The Monkey And The Thing by Shifani Reffai

Once upon a time, there was a monkey who lived in a giant marshmallow. It was of a nice pale pink colour – the marshmallow obviously, not the monkey, because who ever heard of a pale pink monkey? That would be ridiculous. Anyway, this monkey loved his giant marshmallow house and he spent all day bouncing off the insides of its squishy walls and dusting his squishy furniture and having a real hoot in general.

But his bliss was fated to be short-lived, as one day, when the monkey was outside playing on the squishy swing in his marshmallow garden, he heard a shrill scream rip the air. The flamingo who lived next door came squawking towards him, his short wings flailing awkwardly against his sides, ‘Monkey! Come quick! Something horrible has happened!’ and without breaking his stride, the flamingo turned on his heel and ran back in the direction he came from, squawking away. The monkey sighed. Flamingos, in his experience, were always so dramatic and vague about things. Why, just last month, his neighbor had come bumbling into his garden in the same flustered manner and had declared that ‘the enemy was invading!’ and flailed away; upon investigation, the monkey discovered that the flamingo had only been referring to the three elephants who had just moved into the house down their lane. Elephants made flamingos very nervous.