A story about anger
Huffy and the Broken Tower
Somebody knocks over Huffy's tower and Huffy erupts. A story about big anger, and what it is actually trying to tell you.
3 minutes to read aloud · 😠 Angry
Watch it read aloud · 3 min
Huffy had been building the tower all morning.
It was eleven blocks high. It had a flag. It was, without any doubt at all, the best tower ever built in Candyfloss Land.
Then Zippy came round the corner far too fast, and the tower went everywhere.
Something enormous went up inside Huffy, hot and red and fast, from the feet to the ears in about half a second.
"I'm SO huffy!" Huffy roared, and stamped, and grabbed the nearest block, and lifted it right up over Zippy's head—
And stopped.
Because Zippy's face had gone small and frightened, and that was not what Huffy wanted at all.
Huffy put the block down. Huffy's paws were shaking.
Tipsy was already there. Tipsy is always already there.
"Breathe in big," said Tipsy quietly. "Now blow it out like a dragon."
Huffy breathed in, right down to the bottom, and blew out so hard that a leaf went skittering across the path. Again. And again. Then Huffy squeezed both paws as tight as tight, and counted, slowly, all the way to ten.
The red got smaller. It did not go. But it got small enough to fit inside Huffy instead of all over everybody.
"It was my tower," said Huffy, and Huffy's voice cracked, which was somehow worse than the roaring.
"I know," said Tipsy. "You worked so hard on it. Of course you are angry."
Huffy blinked. Nobody had ever said of course you are angry before. People usually said calm down.
Zippy crept over, looking at the floor. "I'm sorry. I wasn't looking."
And Huffy — still hot, still shaky, still very much huffy — said the hardest sentence in the world.
"I'm angry with you. But I don't want to scare you."
They rebuilt it together. It came out twelve blocks high, which everybody agreed was better.
Huffy still gets huffy. Huffy always will, because Huffy's anger is the bit that stands up when something is not fair, and Candyfloss Land needs it.
But now the dragon breath comes first.
