Is it Cheating?

Harold, he had what he claimed was a headache, made sobbing sounds though what would have been his nose had he had one. Actually, he had gotten better at apparating facial features onto his skeleton frame, but real salty tears he could not manifest. Sure, his eyes could pour out a virtual torrent of blood, but Harold longed for the old-fashioned type of tears that tasted like the sea.

His real dilemma, finding a word that rimed with anathema, which was his new word of the day, not only frustrated him, but also pained his brain. Miles the mouse had thrown it at him, claiming he (Harold) needed to expound upon his vocabulary to write better poems. Anyway, anathema was hard to rime with. And Harold was thinking of making up a word to go with it. Would that be cheating?

Well, he certainly wasn’t going to ask Miles. He would give Harold a self satisfied I am smarter than you kind of look that would really make Harold’s head, his self esteem, his entire ghostly visage, pang with pain. 

Harold took his head off and carefully placed it on the kitchen table. The table had four legs, one shorter than the other three, and in an attempt to compensate for this extreme unbalance, Miles the mouse had stuffed old newspaper under the length challenged leg.

Fortunately, Harold and Miles had hired a handyman to do some home improvements, and Harold thought they might as well add the table to the ever-growing to-do list. Rex Mayo, a house painter of world renown, also did handyman work, and said he could repair the flooring, install new windows, and stain the cabin. Surely, repairing the table would not be a problem for Rex.