Submitted to “Red” at Illustration Friday.
Cyborg of the Demon Sea Witches (click to enlarge)
Two 2.5″ x 3.5″ art cards in Copics and fine liners
Mrs. Thurston’s fourth-grade class was reading about Hobbits. It was nothing by Tolkien of course, whose salacious and perverse vision was not appropriate for grown people, let alone children. Such was the lack of wisdom embodied in Mrs. Thurston, whose hippie parents would have been appalled by what their daughter Sunflower had become.
Unfortunately for Mrs. Thurston (or fortunately, if you believe the loss of ignorance is always a positive, even if painfully gained), she had a student named Maybelle Llewellyn whose mother had finally reached a breaking point in hearing about this narrow-minded teacher every day her child returned home from school.
On this particular day, Mrs. Thurston had assigned several pages to be read aloud by the students as she daydreamed about Father Knows Best, her favorite tv show. Unbeknownst to Mrs. Thurston, Mrs. Llewellyn had swapped the second half of all the childish folklore texts with an adventurous tale of two demon sea witch sisters, Djalla and Djegga, who built a cyborg mermaid to take over their ocean planet.
The sentence that snapped Mrs. Thurston out of her Jim Anderson fog began, “Djegga decided to use the lower orifice as a weapon repository,” and only because little Jenny Hernandez – despite being the best reader in the room – stumbled over both “orifice” and “repository”.
What happened next the whole town has promised never to reveal. Such was the agreement with Mrs. Thurston, who agreed to leave quietly with her small pension.
In the end Mrs. Llewellyn was given 25 hours of community service (and the enduring thanks of many local parents) and Mrs. Thurston retired to rural Wales with her blind husband. Maybelle Llewellyn eventually became a successful fantasy author, specializing in creatures of the ocean.
Many thanks to AnnD, who requested a story to go with my Demon Mermaid (now one of the Demon Witch Sisters). Thanks to everyone for stopping in!
