A story for Maureen Johnson

In honor of the last day of BEDA I present, a surprising story for Maureen Johnson.

Once upon a time there lived a pantless hamster called MJ. MJ was always nervous because she was part of a traveling hamster circus called The Flea Circus Upgrade. MJ didn't mind bouncing balls with the seals. She loved riding the backs of the prancing ponies. She enjoyed lighting the fuse that sent her coworkers shooting out of the cannon and far across the arena. She didn't even mind putting her head in the mouth of the lion, so long as it brushed its teeth first. But she was terrified of the trapeze.

Every day her friends would scramble up the ropes, calling to her to join them, and every day she would pretend she had something terribly important to do. Once, when she said she had to give the elephant its vitamins and H. said he would do it, she pretended to twist her ankle, making it impossible to do even a moment of trapeze.

With a couple of skillful missteps she stretched her injury time to six weeks, which was just enough time for her to relax a little too much. As a consequence she wasn't paying enough attention and suddenly found herself right next to the trapeze ladder with no excuses and a healed ankle. Before she really knew what was happening she was at the top of the very tall ladder, clutching a trapeze swing in her little paws, hyperventilating, and praying that a helpful earthquake would open an enormous chasm below them and swallow everything up.

Instead poor MJ stood shaking, high, high above the ground, and wondered why bats were the ones that got the wings. Surely it wouldn't have hurt anything to give just a few to the hamsters.

"Oi, MJ!" called one of her friends. "Are you going to stand there all day?"

"Yes," she yelled back, but was soon proved wrong as her weak ankle, which she had in fact reinjured while climbing the ladder, gave out and she fell forward, right off the trapeze platform. She squealed, sounding a lot like a bat, and clung to the trapeze swing with all her might.

With that all her friends were off and the air was soon filled with tumbling, furry bodies flying through the air, flinging each other from swing to swing. MJ swung back and forth on her swing, trying to get up enough nerve to hang from her knees like her BEDA buddies.

For the rest of the story click here: http://snipu.com/1pb