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Joan woke to find a small tortoise dangling above her.
The worst part? She wasn’t surprised.
“Good morning, Clyde,” Joan mumbled as she stretched. “How long has Sherlock had you up there?”
The longer she looked, the more insane the situation was. Clyde was attached to the end of a long, old-looking fishing pole. The vintage wooden rod was in the hands of a full-length mannequin dressed like a priest. The mannequin was strapped to a stack of wooden fruit crates at the foot of her bed.
Sherlock? Nowhere to be found. He usually favored the small armchair in the corner of the room next to the windows, or opted to stand right next to the bed. Today, however, he was absent.
All of this, and for what?
Well, she knew part of her answer. Sherlock loved to come up with new ways to wake her. When there was a case that needed solving, he flexed his incredibly creative brain to get her out of bed as quickly as possibly. As for why he chose this elaborate setup… she didn’t even bother contemplating. Sherlock was often too bonkers to rationalize.
His past choices of wake-up calls ranged from a live rooster, to an incessantly annoying recording of some opera she didn’t know. One time, he broke out the bugle… but never again. Clyde had been pulled in on his antics, too. A few times, the languid tortoise was let loose on Joan’s bed, where he inevitably crawled onto her chest and settled there. Sometimes, he was wrapped up in one of Ms. Hudson’s cozies.
She couldn’t deny that she liked the Clyde rousings the best. He was quiet, patient, and a face you couldn’t help but love. And she usually got to sleep in a little because of that.
Alas, today was not one of those days.
Clyde seemed surprisingly content up in the air, but Joan quickly took him down anyway, because cleaning splattered tortoise urine was not on her agenda today. She had just washed these sheets!
As she unclipped him from the loop, she noticed a separate fishing line tied around his body. “What the…” Joan followed the cable and saw that it led out of her room. She sighed. The other shoe had dropped.
First things first, then; she put Clyde down on her duvet cover and ducked into her closet. Once she was out of her pajamas, she felt more ready for whatever was at the end of this suspicious line.
With trepidation in her heart and a tortoise in her hands, Joan followed the line out of her room and up the stairs to the roof.
Next to the beehives, a note and a party hat were weighed down by a tortoise paperweight.
Joan chuckled. After years of using upside-down Clyde as a paperweight, she had finally had enough. Last year, she commissioned an artist to make copper paperweights that resembled their lettuce-chomping creature. The next time she saw Clyde lying on top of a stack of papers, she calmly swapped him out for the inanimate copy and set him back on his four legs.
They never explicitly said anything to each other about the new paperweights, but she noticed that Clyde was never flipped on his back again.
She picked up the note, which was scribbled out in Sherlock’s all-capitals chicken-scratch. WATSON. PLEASE WEAR THE HAT AND BRING CLYDE DOWN TO THE KITCHEN. SEE YOU THERE.
“Huh. What’s the strange man got planned, Clyde? You wouldn’t know, would you?” Joan asked as she slipped the elastic band of the party hat under her chin. “Let’s go find out.”
In the kitchen, she found Sherlock, Arthur, and Martha waiting with a large plate of cut fruit. They also wore paper party hats. Martha smiled at her and whispered good morning . Arthur yawned and leaned into the housekeeper’s side.
“Watson! Good, you’re awake. Let’s trade.” Sherlock handed her a slender white mug and took the tortoise.
Joan sniffed the offered drink and found it to be ginger beer. “What’s all this?” she asked, then took a sip.
“On this day fifteen years ago, we found Clyde in a dead man’s residence. I was thinking we should fatten him up and turn him into a soup. But he managed to win me over and now we enjoy the newspaper together.” Sherlock raised his glass. “May you live long and happy.”
“Happy gotcha day, Clyde.” Martha rubbed the tip of her pointer finger across his head. “I’ll make you many more turtle cozies in the years to come, I promise.”
“Happy gotcha dayyy,” Arthur dragged out with another yawn. “Māma, can I go back to sleep now?”
Joan knelt down and gave him a kiss on the forehead. “Okay, honey.”
“I’ll get him tucked in again.” Martha patted her on the shoulder as she led Arthur out of the kitchen.
Joan smiled at the way her heart warmed. Here, in the kitchen of their shared home, she was glad for once that Sherlock had employed one of his unconventional wakeup tactics.
“Happy gotcha day, Clyde,” she sweetly said as she fed him a raspberry.
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