Once upon a time…
There was a meadow. In this meadow lived squirrels and turtles and bumblebees.
And every day at dusk, there would come a man to this meadow. He would kill five of each small animal that he saw and two of each bigger one, until the first three stars shone in the sky.
Gathering up his prey for the day, he would travel to a clearing not far off, dead weight over his back.
In the clearing, he aligned the animals into a cross on the ground. Covering them with kerosene, he turned them into a bonfire. It always shone with miraculous clarity, for three towns over.
The man takes a seat just a few feet away from the fire, admiring the licks of flame that he wrought.
He pikes a leftover rabbit from the massacre and cooks it, eating the meat off the stick in the harsh fire light.
Only the maker of the fire knows its purpose.
One day there was no bonfire.
In the spring of 1962 there was a lumberjack. He worked long days and sometimes long nights.
He stacked thick pieces of wood onto conveyor belts and through machines. He didn’t mind the work, because it gave him food for his family and kept his house in his name.
And then he died of a stroke.
The world never had him again, nor did it care.
Once upon a time…
There was a wooden house. In it, a mother of five children was brushing away at dirt spots on the stove. It was near the end of her day, but she still had one last meal to cook before she could rest.
Her bones and muscles were tired, as she’d been scrubbing at clothes on a washboard out in the pond for the whole afternoon. Before that, a lunch had been cooked and cleaned up after, and before that five squirmy children had been bathed and clothed.
She didn’t mind her work, she only wished she had less of it to do.
And then a stone came through the window, hitting her on the temple before falling its way to the floor.
She died quietly and alone, with only her husband and five children to remember her.
Death comes.
It comes inevitably, quickly, slowly, painfully, tragically, pitifully.
It comes.
It’s coming for all of us, someday.
The catch is we don’t know which day.
But it could be today.
Or tomorrow.
You won’t know, that’s the whole point.
Someday it will carry you away, and what will you say to lady death?
“No, not now! My mortgage was so close to being paid off….”
“This is it? This is how I’m going? What a jip!”
The coherency of life and all that it is has been wrought and warped.
We no longer have a keen sense of destiny.
Nobody knows why they’re choosing the paths that they follow.
The world as a whole has been put to sleep, made not to notice the terrible atrocities that are being committed by governments, people abusing their power, and other such scum of the human trip.
Look out your window, what do you see?
Wholesale fences and chemical lawns?
Death trenches and slave farms?
Pools of starvation, loss of innocence, rapid decay.
These are symptoms of a commercial world gone wrong. Of morality gone askew, letting nothing stop for the mighty dollar.
We worship the dollar.
It consumes us and makes us.
Makes us into something terrible, something hollow, something void of intellect.
Yeah it's not really a story, sorry
