Power Animal Politics

There came an ominous splash which prompted Gally to open her lids just enough to see what Gallabee was up to. But no longer was there a duck swimming next to her, just the slimy back of something yellow and black disappearing in the depths.

‘Oh no, Gallabee!’ Gally’s eyes were nearly as large as her companions, ‘I don’t want to play river monster right now, I just want a ten minute nap before helping mum with the dinner, what’s wrong with that?’
She gulped at the sight of water swelling around her. Something big was creating a predatory noose around her.

‘Please Gallabee!’ she pleaded again.

If she’d possessed a mobile orchestra, they would be stringing together a tense, anxiously-oppressive drone right now. Faster and faster the thing swam around her until the surface began to rapidly depress into a whirlpool.

‘Gallabee! What do I have to do to do!’ She cried as she was dragged down into this under current.

‘Fight me galleon adrift,’ came watery, omnipresent reply, which, despite the pull of the creature it belonged too, was too high pitched to sound anyway threatening, ‘be like the winged Nymphs of old, as crazy as an ant climbing a mountain without a sunhat! Be as fearless as a waterfall dancing over a cliff. Throw off that lazy summer sunset feeling, become as dangerously dark as midnight. Lets create a legend right here, right now! Show me your true power, Fairy!’

‘How can i fight you?’ Gally tried one last plea, You’re my Power Animal, you are my power, you silly creature!’

Gally was getting dizzier the faster she was spun. She hated being dizzy. Just below the surface of the maelstrom she could make out the stripy back of the lake monster as it made laps around her whirlpool. She was so tempted to give this creature a sharp kick in the face and bring her back to her senses, but the same innocent-eyed mask the duck had worn burned out of its toothy head making her feel like a bully for even thinking of doing such a thing. In the end she was left with little choice then to tell Gallabee the words she never liked to hear.

‘CUT IT OUT!’ For a moment Gally had lost the usual tranquillity in her voice, ‘or else I’m telling mums power animal that you’ve been scaring me in a lake-monster-mood again! Lizzie Rattleshack won’t be kind, she never is!’

Like a car slamming a halt, the whirlpool suddenly imploded and a moment later a large yellow and black teddy bear hurled itself out of the water and into Gally’s arms.

‘Thought you wouldn’t like that!’ Gally mused triumphantly, ‘we all know who your lake monster is!’

The teddy just sat there, all those new furry limbs of her making her look rather feeble.

‘I don’t know why I bother turning myself into anything interesting’ Gallabee’s voice came out of the teddy bear like a deflated balloon, ‘all you ever want to do is nap, nap nap nap. Go to Schooley, have a nap on the river, eat your lunch, have a nap, go home from Schooley, have a nap!’

‘How many times do I have to tell you, us Fairies need our naps…’

‘Don’t I know it! But you’re a way more nappy then most. Is there anytime you actually you want to be awake?’

Gally didn’t know the answer to that. She was yet to find place that didn’t feel right for napping in. A time when it didn’t feel right to sculpt all that hair of hers into a bed and drift off to some restful elsewhere. Unless, of course, she was being hunted by something. When Gally was in a sleepy mood, trying to stir her was like trying read a book in moonlight, but the next thing Gallabee said suddenly made her feel wide awake.

‘Cucuru once told me,’ Gallabee mused with a coy voice, ‘that Fairies of olden days used to be lot less nappy and a lot more happy…’

‘Did he now?’

‘And that the reason modern Fairies need so many naps is because they feel so sad and hopeless…’

‘I’m not sad!’ Gally snapped defensively. ‘What’s that suppose mean? Why does everyone think I’m depressed just because I don’t do much? Cucuru doesn’t think I’m sad does he?’

‘No, just that you never have much energy that’s all. He says that the Fairies of old used to have a way more energy and it all started to go wrong when they left the C*ntryside and went to the city. They left the mountains and woods behind, said goodbye to the farmers, who they sometimes cursed the neighbours cows for, and animals who they sometimes hunted their hunters for. They left it all behind just to become settled Fairies who lived in MOUTH’s back gardens and did what they told, even if it was against their true nature.’

‘And what is a Fairy’s true nature, Miss-know-it-all?’

‘Before they came to the Sosighcity Fairies could FLY, Gally, FLY. They flew everywhere, there was none of this napping on a rivers unless they were worn out from flying too much and then it was just about ok to take a ten minute break before their next flight…’

Suddenly taken aback, Gally found her vision filled with memories of a life never lived or just maybe she was channelling the deep time of her ancient ancestors. She was imagining herself as a Fairy in an endless open world with no borders, free to roam until she’d worn her wings out. Playing in the puddles of a farmer’s muddy yard while her parents were busy in the shed cursing the cows. Having wild Fairy parties with wild animals in the depths of wild, green forests. Then ending the day sleeping, hidden away in a heather forest on a bed of moss atop a craggy mountain side under clear unpolluted, star filled skies.

