The Probability of a Trojan Hippo.

The following is my submission to [Fiction] Friday Challenge #218 at Write Anything.

Inspired by the image they provide, it's a fun exercise purely in creative flow. Oh dear - no editing allowed. :)

Somebody chopped it up. Right in front of my eyes. I reach, but my knock on wood just rings in and out of my ears. 

Someone carved up time and space, and the probability of them returning to how things were before. Quite neatly, but annoying, like a brash, not-very-puzzling pattern, as opposed to slashed, like jumbos cutting through a cloud over a delayed terminal. Life interrupted. Surely not the Butcher of Time, rather the Carpenter of Dimensions. Yes, this is their handi-work. A deviation from their plan, from their fail-safe design. Perhaps the linear lines seem dull after some time, even though their practicality is what held everything up, like cups and hiccups, and hippos under water gelled to the crust of a planet. Now it could be a pie, for all I know. Tiny little hippo snouts snorting chunky sweet custardy pleghm, the kind they just wake up one morning and have. Or is it one giant hippo with a foot snug in a custard tart? On, off. On, off. We see the yellow smudge of every fourth step, but there's no longer any evidence of the beats in-between.

I find myself grinding out dried up old custard from the grooves, so I can slot myself in them, instead. As soon as I get into the flow of one grain, I find myself going against the grain in the next. After all that effort. Now I am derailed, I need to adjust, like a clock quite happily 'being' and realising that yet another tick is needed, then for some unknown reason, a tock. Up down, Up down, tugged side-to-side, the tonal quality of happy, sad, happy, sad. Sixty mood swings a minute. 3600 bipolar blips an hour. A lifetime of bliss and pain and laughter and terror compressed, gone in sixty seconds before a new life begins. It must, it will. Time is manic, I suddenly remember. I much prefer the quiet still of the chaos I have found myself in. Chaos is so close to choice. Thankyou, I choose to sit this one out and watch. And pat this hippo, as I smile with self-content. Is that contents? Contents of self? Wait - who exactly am I?

To get a better look at myself, I take off my tool pouch and brush the sawdust off my hands and clothes.