Annoying Koala

 The case wasn't going as plan, I spent most of a day in the hospital filling out paperwork and getting a light dose of the medicinal version of shock absorption. Shock absorption in medicine comes with fun side effects which including, drowns out screaming moms, delusional dreams involving koalas, and one good night’s sleep. 

Case Update: The song is still reverberating through my head; it’s been more than a week.

My luck wasn't changing, I had just deciphered the first two lines of the poem, that cheeky little annoying, koala, could play that ocarina and erase memories leaving behind the song that shall not be named, I had also found my new nickname 'across the wind'. 

It took two weeks before I could get out of house, with the exception of working for the gossip shop my mom owns at diminished capacity. By that time the list of things had grown:

• an Iron Steel Teapot
• a broken time piece 
• a freshly baked rhubarb pie
• a good percent of the neighborhoods pennies 
• the contents of a drawer full of broken earbuds
• the top of a Crystal decanter
• Glass bottles x 47
• matches
• a variety of wires
• Oreo cookies

One week of not being grounded had also not changed my luck, there were no clues leading to the culprit, but I was able to gather back ground information. The suspects name is Kiki; she escaped the zoo on Tuesday the fourteenth of January, not to be apprehended. Two days later the Museum of Myths of Man was stolen from, that was all I could, apprehend on the subject.

 It was a good thing (perhaps); I caught a break in the case. That day I had decided to celebrate getting rid of the annoying music that had finally gone away after three weeks of silent suffering, not eased by the astonished gossip of disappearing recyclables. In celebration I struggled my way through baking cookies, one handed. Before I could savor any of the fruit of my labor, they were gone. Once more the song that belonged in the mind of criminal psychopaths was ever treading on my nerves. 

It was different this time though, the koala was going down. He stole all of my cookies but, with no bag, crumbs and destroyed cookies were left in his wake. The koala was mine. The trail I blazed after him, fraught with determination...  was incredibly boring, and lasted at least 2 miles. Muddy, scratched and bruised I arrived in naturally provided camouflage. Sneaking around what looked like an old electric company building, I found my way into the groaning ghost of a building. Seeing tattered cloth on the floor I stuffed some in my ears and followed my nose.

The smell of animal and smoke saturated the building, but the crumbles lead the way to sight most unusual. A teacup boiling, the steam being fed to a box, surrounded by copper, and eclipsed by connected glass tubes. All of which was contain by a metal cage of some kind. Strewn around the place was debris that gave traces of once being a food item. Cans, bags, looted and abandoned, among their many soldiered ranks was the fragile ocarina. Deftly I slipped it in my pocket avoiding the army entirely, tip toeing my way towards the scarfing koala munching on my hard fought for cookies.

Before I reached him, the thought came that I might not want to confront a wild animal criminal. I called the police, and quietly told them I had followed a suspected criminal into an abandoned warehouse, and was now afraid to leave. Hanging up, I was left to crouch. Thirty minutes later the sirens showed up. The koala freaked out, rummaging past the forgotten and utterly ruined cookies, probably looking for his newest lost item. The ocarina was not to be found; the knocking getting louder, giving me the boldness to yell for help. The noise was not unnoticed, at the sound the koala leap on to me... My response was to scream. 

With a loud bang in came a police officer, flashlight pointed directly. Air rushed out of my lungs, my relief imminent. "This is the police, put the koala down and put your hands in the air," the shock of these words stopped the record in my head for 2.5 seconds. My hand rifled past the grabby koala and griped the ocarina, putting it up to my mouth, my fingers instinctively playing. 

 "Yesterday the koala was recovered to the zoo by a rookie officer. Kiki, the koala was found in an old electric warehouse with a bizarre art piece that is still unclaimed, the officer was called to the scene after...."

I turned off the television, I didn't need them to tell me in other news the ocarina was also discovered this morning. No what I need is headache medicine and a box of store bought cookies...