The Cushion of Benevolence

The Cushion of Benevolence sat very still upon the sofa and waited for the two humans to stop tugging wildly at the pizza, yelling something about ‘too fat to move’ and ‘I never loved you anyway’, before they could eventually sit down and force their hairy arses into his fluffy and benevolent face. He had earned his name through the great adult-circumcision trauma of the previous week, whereby a floppy, blood-soaked penis had landed upon his tassels and he had calmly waited for it to be removed, whereas his cousin, the aptly named Cushion of Malevolence, had gone quite insane and had attempted to rape the internet router as a result of his ordeal.

He had always been a fairly benevolent cushion, and through the years of tea stains and biscuit crumbs moulded into his furry bits, had become a part of the furniture; the most revered achievement a cushion could have hoped for. He couldn’t quite recall the colour he had been at the point of being manufacturing, though it could have been a magnificent shade of striking azure, for now he was instead a nice crusty brown, and melted into the background like butter down those suspicious crumpet holes. The humans had never washed him for fear of his zip ripping open and filling the floor of their laundry room with cushion guts and the occasional small packet of cocaine, which had been stuffed there just incase by the previous owners. Despite the occasional moment of clarity, an unfortunate side effect of sobriety, whereby the realisation occurred that the flat they lived in had essentially a thin layer of shit coating each surface, the cushion was generally safe, tolerated- and thus he was able to tolerate the humans in return, and retain his benevolent stance, on a sofa made mostly out of sweet wrappers and Kopparberg bottles.

Then one cold winter’s night, when the power had cut out, either by zombie apocalypse or a lack of paying bills, a terrifying event occurred. Had the cushion been slightly less benevolent, laid-back, and cocaine filled… perhaps he could have stopped the fire. Perhaps he could have advised against the lighting of several candles around the general area of the Cushion of Malevolence, who had recently become fanatical about skinning kittens and generally burning everything to the ground. Perhaps he may also had seen the danger in lighting the aforementioned candles in a close vicinity to the improperly anchored bonsai tree, who teetered on the edge of the shelf, and mocked all with his tiny, perfectly trimmed moustache. But, he did not.

The bonsai tree looked at the spoon, the spoon looked at the coaster, the coaster wasn’t looking because it was too busy humping the mug; but the mug saw the spoon looking at him, and so looked on to the internet router, who looked at the Cushion of Malevolence and winked through it’s rather intense Stockholm Syndrome. The evil cushion looked once more upon the bonsai tree, and thus with that final look, the bonsai tree crashed to the table beneath, scattering the candles around the room. Flames snapped up at the startled curtains, the humans ran around screaming as they burned to death and in the confusion the Cushion of Benevolence was kicked through an open window and lay, defeated on the grass outside,  his friends and fellow décor pieces consumed by the blistering wrath of the flames.

He lay in mud and benevolence for several hours, and as the house he called home burned to the ground, the rain began to fall. Steadily the rain droplets pushed through his biscuit crust and he could see just beneath it… he flapped his corners around as he endeavoured to sit up and look at the colour upon his chest. He experienced a wave of surprise, under whelmed somewhat with the realisation of his inherent and undeniable plain brownness.

He lay on the ground and watched the flames lick the edges of his perspective of the night sky. ‘I could have killed those bastards myself,’ he sighed.