Imelda the millipede

A  LITTLE STORY FOR CHILDREN

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Once upon a time in the Kingdom of Millippines where all the Chilopods and Diplopods lived, there was a young millipede called Imelda. She was a very beautiful millipede. Every day she would look in the mirror as she was shaving the 70 pairs of legs which sprouted from her 35 segments and make a promise to her gorgeous reflection “One day I’m going to seduce our handsome King Ferdipoop and join him in holy millimony and then we’re going to live together in the Pod Palace and reign over all the other lesser pedes in the land.”

And do you know what happened? That’s exactly what she did.

King Ferdipoop and Queen Imelda spent many fun days in the Palace garden which was full of rotting leaves and hollow logs. In and out they would go, then over and under and up and down then in and out once more until it was time for them to go and exterminate anyone who might have been plotting against them.

They were also very careful looking after the Kingdom’s money. They stashed it all in lots of hidey-holes far across the sea where nobody else could find it.

Queen Imelda used some of the money to buy lots and lots of shoes for all her feet. There were breakfast shoes, lunch shoes, toilet shoes, tish shoes, and supper, party and dancing shoes. Her most favourite shoes of all were the sharp pointy-toed wooden clogs which she used to kick the Palace staff right up their excretory tubules whenever they were not working hard enough.

There were hundreds of working-class pedes employed to keep Imelda’s Palace looking shipshape.

First there were the disabled Monopedes who could do nothing much with their single legs except sproing through all the rooms in the Palace on pogo sticks painting the ceilings in short sharp brush strokes or changing light globes in stages. The Impedes were the court jesters and they flitted around joyously dressed in floppy red pixie caps adorned with green pompoms and flashing LED lights. They laughed a lot and played tricks on everyone with their protruding antennae, leaving behind a gay air of frivolity.

The Velocipedes dashed around here and there, hither and thither, high as kites on their staple diet of cocaine and amphetamines, while the squadrons of Stampedes just trudged around with military precision squishing all the invading ants and cockroaches with their hob-nail boots.

Life came to a sudden and tragic end for Queen Imelda. One sunny day when she was out tanning her ventral surfaces in the grass next to the bespoke coconut-shell swimming pool which Ferdipoop had commissioned, a human being whizzed over the top of her with his motor mower set on full throttle. All the Imeldrial legs, body segments and stink glands together with one hundred and forty tiny hot-pink Gucci flip-flops were splintered and splattered and flung all over the Arthropodian realm.

When King Ferdipoop came along and saw all the blood and entrails and pieces of thorax, mandibles and ganglia blemishing his brand new pool he exclaimed “Holy Crap! What a bastard!” Then he immediately went out and found himself a younger replacement millipede. One who he hoped would never upstage him in public like Imelda had done.
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And her name was GaGa.

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THE END

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