If one was to assign human feelings to the cushion–which we will not, since it was wholle inanimate–one might imagine into have had a bitter past, as it had previously been set aside for the exclusive use of Squirt, Aunt Augustine’s beloved pomchi, and true to his name he had visited every kind of indignity upon the cushion that was possible, and a few that may have been invented solely for the occasion.

Once Squirt–and his successors Squirt II and Squirt III–had passed away and Aunt Augustine went into care, she had used the cushion as a support during her struggle with IBS in her twilight years. Again, were the cushion to have a mind or a memory–which it did not–it might have rejected the indignity of the situation. Upon Aunt Augustine’s expiry, the cushion went to Cousin Marybelle, who had used it as an experiment in washing and re-covering older cushions as a sacrifice before trying the procedure on her own, beloved, living room set. Find it a success, the cushion had gone into the white elephant gift exhange as a “new” item.

This led the cushion, which would have been seething with resentment had it ever been sentient, which it had not, into its current circumstance of sitting on the Guest Couch in Great Aunt Agnes’s sitting room. If anyone had known its history, and known the powerful hatred that would have been coursing through the utterly and intirely inanimate object, might have thought twice about sitting there.

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