How the Rhinoceros Got His Skin (And More)

I was thinking (as I often do when I’m washing my face and looking at myself in the mirror—don’t ask) about a “short story,” or fable, really, that I wrote for my book. Frayne (a dragon) tells it to Susan (a little girl), and it’s about a tiny mosquito that overcomes a bully of a dragon by biting him all over. And as I was thinking, I wondered what people would say about the little story, because, at the end, the dragon has learned his lesson and the mosquito gives him some very effective salve for his bites. All is happy, the end.

I could just hear them:

“Oh, come on. What a sickly sweet way to end a story. Everybody wins? The bad guy doesn’t get punished? Everyone is friends?”

And maybe it’s true, maybe it’s a little too optimistic, or maybe it’s too Mary Poppins/Pollyanna. But I had to end it that way, and here’s why.

Because, when I was little, my grandparents had an old book of Rudyard Kipling’s “Just-So Stories,” and I read the story about the rude rhinoceros who leaves his skin on the riverbank. And a man, to punish the rhino for eating his cake, puts the leftover crumbs and some burned currants in the skin, so that when the rhino puts it back on, he itches until his smooth skin wrinkles all over—and he itches forever. Forever.

When I read that as a little girl, it made me sick. I hated that man who made the rhinoceros itch, no matter what the reason. I hated him because—because—he didn’t just cause the rhinoceros pain. No. There is dignity in pain, in bearing it, even in being dealt it, somehow, in martyrdom, but there is no dignity in itching. It even makes a sentence sound absurd. The rhino—he didn’t go out with a bang, he wasn’t put on the rack, he didn’t get his head chopped off, he was made to itch—forever. It’s painful, it’s horrifying, and it’s ridiculous.

Another thing that happened to me a lot when I was little was that my brother would scratch me when we were fighting. And sometimes scratches, besides hurting, will puff up a bit and itch monstrously. The pain of those scratches didn’t bother me. But the itching—that would bring tears to my eyes. I’d scratch my hand or my arm or whatever body part it was and think, “He must really hate me. To want to cause me shame like this.”

Or, well, maybe those weren’t the exact words that went through my head. But they were the essence of my feelings. And those feelings, if people ever accuse me of being sentimental or sickly sweet or too nice, are why I can’t let dragons itch forever, or even for very long. It’s because the rhinoceros did. And because I never want to be the cause of someone or something’s suffering like that, not even in a story.

The end.