Smidgeon’s Birthday

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Written by: on Wednesday, October 27th, 2010

Several men watched as a single crow circled their ship before landing on a railing. Only one man recognized the visitor. The rest were quite superstitious and already formulating evil possibilities to the arrival of this specific crow. The crow announced its arrival with a few caws.

“Corbin.” Captain Bain LeGuile smirked as he crossed his arms.

The crow hopped along the railing, flapping its wings a few times before it cawed again. Soon it morphed into the form of a young man seated on the railing. “You guessed correctly,” Corbin smiled. “So uh…” He motioned over to Smidgeon towards the front of the ship, “What’s got him excited?”

They both turned to look at Smidgeon, LeGuile’s first mate. He was quite short and rather fat; appearing like an apple with a head on top. He was busy looking through his scope, trying to spot something precious!

“Some idiot at Port Karnac told him about an island that appears only on birthdays.” LeGuile shrugged, “So we’re out to find it at his request.”

This surprised Corbin greatly for two reasons. He had never known LeGuile to go along with anyone else’s ideas – even if it was his most trusted first mate’s idea. The second was that he never even gave thought to the idea that any of his creations had birthdays. It did make sense to some degree that they would have birthdays, being the day they were created. He paused for a moment and stared at LeGuile.

“What?” LeGuile asked with annoyance.

“Today is Smidgeon’s birthday?”

“Listen. He’s been asking me for the past two weeks if it was his birthday ‘today’. Last week I gutted the idiot that told him about birthdays. I gutted him good, I sure did. Now I can either gut Smidge too and end the damn nagging or let him have a birthday already.”

“You’re getting soft!” Corbin teased.

With one hand, LeGuile shoved Corbin over the railing and said with a smirk, “I’d feed you to the serpents if I could.” Instead of hearing a splash, LeGuile laughed as he heard wings before he saw Corbin fly into view.

Corbin cawed in annoyance and settled on the crow’s nest high above the ship.

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