Zenikv is 299 years old, has three eyes, two arms and four legs. She only comes out at night. And she eats kids.
Zenikv is the fictional monster of Rochelle Norman, 10, a fifth grader at Whittier Elementary School who created Zenikv as part of a writing/art project in conjunction with Lawton High School.
The fifth graders were asked to write a story about monsters and then draw a picture of it. The stories and drawings were given to ceramics students at Lawton High, who created the monsters. Whittier students will get to see their creations Tuesday at the Monster Museum at Lawton High.
Norman said her favorite part of the project was writing the story “because it was all about creativity and the mind”.
“I never got the opportunity to create a story of my own,” she said. “No one can tell me any details to put in. It was all about my mind and my monster. In my mind I was already planning the story. I’ve always had a creative mind and love drawing.”
Norman said her monster lives in a bunker underground and comes out at night when she kidnaps kids from their beds. Norman said the monster makes adults scream and that no one has seen her, only her shadow. She has long hair and a third eye and she sleeps during the day.
Oh, she likes to eat kids for dinner.
“Sometimes she has veggies because they are healthy,” Norman said. “She has a normal size head, obviously. If she wasn’t a monster, she would have been the perfect woman.”
William Darnell, 12, said he also liked the writing portion of the project best. His monster’s name is The Guardian, he is 10 feet tall and has a hunchback. He has four sharp fangs and is 5,000 years old. The king wants to see who the monster is guarding, so he sends men and messengers to The Guardian for 10 years, but no one ever returns. An epic battle ensues and the humans win in the end.
“It was a good story and I liked writing it. I wanted to do more but the teacher said I had to stop writing,” Darnell said.
Emmalee Hendrix, 11, said she, too, enjoyed writing the story more than she did drawing her monster. She created two monsters, a brother and sister, who live in an abandoned house and don’t go outside because people are mean to them. In the end, humans kill all the monsters except for the brother and sister.
Aleah Cooper, 11, said she enjoyed drawing her monster more than she did writing the story. She made a chocolate chip cookie monster, with wires coming out of it. She said the monster is really a security camera in a bakery. Through a series of events, the cookie monster is accidentally sold to a customer and eventually ends up in the landfill where it finds more security cameras and they all become friends.
Jace Macias, 12, said his monster’s name is Banana. It is 13 years old, has dark brown eyes, a small nose, long arms and long legs. It likes to eat cheese, but does not like to eat anything green. He runs away to the forest when someone tries to eat him, but runs into Bigfoot, and has to escape. He eventually gets eaten by a monkey.
Macias said his favorite part was when karma came in at the end of the story.
Several of the fifth graders said they are looking forward to meeting the students who created their ceramic monsters.
“I’d say ‘Good job and thanks for picking mine’,” Macias said.
“I think it is going to look extremely cool,” Norman said of her ceramic monster. “I think it is going to look absolutely amazing. Creativity is all about the mind.”
She said she might put her monster on the bookshelf in the living room or in her room.