Memoirs of a Porcupine

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so I’m just an animal, just a dumb, wild animal, men would say, though if you ask me most of them are dumber and wilder than any animal, but to them I’m just a porcupine, and since they only believe in what they can see, they’d see nothing special in me, just one of those mammals with long sharp quills, slower than a hound dog, too lazy to stray from the patch where he feeds

I wouldn’t want to be a man, to be honest, they can keep their so-called intelligence, for years I was the double of a man they called Kibandi, who died two days ago, most of the time I stayed hidden just outside the village, and went to him late at night, for specific missions, I know if he’d heard me making this confession while he was alive he’d have punished me severely, free speech, he’d have said, ingratitude more like, he may not have shown it, but all his life he felt I owed him, I was just a lowly bit player, a pawn in his hands, well, I don’t want to boast, but I could say the same about him, without me he’d have been a bit of rotten pulp, his life as a man worth less than a few drops of piss, the piss of the aged porcupine who ruled over us back when I still belonged to the animal world

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