Zoobie Animal - writercize #42 (A to Z 26)

First off, an ode to the letter Z.  Beautiful, zig-zag letter z, how I adore thee ... and all that you mean this month of April.  Satisfaction at completing a challenge and the return to four posts a week, down from six - hooray, hooray, hoorah.  

(To my followers not involved in the A to Z Challenge, thank you for bearing with me on this alphabetical journey with all its little side notes, and to those involved in the A to Z Challenge, thank you so much for finding me through the challenge and signing on to follow this blog.  I hope you continue to log in often as I have many, many more writercizes coming up!)

Now that that's done, let's make a zoobie.  Think newbie at the zoo, hence the name zoobie, an animal creation all your own.  Dr. Seuss was fantastic at inventing make-believe characters that could easily live in the city zoo - The Lorax, The Sneetches, a Zizzer-Zazzer-Zuzz.  As a matter of fact, I think it's nearly impossible to make it through a Dr. Seuss book without learning about a new animal living within Theodore Geisel's imagination.  

writing exercise:  Let your imagination run wild and create an animal that does not exist in the real world.  Be as creative as you can about giving your zoobie a natural habitat, a diet, a few physical characteristics and a name for its species.

(Click "read more" to meet one zoobie in the writercizer's sample response.)

writercizer response:

Meet The Hiccurpeeze.

The hiccurpeeze is a very large gray animal that looks like a cross between an elephant, a hippo and a rhinoceros.  It has large elephant ears, enormous hippo teeth, a long pointy rhinoceros nose, and the round, roly, wrinkled body of all three.  

Unfortunately, the hiccurpeeze is very prone to allergies, both of the dusty and edible variation, and got its name from the horrible reaction to such allergies.  When a bit of pollen passes by the hiccurpeeze, the poor thing gets a shiver and a shake, tosses its head back and lets out a loud, simultaneous hiccup, burp and sneeze.

Due to its allergies, the hiccurpeeze's natural environment lies within the Arctic circle where it is too cold for pollen and too drab for exotic foods, but it can adapt to the zoo within a tightly sealed box of paned glass.  Zookeepers feed the hiccurpeeze a daily diet of fish and penguins (the penguins after hours, naturally, as they don't want to frighten children in love with the little tuxedo birds after dancing to Happy Feet) and need to powerwash the inside of the box daily to douse out the sneeze germs.