The life and times of the pumpkin and the penguin

The life and times of the Pumpkin and the Penguin

Its just through the valley, where the glaciers shake hands. Its past
the smiling chasms that claimed a life last year. Its beyond the out of
use cable car that I tried to rest on but the wind was too high. You'll
find it where the snow closes in.

As I was flying here I pretended that there were only two colours in
the whole world. White, white, always white and then?

You will find no castle looming, or thunder cracking, just a field. A
wide, round and snow-soaked field. Untouched powder, ten foot deep, and
definitely no footsteps.

When I get there, even when the sleet is stinging my wings, I take a
moment to look down. A pin prick, a drop of colour on a blank canvas.
How can one bright speck mean more than a whole avalanche worth of
white? It does, and yet it can't be.

Exiled from the cliquey list of natures pretty boys. The rose, the
deer, the sun, the oak, the crow, the list goes on. Conspirators
condemned it. I often imagine a young literary, angry at the vegetables
hard and inedible shell, announcing scornfully "from now on you shall
be forever cursed with a decidedly uncouth handle. I name
thee?'Pumpkin'. And your deep poetic hue, of which you seem so proud,
shall from here forth be known as that most unrhymable of
words?'Orange'."

Spiralling down towards the centre of the field I can perceive it is
staring up at me. Unblinking, despite the sleet, it holds my gaze as I
slowly descend. This pumpkin knows I'm coming. I had to come
eventually.

You may have heard of this particular pumpkin before. He, She, It, all
and none of the above. This pumpkin had a cameo in a fairy tale about a
would-be princess and an ill-fitting slipper. You know the one, this
pretty girl named Cinderella, another ill-named unfortunate, who falls
in love with the Prince at a royal ball. She forgets her curfew and is
forced to abruptly tear herself away from the charming young man
mid-embrace, and flee the palace. At which point one of her slippers
falls off and I always feel like shouting 'well if you will wear
slippers you silly girl!' In the tale, the pumpkin's literary debut,
this, most noble of vegetables, is reduced to a booby prize, a
deterrant. Forever stereotyped, the pumpkin withdrew from the fickle
world of literature.

So this is where the Pumpkin came to. Out into the snow, where no one
would dare follow. I knew it would be hear. How did I know? Because I
too have suffered. Me and my kind have made a similar choice. From the
start we knew we were not destined for poetic immortality. I'm not a
hawk, or an eagle or anything that soars. Neither can I be said to hum
or glide and my wings beat with a most unsatisfactory 'fwup'. I have no
literary history.

I can imagine the same literary snob who cursed the pumpkin announcing
'my word! What an unnatural looking bird. It flies as though it has
piles the size of mole hills!' With this sort of slander ringing in our
ears we cut our losses and got out. There was a unanimous decision that
we should never fly again and we withdrew, like the pumpkin, into the
snow and lived our lives away from expectation.

This is how we lived for a long time. At the ends of the earth we
flourished until, one terrible day, literature caught us up. Some
explorer, bitter and cold and lonely, found us, then he named us, and
this is why I'm here today. He could have said 'quail' or 'grouse' or
anything. But he didn't, he said 'penguin'. Can you imagine the
embarrassment? Imagine humans had been called 'penguins', how would you
feel then? We knew we weren't graceful or majestic but all we wanted
was not to be troubled, not to have a chocolate bar named after us for
gods sake. Anyway, it happened, and so here I am.

But I still have not really explained why I'm here, why I'm the first
penguin for thousands of years to fly again. Not that that really
matters. Even if someone had claimed to have seen a flying penguin
awkwardly flapping its way towards the alps I dont think they would of
managed to convince the world of science of it. The physics boffins
would have said that body mass to wing span ratio means that penguins,
like dragons, could never fly. Scientists! No wonder the dragon
retreated back into the caves, what with scientists yelling 'you can't
fly and you definitely can not breathe fire!' What species would hang
around to be told it's 'scientifically' impossible to keep doing what
you've been doing for thousands of years. But I'm still not explaining.
I had to come to ask the Pumpkin a question.

You see, something has changed. Something unexpected. We accepted our
fate as one of natures ugly ducklings but that does not mean we did not
fantasise about internal literary life. On days when it was
particularly cold and the hail was whipping painfully across the plains
you could often hear one of us, with frostbite setting in, mumbling to
the heavens, 'if only we had been called the nightingale or the swan,
how different things would have been.' We often thought that if we had
been given a graceful name then someone might have written a poem or a
short story about us; and then we could have returned to the warmer
climes with a solid literary foundation and no-one would have laughed
at us. They would have nodded and smiled because we were the species
that got so splendidly immortalised by 'that Wordsworthian epic', 'that
sonnet', we would even have settled for 'that haiku'.

Yet again, I digress. Whats this all about? We've heard a rumour, some
say a myth. Apparently theres been a change. We are told they call it
'Post-Modernism'. Apparently you can write about anything. In fact, its
even better if you write ironically about something unusual or
controversial. So by that logic the penguin, the aardvark, the
beetroot, we are all up for our literary debuts. The name itself,
post-modernism, so awkward it could hardly mean anything else.

I've come to ask the pumpkin if its true. You'd be surprised how much a
pumpkin in a snow covered glade hidden in the southern alps picks up.
'Is it true?' I ask. 'Is it true that post-modernism could give us the
literary foothold we need to hold our heads up high in the populated
world? Could this mean we can return to our old sunny habitats without
the fear of ridicule?'
'Slow down, slow down' the pumpkin replied calmly with a smooth deep
radio broadcaster voice.
'It is true. But...' the pumpkin said as my eyes lit up, 'the time may
not be right'.
There was a pause as the large orange vegetable calmly waited for me to
ask.
'Why?' I said.
'Because someone has to have written the story, or the play or the poem
first.'
'What do you mean? What story?'
'Well, in your case, a story about penguins. For me, I'll need a story
about pumpkins. Or both.'
I couldn't help but burst out laughing. It just sounded so ridiculous.
Frustrated by this the pumpkin pinned me to the spot with a one eyed
stare.
'You dont get it do you?' he groaned.
'We can't just turn up and say "okay, accept us, we are post-modern!".
We have to wait for someone to write the story about us first. Imagine
we turn up too soon. We arrive and the author, our saviour, is only
halfway through the story about 'the life and times of the pumpkin and
the penguin'. Next thing, the writer sees on the news that a talking
pumpkin has rolled into town followed by three million fwupping
penguins flying over his head all expecting to be warmly embraced by
post-modernism. He or she is going to take their story, throw it in the
bin and probably scream 'what are the chances?' I finally
understood.

'We have to wait for those two very special words', grinned the
pumpkin. Again there was silence I had to fill.
'And they are?' I asked.
Fixing me a knowing gaze the two words rolled from within the pumpkin's
thick shell and reverberated around the glacial valley.

Echoing for what seemed like minutes, somewhere in the southern alps
snow rolls quietly down a cliff face, dislodged by vibrations from the
words 'the end.'