The Cow

There was a cow that lived on a farm. She was young but very smart. She was smart enough to know that ‘farm’ meant ‘place where they will kill my children.’ How she got that smart she could only guess, but with nothing much else to do, she spent a lot of time thinking. She knew the patterns of the farm: She saw the other cows were scared of the barking dog, She knew when gates were opened and closed, She knew the bulgy eyed guy was lazy and opened both of the gates for a time instead of opening one – moving the cows through it – closing it – opening the next one – and then moving the cows through, as the others did. In short, she knew she could escape. “But where would I go?” she thought “There are so many fences, there is no longer a meaningfully definable ‘outside’. “For example” she reasoned “pick any fenced in area, and call that the outside – then everything else is inside. In other words, the space outside all of the worlds fences was of a similar size as all the areas within them. They effectively fenced in that last space without having to do anything.” With no outside, where could she go?

She chewed her cud and thought.

The Frogs

my 55 word story ‘The Frogs’ is now up at the 55 word section of Birdandmoon.com!

The Frogs

The rest of the site is very cool so you should check it out.

The Frogs

When the people came the frogs decided to hibernate – better to sleep than lose your mind awake. “Let’s dig them up and eat them!” the children laughed. In the spring the frogs gathered to count their loses. “Sad about Hubert, such a beautiful voice… Beatrice, please try to remember what you can of his songs.”

This story has 55 words – which is a thing people try to do sometimes.

The Bird

        There was a guy who was walking to work and away from a fight with his girlfriend. Then he got hit by a car.
        In the hospital he got a call from some friends he hadn’t talked to in a while. He got some flowers and watched TV. His girlfriend brought him chinese food. It was better than work.
        A few days later a bird came flying out of nowhere and crashed into his window and fell and disappeared. He managed to pull himself out of bed and grope his way painfully to the window. He saw the bird lying on the ground. It was still breathing!
        He called the nurse. It was morning, and the morning nurse was the nicer one. He explained about the bird and she went out and put it in a little box and brought it to him. He looked up on the internet how to take care of it. When his girlfriend visited all he wanted to do was talk about the bird. He asked her to get him some supplies and a cage for it. She thought he was losing it – maybe it was the painkillers. Anyway, she got it for him.
        He took care of the bird. It was obviously in pain. Over the next several weeks he and the bird got better together. The bird was now hopping about a little and the guy could take it out of the cage and the bird would hop around on his bed and sit on his shoulder. He and the bird would look out the window together. Suddenly one day, without any previous attempts at flight, the bird took off and flew out the window. “Now he’s happy to be outside” the man thought – he was also going to leave the hospital soon.
        When he was finally better, his girlfriend came to pick him up. She threw out the dead flowers and gathered up the cards and other little presents he had gotten. “I’m thinking about quitting my job” the man said to his girlfriend. “Why, you don’t like it?” she asked distractedly as she looked about the room making sure they had everything, though he could tell she was paying close attention. “Yeah, I don’t know, maybe I’ll get a job at a bookstore or something – something that isn’t so draining.”
        As she wheeled him out of the hospital (he could walk, but hospitals make you wheel out for insurance reasons) he felt a little different about everything. When they got to the door, he got up from the wheel chair and walked to the car, and when he got in the car he realized he wasn’t exactly inside of it in the way that he used to be. The inside of the car was just another part of the outside. He was never inside of anything in the old way again – and, like the bird, he was happy to be outside.

If You Dance With The Devil, You Might Get Burned

There was a place full of people, and each had their own fire. It helped to keep them warm and to see in the dark. But fires are both fierce and fragile – so sometimes they had to take great care to protect their fires from harm, and sometimes they had to protect themselves and others from their fires when they were wild.

If they were smart, they fed their fires good dry wood that wasn’t rotted so their fires would burn hot and clean. And if the fire was getting out of control, they could withhold new wood and wait till it settled down, or they could get to a safe place away from others and feed it even more and light up the sky. But they had to be constantly vigilant that they had enough fuel around, because small fires might quickly go out and large ones might quickly burn through their fuel.

