Panda

This short narrative is based on a sad looking panda key chain I have had for as long as I can remember. I'm fairly certain that it was a hand me down from one of my older sisters. Anyway I pulled, "Descriptive paragraph" and "Free write narrative," from my pocket of writing prompts, and decided I would do both of them at the same time. 

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

You can't see the wings in the picture,
but they are there.

The key chain panda was just about two inches tall, not including his chain. His head was huge, making up over half of his height, and it was twice as wide as his body. Other than his large head he had the basic anatomy of a panda, except for the feathery wings he had sticking out of his back. he had the grime and nicks from spending several years hanging from backpacks, being shoved into drawers, and chewed on by babies. It may have been this that gave him the look of being thoughtful and melancholy. It may have just been his natural disposition to feel so. He was simply called Panda.

   Panda lay in his cramped corner of the drawer, staring at the same three centimeters of drawer bottom he had been staring at for the past three years. Beneath him, the drawer moved, and he wiggled some on his nose. The drawer was gotten into frequently, but the grabbing hands never reached so far back.

   Panda sighed, or he would have sighed if he had had lunges and an esophagus. What he did was a mental equivalent of a sigh. He doubted the hand would reach for him/

   Fate would surprise him though. he felt his whole world turn upside down and he fell onto a desk top along with the other items from the same drawer. Panda guessed it was the desk top, the desk to the drawer belonged to.

   "What a bunch of crap," said a voice Panda knew to be the mother of the girl who kept him. Panda sensed hands rummaging through the pile of random things. The tips of one finger even brushed against his large head.

   "Yeah, well, we can probably throw most of it away."

Panda tried hard to place the voice and it took him until he saw the face the voice belonged to for him to realize who it was. It was the girl who owed him. Only now she was older. Instead of pigtails she wore her hair straight and hanging in her face. Panda felt a bit like crying. He had always been a decoration piece. Not a toy that formed a true relationship with his owner, but to see his owner so changed still saddened him

   Panda felt himself get pushed along by the mother's hand, and he toppled off the edge of the desk and into the trash can. The only thing worse, Panda realized, than being dumped into a drawer for years on end was being dumped into a wasted basket.

   It was a disheartening journey from there. Waste basket to garbage can. Garbage can to garage truck. Garbage truck to land fill. No it was not a very fun journey indeed.

As Panda lay in the landfill more and more stuff was piled on top of him. He wondered how long this would go on when he felt a vibration tremble through him. The vibrations grew stronger until a growling rumbling accompanied it. And then suddenly it was atop hi. If Panda would have had a heart it would have been beating hard and fast. A great weight pressed down on Panda. The pressure was so much it snapped him in half.

   Unlike humans, all toy's souls took a few minutes to drift from their bodies, even when blown to pieces or instantly melted. There were stiff and immobile, even in death.

   "Oh well," thought Panda as he drifted away form his broken body, "at least I don't have to spend the next several decades compressed in a land fill."