Xirysa Says: I read too many children's books when I'm bored. See if you can guess what inspired this.
Of Elephants and Giant Mushrooms
Neither of them knew exactly how it happened. One minute, everything was good. Fine. Perfect, even. They had been playing catch, and André had thrown the ball too high. Nothing horrible about that.
But then there had been a dull thud.
And a crash.
Followed by a muffled yelp and a cry of no!
The result? A very startled André and an almost hyperventilating Oscar.
André blinked at his friend. After all, it wasn't everyday that one saw Oscar in such a state. Normally calm and quiet, Oscar now... Seriously looked like she was going crazy. She kept spluttering and flapping her hands in a rather odd matter. Definitely not normal Oscar-esque behavior.
"Oscar?" André asked tentatively. Despite the fact that he had lived at the mansion for less than a year, he already knew that one could not really tell with Oscar. Granny had called her an enigma once, but he had no clue what the word meant.
Her face was a rather interesting shade of red as she gestured rather lamely in the direction of the crash. "The vase..."
Looking where she had gestured, André frowned. "Oh. That vase." He looked back at Oscar. "I don't really see what's wrong—that vase was pretty ugly." And it had been. The vase had been a rather unfortunate shade of green, decorated hear and there with pigs every color of the rainbow. Why pigs, he didn't know. One never really knew with rich people—the were eccentric. At least, according to Granny, most of them were.
His statement didn't seem to placate Oscar in the slightest, though. "I know it was ugly," she hissed between clenched teeth as she bent down to pile up the shards, "but Hortense gave it to Mother when she got married, and for some reason Mother loves it."
André shrugged and bent down to help her pick up the pieces. "Who knows? Grown-ups are odd." His hand brushed against something hard and rubbery, and he picked up the ball they had been playing with earlier. "Oops..."
Oscar looked up at him. She seemed rather... Frazzled. "Just help me pick up the pieces," she said. "Someone's sure to have heard the crash, and they'll be up here any minute!"
It seemed her words were more right than she thought, for at that moment old Madame Montblanc burst into the room. "I heard a crash and—oh my! Are you two all right?" She then saw the pile of shards, and her eyes narrowed. "What did you do?"
André stood up rather quickly, holding the ball behind his back. "Er... I... I didn't do anything, Granny. We didn't do anything wrong." He swallowed thickly. "It was... Uh, it was..."
"The elephant."
André looked at Oscar as she, too, stood up and looked at his grandmother. "An elephant?"
She nodded vigorously, still watching the old woman's face carefully. "Yes, the elephant. You remember, don't you?"
The meaning of her words finally became clear, and André nodded, too. "That's right; it was the elephant!"
"Oh really?" Madame Montblanc crossed her arms over her chest and looked down at the children in front of her. "Can you tell me about this elephant?"
"It was big."
The old woman nodded. "Elephants generally tend to be rather big."
"And it was pink!" André blurted out. He didn't know what made him say it—perhaps it was the obnoxiously bright pink pig that stared up at him from a shard of the vase.
"Pink?"
"Yes," Oscar told her. "It was pink, because..."
Her old nanny raised an eyebrow. "Because...?"
"Because it eats giant mushrooms and cake."
Oscar resisted the urge to slap her palm to her forehead. Giant mushrooms and cake? The idiot was going to get them in do much trouble! Didn't he know how much her mother loved that stupid vase? "Yes, and cheese, too."
Never mind. She couldn't put the blame only on André, no matter how much she wanted to.
"And I suppose," Madame Montblanc said as she stepped closer to the children, "that this elephant thought that there were mushrooms and cakes and cheese inside the vase?"
Oscar sighed. "You don't believe us, do you, Nanny?"
Madame Montblanc shook her head. "Not at all."
Xirysa Says: Lame 'fic is lame, by the way. And I'm such a silly sometimes. But oh! How fun being nonsensical can be... Feedback is nice, by the way...