Written for MLMM Monday Wordle;
here are the prompt words:
shoulder, hide, care, join, share, pride
pleasure, steps, betrayed, friend, kind, missed
The hornbill had never learned to hide his opinions. He announced them daily from the highest branches: which fruits were ripest, which storms were coming, which creatures below were conducting themselves without sufficient pride.
The tortoise, for her part, had never felt the need to share her thoughts.
They had an unlikely friendship, begun the season the hornbill had broken a primary feather and discovered, to his considerable dismay, that the sky was rather meaningless without flight. He sat on a low branch for six days, and the tortoise was simply …. there, patient, asking nothing, offering the kind of company that doesn’t demand conversation.
Oddly, when the feather grew back and he took to the sky, he missed her.
Now they kept a quiet rhythm. She took slow steps through the undergrowth, finding water and vegetation; he flew ahead, reconnoitered, and reported back. Neither had a care to mention what they contributed to the relationship; it seemed poor manners to do so.
Until the day he saw the python coiling silently behind her, and …. without thinking and taking no pleasure in making a drama of it …. he dove, shrieking, and drove it back.
She hadn’t seen it coming but she knew she’d been saved by a fraction of a heartbeat.
She looked up at him on his branch, ruffled and breathless.
“You could have been hurt,” she said.
He straightened, wincing slightly where a python scale had caught his shoulder.
“Yes,” he said. “Well….”
She understood. Some debts are carried quietly, and some things you do simply because you would feel betrayed by yourself if you didn’t.
They didn’t exactly join hands and skip off into the sunset after that but traveled on together contentedly, trusting in their fellowship, as the jungle darkened around them..
NAR©2026
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