Elephant and Couch

I asked a niece and nephew to each give me nouns to use as prompts. They came up with elephant and couch. We agreed that I could write about an elephant who sits on a couch and breaks it, but we thought that might be too obvious and I came up with this instead...

Madhu sat on her couch, staring at the broken television. The final match of the Cricket World Cup was starting and the horrid thing picked now to become a piece of useless scrap. Her trunk crinkled in agitation.

There wasn't a netcast of the game and she took too much after father to pop down the pub and blend in with the crowd there, as evidenced by the fact that she even had a trunk to be crinkling in the first place.

Her dad could fix the problem. He was, after all, the Remover of Obstacles. But Madhu had repeatedly promised herself that she was going to stop running to him with her problems. Besides, he was tusks deep revising his latest manuscript and had never understood his daughter's attraction to sports. Grandpa Shiva did, but repairs were the opposite of his gig.

Well, there was no help for it. Her options were to break her father's one rule for her or to turn thief and steal someone else's telly.

Madhu went into her bedroom, covered her elephant face in enough makeup to look plastic, and teleported herself to the game, where she made it onto international television for her enthusiastic pro-India “costume”.