“I should have dumped your ink a long time ago,” Sylvia said as she tried to open the fountain pen.
“You can’t, I won’t let you.”
The pen wrestled out of her hand and started scribbling something on the nearby pad of paper. Sylvia stood, stunned that the pen could somehow write on it’s own.
“But…how?”
“I’m more powerful, because you loved me.”
She watched as the pen’s scribblings came together to form a tiger. She grabbed her book bag and bolted for the door. She slammed it shut just as a loud roar came from the other side.
“I guess you don’t love me back, huh?”
She fumbled in her bag for the little booklet that came with the pen. Sylvia scanned the instructions about how to fill it and how to clean it. She was just about to wad the whole thing up in disgust when she saw the small print on the very last page.
This pen is magic, use at your own risk. To reverse the magic, please empty the pen, put it back into the original black case, and say these words three times: Fountain Mountain Poo.
“Fountain Mountain Poo?” Sylvia said out loud.
“Doesn’t work as long as I’m full of ink,” the pen sang from the other side of the door.
She dug around her bag to see if the case was in there, but she remembered it was sitting on her desk which was inside her room with the tiger. All she had on her was a sketch book, a few colored pencils, and a large eraser with the words, can be used on ink, written on its side.
Perfect! Now, all she had to do was open the door and maybe she could erase the tiger and whatever else the stupid pen was thinking up, before….well, she wasn’t quite sure what would happen if she was eaten by a pen drawn tiger actually.
With the large eraser in front of her, she pushed open the door. The tiger leapt for her, but she quickly slashed at its mouth, erasing all but one sharp fang. Sylvia erased the tiger part by part, but before it was completely erased, its left paw swung at her and knocked the eraser to the floor. She dropped to her knees, picked up the eraser, swiveled, and finished off the beast leaving nothing but disjoined black lines all over the floor.
“Look what you did,” the pen shouted. It started to draw again. “Try this on for size.
“Is that… a clown?” she asked.
The pen laughed. Sylvia dropped the eraser. When she bent over to pick it up she noticed blood. Her blood. The tiger must have snagged her right hand, blood was dripping everywhere. She squeezed it and swallowed. Clowns scared her, no, terrified her, and this one was no exception. The pen had made him tall and menacing. No time to be scared, she thought. Sylvia grabbed the eraser with her left hand and lunged forward. She took out the clown in four slashes.
The pen was still laughing, so she grabbed the case and jumped across the room. She picked up the pen, threw open the ink well and dumped it. She then shoved the pen into the case and snapped it shut.
“Fountain Mountain Poo. Fountain Mountain Poo. Fountain Mountain Poo.”
The laughing finally stopped.
Later that evening, after she had cleaned up her room, bandaged her hand, and finished her homework, Sylvia was reading in bed.
“Sylvia.”
“Yes?” she asked, looking around her room.
“Fill me back up, please. You know you want to.”
And that’s how Sylvia’s fountain pen got buried behind her Mom’s prized rose bushes.