Though a fire is a fire, and so a pretty specific thing, hot and bright etc., everyone’s fires were slightly different depending on the exact nature of the fuel they used and exactly how they built it. And when people stood near each other, their fires would mingle. A bright fire could strengthen a little one, or overwhelm it. And someone could even re-light a fire that had gone out, provided the embers were still hot enough. And your fire was changed by the other fires, so it was a sort of record of both who you are and also where you have been and who you have known.

Pregnant

There was a woman who was pregnant with a baby.  The baby was a dreamer and very imaginative – He would think of wonderful stories of high adventure filled with tremendous yearning, passion, and great accomplishment. These dreams were rich with detail and beauty, and the mother could sense this, though only the broadest emotions got through to her. Still she knew what a sensual and delirious dream her child was having, and with what clarity he saw through to the essential in life and living. The mother and child made a gradual and most gently communicated mutual decision that the child should never be born.

The mother toiled all her life scrounging for food and to stay warm. She lost her friends as she had to pull away to avoid their questions as her pregnancy continued into its second and third years. And she lost acquaintances and even pleasant social interactions with strangers as she became a weird and wrinkled, wildly pregnant old woman. And all this time her child, now rather grown in the elaborate beauty and joy of his dreams, told her his vague stories she knew where so clear in his own mind. And when she finally died, they died together as content as anyone could be.

By the Light of the Silvery Smoon

Here’s a story my niece wrote based on an idea we came up with together based on a piece of wood we both painted.

In a distant place, and a different time, far from where any human has ever tread, there was a tribe of creatures that were more eye than anything else. They lived in caves and had never seen the sky. They had never been outside their caves at all,for that matter.

But the ancients of the tribe had stories that had been passed down for generation after generation. Stories of a beautiful orb of silvery light that brightly lit the sky during the day, and bathed the land in a gentle glow at night.

Most of the adults believed the stories had changed over time, that the light orb had either ceased to exist long ago, or never had at all. But the young ones of the tribe believed the stories, and never tired of hearing the same ancient tales over and over again. They dreamed of seeing the great orb, of feeling the warmth of its daytime form, and of gazing at the silvery white reflection of the night form on a clear pool of water.

In the school cave, whenever the teacher even mentioned the great orb, the children would burst into excited conversation, debating over the exact details of the orb. Why was it there? If it was so important, then how could the tribe have survived for centuries without seeing it or experiencing its heat? The pile of unanswered questions grew as the years went by. None were answered, because the only information they had was in the legends. Until one day, a small child decided he wanted to change that. He wanted to go to the outside world, in search of the great orb itself…

He enlisted the help of some of the other young ones, and the few adults who were curious about the orb, and the world outside their caves as well. No one in the tribe had left the intricately connected collection of caves they inhabited in many hundreds of years. The group felt honored and intrigued to be the first.

They knew they needed a way to travel, and it would also need to get them away from danger, for they had no idea what the outer world might have in store for them. They decided on an airship. They worked diligently for several months until it was finally completed.

They painted it blue, with night-black stars and stone-gray windswirls,and also what they imagined the great orb to look like, a large gold-cored silver sphere with brilliant rays of light streaming from it. Then they loaded up with provisions, said their goodbyes to loved ones, and sailed away, in search of what they had only heard about, dreamed about. They sailed in search of the great unknown.

A Pear Tree on the Steamer Ship

I was riding a train from Denver to L.A. to pick up ‘bubbles’ the camper van from an aging british sleaze rocker. I wanted a home with wheels because every other kind of home is one you never really own – property tax may as well be called rent. Cars need insurance so my plan was flawed from the start and living in your car is illegal (at least in Boulder city limits), but I was going to buy some security – I thought anyway.

I took the train and not greyhound to avoid the screaming train wrecks that ride the bus – like the meth’ed out woman who didn’t stop rambling and complaining and sneaking cigarettes for the 20 hours I shared the bus with her, and even the vegan mobile home deliverer who shared my love of the country side, though he thought carbon dating was some kind of atheist conspiracy. And mostly to ride on smooth rails and not bumpy, lane-changing roads.

