As a little kid, I had this recurrent nightmare. I was alone, doing whatever little kids do when they're bored, and suddenly, out of nowhere, a rhinoceros ran me over. I didn't even have the time to see it, I just knew that it was a large animal with a horn on the nose (in fact, I suspect that I was trampled by rhinos before I knew about them). I was left flat on the ground, like some sort of kid-flavoured pancake. Then my parents came, picked up their progeny and rolled it up. My father and my mother carried me back home on their shoulders and, in place of a proper funeral, stored me in the attic, to be eaten by moths with other discarded pieces of family junk. In the morning, I had somehow got back into my normal 3D shape, and I ate my breakfast warily, looking out for approaching pachyderms. The strangest thing was that rhinos weren't the only culprits. Now and then, I was trampled by another member of the animal kingdom. Hamsters did me a couple of times. Once, a big toad kept hopping on me until it was satisfied with the result. Obviously, this had a particular influence on my diurnal life. I was terrified by anything featuring an animal, cartoons, games, magnets, nature shows, zoos and almost all children books, which explains why I started to read newspapers at an early age. Worse, my parents took me to a shrink, and because of the symbolic sexual nature of the horn thing, my mom and dad were briefly suspected of child abuse. Fortunately, since I also had aardvarks, donkeys, drosophilae, okapis, wombats trampling dreams, there was little of a case against my parents, and soon we were a wholesome family again. When I became a teenager, the dreams recessed a little (girls didn't trample me), but the phobia lingered, and the whole neighbourhood promised me a career at a slaughterhouse, or as a bullfighter. Instead, I chose to program computers, which was a fun and virtually animal-less occupation (unless you count "bugs" as animals, ha ha ha). So, I was little prepared, on my first day of work, to meet Alexandra. She worked in a cubicle a few rows from mine and, well, she was a rhino. She had large, sweet brown eyes, and her wrinkled skin was of the most soft, leathery