Fiction: Group 2
The Pink Dolphin Protest
German Swiss International Primary School, Cheng, Edgar - 9, Fiction: Group 2
oyfully, I flipped my tail. My friend Bob had just sent me an invitation to his birthday party. And Bob has
the best parties.
Last year, he got the Rays (the most famous merman band) to perform at his party. The year before, he had
a wild celebration at the Pink Dolphin Playhouse, a massive place with strobe lights, a jungle gym, with an
electronic gadget every ten inches. We also got to make masks. I made one of those weird two-legged
humans that smell like sweat.
I was
psyched.
I swam in a circle, then propelled myself up to the surface and did a dive. Being a pink
dolphin has its perks, even if we don’t have those things that humans have at the end of their arms. I think
they’re called hands.
I paddled quickly back home. It was just a small cave, nothing fancy, but I was proud of it. I loved how the
makeshift porch was set into the stone, and the elaborate way that the rocks were positioned to make a
pattern, but still look natural and organic. I’d crafted the door using a slab of rock and seaweed.
I scribbled ‘Bob’s birthday’ in my planner. Then I swam up to the attic to do a little bit of cleaning.
As I pushed junk into the sunken trash can, something caught my eye. I swept the dust off with my tail, and
examined it.
Tears welled in my eyes. It was a framed painting (we paint using octopus ink, coloured with trash that
humans toss into our oceans) of my mom and dad. They’d died two years ago, when a boulder crushed
them both, but nobody knew why the boulder had fallen in the first place. The king couldn’t appoint
guardians, so I’d lived at an orphanage for a year. But I’d swam away so many times, he finally agreed to let
me live on my own.
I sadly pushed the painting into the small pile of items that I wanted to keep.
* * *
Eventually, the day of Bob’s birthday arrived. I attached his present (the book he’d wanted for months) to
my tail with seaweed. Then I raced through the water at top speed.
Halfway through, I noticed a large crowd of pink dolphins to my left. They held signs that said
Keep our
river whole””
or
They’ll annihilate us! Do something!”
The king himself was there, a determined but weary
expression on his face.
Bob and his brother Ian were there. Bob looked indignant and angry about something, and he kept
scowling at the crowd. Ian was calming him, but even he looked concerned. “What’s going on?” I
enquired.
Bob replied, his flippers on his hips. “Two and a half years ago, the humans started to build a bridge across
the Pearl River Delta. Now they’re almost finished, and most of the pink dolphins want the king to do
something!”
“He’s just cross that his party is cancelled,” Ian explained. “That’s why he’s so grumpy.”
Meanwhile, I was frantically thinking about the consequences of the bridge being built. It would split the
Pearl River Delta in half! It would mean no more visits to Bob’s place, no more trips to the Pink Dolphin
J
