Chapter 02: Odd Market Animals

Ah Choi knew there was a tortoise living under his stall. He also knew that it was very dirty. He knew that Dirty Tortoise was dirty because the drain was dirty, and the drain was dirty because Ah Choi had to keep his vegetable stall clean, and to do so he had to wash all the dirty stuff into the drain, where Dirty Tortoise lived.

So Ah Choi knew why Dirty Tortoise was so dirty all the time, and he felt very guilty about it. He had tried moving Dirty Tortoise to another place that was cleaner, but Dirty Tortoise just trudged SLOWLY and SURELY back to the little old drain all over again. After a couple of times, Ah Choi eventually gave up and decided to let the tortoise stay there, and even started feeding the little tortoise leftovers from his vegetable stall.

What Ah Choi did not realise was this – Dirty Tortoise could actually talk. No, he didn’t talk in English – that’s a human language. No, the Animal Kingdom has their own language, complete with their own dialects – reptiles speak Reptilian, mammals speak Mammish, birds speak Twittish, and so on. The difference between their dialects and us humans, is that there isn’t really any difference between them – just the peculiar accents and the way some things are said.

Anyway, enough about the boring subject of Animalian Language. More on that later. This is the story of Dirty Tortoise. And at this moment of time, Dirty Tortoise was happy.

For a tortoise, he was leaving a good life. He lived free in a nice dark, damp place, he had a constant supply of food thrown into his drain by Ah Choi, and he had lots of friends around. It was an odd life for a tortoise, but then again, Dirty Tortoise was not the only odd animal in the Temelo Wet Market.

In fact, the entire Wet Market was filled with odd animals. This was a very odd market indeed, and that’s not even counting the whole Very Important Heritage Site thingy. It was a Wet Market where every single stall had a little animal living under, inside, above or around it.

Dirty Tortoise’s vegetable section, for instance, is also home to Billy the Unoriginal Goat (a unique species of goat is so incapable of original thoughts that it doesn’t even know what goats are supposed to do and so copies whatever every other animal does), and Leafy the Vegetarian Green Snake, amongst others.

As expected, the spice section was home to the most exotic animals. Only here, are the animals brave and pretty enough to roam around in plain sight, for tourists to ooh and ahh over and take pictures of. Among the animals here are Cak the rainbow-coloured leopard gecko, Vladimir the Russian Talking Parrot and a rainbow coloured Neon Flourescenian Cat ironically called Blackie.

While most animals steer clear of the meat section (because it can be rather distressing to see a friend of yours being slaughtered and strung up to be sold as soup stock); even the stalls in that section was occupied by meat-eating animals (usually the ones that even humans steer clear of) such as Meg the miniature chicken fox, Fang the walking Piranha and a gang of boomtown rats who had formed their own little triad called the Ratatatatats. Though.

Over in the fruits and flowers section, the animals are generally of the insect and bird variety. The insects love that section because of the flowers and pollen, the birds love it because of the fruits. Again, these are not your normal fruit flies or sparrows you see everywhere. Wingit the cherry eagle, for instance, is the smallest eagle in the world, about the size of an apple. He hunts like a normal eagle, swooping down from high on worms that dare peek out of their apples, and built his eyrie in an IKEA lamp above the apple stall. The only worm Wingit won’t eat, is his good friend Squirm the giant orange worm. Squirm survives on oranges, which contain citrus acid that is pretty bad for a cherry eagle’s stomach. There was one animal in the Fruits and Flowers section that was neither an insect nor a bird though, and that was Sonky the Funky Monkey. Naturally, he lived in the banana stall, a guest of the stall owner Chiu, who liked the way the funky monkey hummed Prince and Jamiroquai songs while he was merrily gobbling down a comb of bananas (Chiu was too stingy to get an iPod, so he relied on Sonky to entertain him during the slower business days).

Also, the Temelo Wet Market is a market where rats are cleaner than tortoises, and are welcomed as pets, because they clean up the floor of any waste cleanly and properly. It was a wet market where humans and animals co-existed side by side, and no one took a broom to a rat, or shot a gecko down with a rubber band. No one knew why the market was like that, or when it started being that way – it just was.

Amongst all the animals that lived in the Temelo Wet Market, Dirty Tortoise was the oldest. In human years, that is. In Rat years, he is ancient. If he was a mosquito, the rest of the mosquitoes would think of him as The Mosquito God Who Lives Forever. In tortoise years, however, Dirty Tortoise was practically still a teenager, still full of curiosity, and still gung ho enough to wander around the Wet Market seeking out new things, and making new friends. The only problem is, being a tortoise, he never got very far. In fact, he had never even been all the way to the (human) entrance of the Wet Market, let alone step foot outside. The most he had gone to was just over the halfway line, where the meat section was, but the sight of the raw meat and the occasional tortoise shell hanging around the place frightened him, and he never lingered for long.

Still, Dirty Tortoise was a friend to every animal in the market, even those who typically do not get along well with animals in the other sections. He was also the most knowledgeable of them all, because Ah Choi who was also studying part-time, would often read books out loud in his stall during the slow business days (which was almost every day), and Dirty Tortoise learned a lot about deep subjects like Management, Business and Marketing just by listening to Ah Choi reading.

It was because of this that whenever the other animals had problems, Dirty Tortoise was the one they would usually turn to for help.


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