Pt 4: Jenny and the Laundry List

Jenny looked around to see if she had complete attention then tilted her pirate hat forward at a jaunty angle and looked at her audience. The friends leaned forward on their seats with eager faces and waited for her to explain how Rabbit Jenny remembered everything she saw in the night. Jenny the Pirate began again.  "Late at night, when Jenny was going to sleep, she curled up and tried to recall everything she had witnessed in the docks. Then one by one she attached each event to a piece of washing." Pirate Jenny stopped and smiled grimly. "Jenny knew all about washing. Every morning at the crack of dawn she was forced to launder all the soiled clothes of the cruel hotel guests. There was so much to do that her paws were raw-red by the time she served breakfast. But at bed time reverie, her mind floated and laundered what she’d seen on the docks. She first gave the laundry very special names for all the dubious exchanges she had witnessed. Then she designated a garment for each of the people involved - and if she didn’t know who they were, she invented a name them. As she imagined folding clothes and putting them away, she allocated to each of these people a fitting punishment. In the eye of her imagination she could see layers of garments - ironed, folded and named - rising to the top of a basket. Then as the stack of freshly laundered washing became ever higher, she willed the basket to suddenly fall. It was only then - at the precise moment when garments spilled onto ground - that Rabbit Jenny smiled and drifted into sleep...”