ISHQAH - A RETURN TO INNOCENCE

Bundle looks at himself in the mirror. He stretches his squat neck and wrinkles his beak.

Ugh, he sighs. Why does it have to be blue?

He stretches up on his tippy-toes, puffing out his chest a little. His feathers ruffle up and make him look bigger. But it only succeeds in making him looking like a puff-ball. He slowly descends back to the ground, looking at the webb of his toes – blue again. Blue all over.

No wonder he is feeling a bit blue too…

He sighs again, waddles over to the window and looks out upon the ocean. It is calm today, a deep sapphire hue. Bundle decides to trundle over to the beach and practice his swimming. Being a cross-breed between a booby and a penguin, his pecs are not as strong as his penguin cousins’ flippers…

He waddles down to the shore.

Innocence is so idyllic, he thinks. So remote and removed in the deep Pacific. They says it’s far from the madding crowd. Bundle always wonders what that means, really. The closest he has ever got to a crowd is the annual penguin migration. It seems a pity, he thinks, that the island is slowly sinking.

The Pacific sun shines off the surf lapping its shores, echoing his sigh. He dips a blue toe in the water, takes a deep breath and dives in. He gasps a little as the cool ocean washes over him. Then he starts to swim.

It has been drilled into him that the only way to make his pecs penguin-worthy is to swim swim and swim until they support strong flippers – not floppers. He dives in and out of the waves for an hour, practicing his strokes, coming up for air, then diving under again. As the afternoon Christmas sun starts to beam down, he begins to feel a little drowsy.

He is swimming back towards the shore when he spots Gertie, the Blue Whale, waving her usual green peace flag above her massive tail. Bundle’s muscles hurt so he decides to hitch a ride. Gertie won’t mind. He’s done it before and she always drops him off in the bay.

The sun is warm. The breeze is cool. The ocean spray feels refreshing as he surfs on Gertie’s tail. He soon dozes off, enjoying the ride.

Bundle is walking on the ocean, skimming across the waves. He stares up at a huge shiny staircase with moving steps that come down and go up. Down and up. Down and up.

He stands on the edge of the water as it dips down into an incredible cascade of ocean, looking up at the magical silver stairway that seem to stretch high, high into the sky and go deep down, down into the ocean floor.

He murmurs to himself, “I’m a pilgrim on the edge, on the edge of my perception. We are travellers on the edge, we are always at the edge of our perception.”

Then he’s magically sitting in a little box, holding a wheel - it’s like those patrol boats he’s seen before, but it’s got four wheels on the bottom as well and now when he turns the wheel in front of him, it moves on the water with a great rush and the box starts to go up the stairs - but the stairs are going down and the box can’t move up.

Bundle turns the wheel with all his might (he really needs to work on those pecs) but the box stops and get’s stuck, even as the stairs go down, down down, under the waves and deep down to the ocean floor and Bundle goes with them. Then they’re slowly moving up, up, up and there’s a big jerk.