Pond's Twelve: A Melodrama
The stroke team promised me a plan today,
after Mum’s MRI, and I braced for something clinical,
instead, a slick and cinematic diamond heist surfaced,
but the universe, trickster that she is,
sent ducks instead.
Twelve of them.
Masked.
Organised.
Unionised.
Pond level professionals with a taste for chaos
and a getaway route through the reeds.
Meanwhile, the witches were stirring the cauldron,
the druids were faffing in stone circles,
and a gladiatrix, soft-spoken museum educator by day,
wielder of the gladius Fulminata by night,
leaned on her sword like a woman waiting
for the plot to catch up.
My house, as ever, anchors as the gathering place.
Not for mermaid balls (though there is a tail in my drawer
when I take off my koala skin),
but for brunches on good china,
where check-ins are a sacrament
and someone always brings potato salad
as an offering to the household gods.
There is a love story:
my parents, modelling devotion like it is a craft
you can apprentice in.
Lu and I, no longer star-crossed,
just mildly sleep-deprived,
telling our origin myths over espresso martinis
that taste like truth serum.
As for the twins
not evil, just damp,
I refuse to elaborate.
Every melodrama needs a shameful subplot
and that one is mine.
And listen,
I swear on every feather in Pond Twelve
that no tigers were harmed
in the making of this pantomime.
They simply wandered through the scene,
confused but majestic,
as tigers do.
Besides,
plot twist:
I am doing Day 18 on Day 26,
and time, like the ducks,
refuses to behave.
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