And the train was right. It had airplane seats and walking around and a car that was all windows and benches – I liked the idea of some engineer guy who might own guns and a laser level taking window gazer’s needs as another design constraint, in line with plexiglas prices and metal fatigue – an advance in the mind of a left handed night owl who gets ‘b’s and ‘d’s mixed up, and is used to the idea that things aren’t exactly made for him.

And I wasn’t the only one with busses on my mind, as three of my fellow window gazers (mother, daughter, and grand daughter it seemed) were chatting happily on what must have been a trip they planned months ago, and were discussing the daughter’s husband, who worked as a city bus driver and once competed in the bus driver rodeo, whatever that might be, and who felt he had to hide from his coworkers the fact that he took a train somewhere once when he and his wife took a trip (you can imagine he argued for the bus and that this train aficionado was now bragging a little about the love in her husband’s small sacrifice). Or airplanes either, I imagine, as anyone who takes a train anywhere in the US is aware that they could have just flown for a similar price, unless you’re the Mennonite family seated next to me for a time, who I guess wasn’t flying on religious grounds, with one of those quiet daughters with thoughtful eyes that I automatically assume know something important about life that I missed somehow, and whose gaze asks me quietly to stop being such a maniac because i’m confusing them.

And the train was stopped for a time somewhere in New Mexico, I think, so that the police could board and take a look at all the young men traveling alone, as some young guy with earrings and a little facial hair had shot and killed a 22 year old cop during a routine pull over a couple of nights ago – or so I was told, at least, by some nice maybe sort of dumb lower class guy sitting across from me after a cop had asked to see my ticket. And though I was worried, this nice sort of curious guy seemed to want to tell me something interesting as opposed to force me to talk to him. He was with his also nice and curious and maybe dumb wife anyway so he could have talked to her, I guess – though they both seemed more interested in the other passengers, like they already knew everything each other had to say, but in a nice way, as they both shared that giving sort of curiosity. And then the guy gave me a pear and gave this black lady an apple. And, as would be usual I guess, the black lady started talking to them a bit – but they didn’t seem to care much – aware, I thought, that she might be doing it just as a way of giving thanks, and they weren’t interested in that sort of thing, though they accepted it just fine. And I was trying to figure out how to react to my perfectly ripe and delicious pear – should I also talk to them? Should I look at him and catch his eye and nod and give a little pear salute? Tell him it tastes good? I’m sure he knows what his pears taste like. And I thought he could be God and the pear could be my life, and you have to figure out how to react to this gift – like do I keep making ‘yuuummmm?’ noises all the time so that he knows I enjoy it? – does he care? Why would he give me this pear, does he want thanks, or company? I didn’t think so. I think he wanted me to just enjoy my pear, or else he didn’t care either way. So I ate it and looked out the window, and I was thankful for my pear and extra glad I could just enjoy it without having to do anything in particular about it.

And I thought I could tell this story like there was a little bird with a broken wing who had to take a steamer ship to the south seas for the winter due to his injury – and, inexplicably, there was a pear tree planted on the forecastle deck, and it was ripe, and he picked a pear off of it, and wasn’t sure what to make of the tree being there or who to thank exactly, or the coincidence that it happened to be perfectly ripe just at this moment. But then I thought I better just stick to the facts for now, because there always seems to be a lot more going on then I know about.

 

Definition: Like (as in to like something):

Someone is said to like something when they can find a reason for liking it that they like (see definition: belief).

Worse than circular, this idea contains an infinite regress – though, in practice, usually bottoms out at the 2nd or 3rd level. Some sophisticates have been known to take it to enormous lengths – as many as several thousand steps, though the stupid and wise both tend not to bother.

 Through millions of years of evolution, natural selection favored those who were well adapted to their environments, finally producing animals perfectly suited to their ecological niche.