by Miriam Square

[Note: written for a friend, with love]

I live with my friend Lee. He’s a lot taller than I am, and a lot smellier too. I don’t mean to be mean. It’s not that I think he’s even particularly smelly, in fact, on a scale of one to smelly, he’s a lot closer to one than he is smelly, but he’s still smellier than me because I smell like a Teddy.

That’s because I AM a Teddy, which is why I smell like a Teddy and not like a boy; like Lee, who is a smelly boy and not a cuddly toy.

I think that must be why Lee gets up every morning and goes to work, while the weather is still smelly outside. Boys have to go to “work,” whatever that is when it’s at home. Lee never really talks about work and such like… beyond assuring me that it’s very, very smelly indeed.

Once, when he had gotten home, after it was dark outside and then light outside again, I said to him, “but how smelly is work really?” I didn’t need to explain about the scale between one and smelly because he was the cuddly boy who told me about it.

“How smelly? Um, do you remember that fellow we knew who farted all the time?” I think I did, his name was Saddam Hussain, or it might have been Adrian, anyway it was definitely one or the other, so I nodded, “well it’s even smellier than him”.

“Oh dear”, I didn’t know what to say next, so I made him a nice cup of tea and asked if he would like a good auld hug.

Anyway… so I woke up on Tuesday and thought to myself; Tedward young bear, you’re too old to be laying around in bed all day with nothing better to do than eating biscuits and reading about intricacies of quantum mechanics in relative ten-dimensional space-time…

Which had been going very well as you can see; I’ve learned how to spell quantum, dimensional and mechanics so far! In another week or two I might even be able to spell i-n-t-r-i-c-a-c-i-e-s too!

I figured that a growing Teddy couldn’t spend every day lying around how to spell big words; so I decided to build a rocket to fly to the moon and see if it was made of cheese.

There was only one problem. I don’t really like cheese very much and the moon was an awfully long way away from home to fly to just to see it was made out of something I didn’t like.

But what if it was made from cheese? Cheese is made from milk…and milk is made of cow…which would mean that the whole moon was made by a Cow.

How big would that cow have to be?

Scary big?

“Lee, how big would a Cow have to be to create the moon”?

He looked at me super funny when I asked him later that evening, “Are you feeling alright Tedward”?

“Oh yes I’m fine”, I said, which was actually a little fib because I was really rather tired after spending the whole day building a rocket ship on the kitchen table. “I’m just a little confused because until this morning I didn’t even know that there were giant Cows in space”.

“Tedward, are you being a silly-billy”?

Which of course I wasn’t because I had built a whole rocket ship in one day AND had nearly learned how to spell intricacies properly. “No I don’t think so Lee, I just didn’t even think there was grass in space for Cows to eat”.

“I didn’t know there was grass in space either, Tedward”.

“Oh dear”, and I had been planning on blasting off from the kitchen table the next day, “I think I might go to bed early tonight”.

So, I went to bed early that night and when I woke up I decided to go to the shop and buy ice-cream instead of flying to the moon.

I think it would probably be better if I learned how to spell all the big words in the world before I flew to the moon, irregardless of what it was made of.

[the end]