‘Cucuru once told me that it was the Sosighcity that came out of no where and before they knew it there was no countryside left anymore.’ Gally mused sadly, ‘Either way, I don’t know why we don’t live in the wild anymore,’ she spoke wistfully, a sad melancholy filling the back of her eyes, ‘I don’t know why it’s illegal to fly either. What I do know is that this is my last chance for a nap before I get home. I just know Mum is going to put me in charge of sorting out the cupboard raid before dinner tonight. You don’t want me to get cranky for lack of naps do you? Then I might just turn into a Hateful Mugger. Fairies don’t usually turn into monsters but there’s always a first, would you be up for hunting me if i did?’

Gallabee’s eyes suddenly looked really crestfallen.

‘Ok…fine…have your nap’ she was now talking almost as quietly as Gally did, ‘well, why don’t I just turn myself into a inflatable pillow then …’

‘Don’t be like that’

‘No I insist!’

In next moment there came the sound of air expanding into a rubbery space as her teddy bear mood suddenly expanded into a stripy pillow that just floated there on the river with a empty expression on its masked casing.

‘Don’t need to be so melodramatic!’ it almost broke Gally’s heart to see her looking so dejected.

Gallabee said no more. Her eyes had become two cold balls as they started to scan from left to right with the all calculating professionalism of power animal on business, constantly on the lookout for potential threats to her Fairy’s safety.

Gally always hated it when Gallabee actually did her job properly. There was something so off about Gallabee when she got like this as if she didn’t even know her anymore. However, the fact that she’d actually got her power animal shut up for ten minutes was definitely a victory to take swift advantage of if she wanted get in another forty winks. Pushing her arms out of the tangle of hair and putting her hands behind her neck she closed her eyes. Just before drifting off, she angled her nose towards the ridge tops of GlenofD’Raaah above, as if she was sniffing out for something on the humid breeze.

‘One last thing,’ she requested of her power animal, ‘Give me a ruffle-in-the-pillow if you see a Gnome with a fishing rod. I can’t smell the spirit oil of Slapham Junction yet so I think were good for…now…but…’

Gallabee threw Gally a dirty look as she continued with the silent treatment. She’d transformed herself into a pillow without a mouth for more then just practical reasons. As they drifted onwards down river, her pupils continued their ceaseless probing, just behind Gally’s sleeping mass of hair, taking in ever last detail from the darting dragonfly’s to the way which the waters edge stroked the mossy rocks along its course.

The sun flickered through trees as if the leaves were dancing to birds singing from the fronds of huge ferns draped off twisted emerald tree trunks. Little else stirred the dense undergrowth, only the odd monkey looking for fruit and mischief.

But, if the peace and quiet was getting all too hopeless for Gallabee, tranquillity in the glens of GlenofD’Raaah never seemed to last long enough for Gally. All too quickly something tribe-made usually destroyed the unspoiled silence as if any wild space was just small waste of calm lost in a world of chaos. The river only meandered peacefully down a couple more wooded ravines before suddenly slamming straight into a five hundred foot tall wall.

This great red brick orifice, was an barrier of oppression that demanded attention. It spanned the glen from side to side with no mercy in its dark shadow. There was a series of gasping archways in its sooty ornate facade that funnelled the river into a series foaming white waters, roaring downwards into these jet-black abyss’s of no return.

Even as the water started to get more and more racy, Gally seemed so determined to stay slumbering, even a frothy ride down a waterfall wasn’t going to dampen her lust for sleep. As she was doused in the face by foam she just screwed up her eyes and tried harder to fight the instinct to open them again. All the time her legs were were starting to point straight downward into one of the archways to hell, the only thing that might prevent this, the prospect of being snagged on a pile of rubbish bags that had become entangled on the roots of a fallen tree in the corner of a buttress.

Gallabee seemed to be the only one of the duo who seem to concerned about their fate. But if Gally wasn’t going to bother waking up then why should she bother warning her about their course? Gally let out the umpteenth yawn which her mouth didn’t get finish before the rest of her disappeared beneath the surface, pulled into the depths of the rapids on the brink of no return. Gallabee’s eyes widened with excitement, completely un-phased by Gally’s suddenly disappearance.

With a congested sound she began swell up until her pillow bluntly exploded to bits, revealing a large fish underneath, head torch now crowned upon her face mask.

‘LET US GALIVANT!’ She mused full of rambunctious relish, ‘Into the abyss of no return we go!’

Without question and a look of pure mischief on her face, she followed her companion underwater.

For any spectator, it would have seemed certain that both of them had disappeared straight into the pitch black unknown of this sooty tunnel never to be seen again. And they probably would have if not for the small pointy-hatted figure siting on the top of the wall five hundred feet above. With pinpoint accuracy this serious Gnome had cast his fishing road at the cascade below, speed-winding it in moments later with a soggy looking fairy girl hanging bedraggled from hook and guilty-looking fish biting on for dear life from her foot.