I was talking to a friend* about how much I miss my dog (well I guess he’s my parent’s dog now as I only see him twice a year), and how I wish I could bring him down to live with me in my London flat. My friend revels in explaining how ‘naïve and stupid’ I am: detailing ‘how cruel it would be’ as I’m ‘at work all the time’ and how my flat is ‘tiny and dirty and smelly and full of dead prostitutes and… ‘, I stop my friend from at this point, and tell them I understand.
This conversation got my thinking, what pet would I be able to take care of in my environment? It would have to be small, cheap and low maintenance. The obvious answer to this dilemma is a Bulbasaur, but alas I cannot find one, apparently some Ash kid took the last (According to one Asda employee).
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| The perfect pet for a London flat, I could fit six in my belt! |
I assume bats don’t need much looking after, but they are so hard to catch I soon gave up. My old Tamagotchi seemed to tick all the boxes until I found out how much one of those little circular batteries cost! Instead I downloaded a Tamagotchi emulator (Hatchi) onto my phone only to return to it a few hours later to find my beautiful young blob ‘Pam’ was lying dead in her own filth. I began to despair, I craved companionship so much, until BAM! It hit me like a blue shell: SEA MONKEYS! They’re cheap, you only feed them once a week and there is a shed-load of them all in a tiny plastic tank; my prayers had been answered and soon I became the proud owner of a whole colony of baby Sea Monkeys. I felt like Brainiac must have when he put Kandor in a jar, looking down into my own pocket sized metropolis.
After two weeks of watching my little beauties multiply and grow their numbers slowly but surely seemed to fall, first it was subtle I doubted my judgement, but within a week my incredible colony of over 20 little ugly swimming mini-scorpions (because let me assure you, these little creatures were 1. Not from the sea, but actually thrived in fresh water and 2. not monkeys)...
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| Who ever cartoon-ised Sea Monkeys blatantly had not seen one. |
...was down to two fat bloated things; I named them Optimus and Megatron (Although being honest I couldn’t tell the difference) it seemed that these particular ‘Sea Monkeys’ did not like the algae I had been feeding them, but preferred the translucent white flesh of their families. Within one more day only Megatron remained (or maybe it was Optimus) and in one more there were none left at all, my little red tank served as a watery casket for a whole generation, they knew nothing else but the inside of their invisible cage, with the face of my Grandmother (as a young lady) staring in at them.
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| If you look carefully you can see Optimus and Megatron frolicking. |
After a mourning period of about a week I decided to have a small service, (I couldn’t invite close friends and family as all their relatives were skimming the top of the water with them) as I played a little song I’d written for them on my Ukulele I saw a stirring in the greenish water, ‘Optimus!’ (or was it Megatron? Or would his apparent ressurection make him Galvatron? So many questions) I cried with delight, but something seemed different about him, I can only describe him as less responsive than normal, dead eyed, with mouth agape he stared into space/the photo of my grandmother and I realised what I had created…
...A Z-MONKEY! An undead brine shrimp hungry for brains (and Algae), here’s an artists impression of the little freak:
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| 'Urrrghhh need briiiiinnnneeee' |
*When I say ‘friend’ I actually just mean the friendliest of the voices in my head, the others tend to whisper of murder and madness.
