Microstory 1589: The Bear Ate My Tail

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Prompt

My son came home crying after spending the weekend at his mother’s, but he wouldn’t tell me why.

Botner

He was never very clear about what happened to him there. He hated to talk about it, so I had to pry it out of him. “Mom, there was a bear,” he said. A bear? “Mom, it ripped me apart and ate my tail, and the bear was a monster!”

Something was different. My mind kept clicking back to the bear, and I realized my son had a horror story to tell. “Sylar?”

I tried to listen to him, but there was something in his tone of voice that told me he didn’t want to tell me. “The bear ate my tail off. It went down the throat and ripped through the skin. There’s nothing there anymore, Mom. It’s not my tail anymore. It’s no longer me. There’s nothing.”

I stared at him, wanting to believe him. But I knew better. I picked him up and held him. “But I just saw you that day. You’ve got your tail, baby. I saw it.”

He smiled at me and squeezed me. “Mom, don’t you believe me? It’s just a story that people tell so they can scare kids and get their money.” A kid shivering in the woods, not knowing what happened to him, unable to tell me anything about it? I wondered if his mother had made him write that story. That was the only reason a six-year-old boy would lie to his mom. He wasn’t telling the truth.

Conclusion

My ex-wife and I have a pretty decent relationship on the whole, but things get a little competitive when it comes to our son. It’s like she wants to throw me off my game, and make it hard for me to get him to be honest with me when it’s my time with him. We have a complicated schedule. I have him in my tree for the five weekdays, and then she gets him for the weekend, and then we do it again, except I hold onto him for that next weekend, and she ends up with the weekdays after that. I don’t know why we came up with that. Or ya know what, I think I do. This is just another way for her to control where he is, and what he does. As squirrels, we have to be really careful about how we raise our children, or we really will get eaten by bears. I guess she thought I would be scared he was telling the truth, and he truly was attacked by a bear. I have to get her back somehow, as petty as that sounds. Perhaps I’ll steal her winter nuts.

Microstory 973: Survival

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This slot was originally scheduled for Healthcare (When It Works) but since I know very little about countries and regions where it works, it didn’t seem appropriate. All I know is that Usonia isn’t one of them, but that’s all I’ll say about it, other than mentioning the fact that Obamacare saves lives. Instead, I’m going to take this opportunity to admit that I’m a survivalist. The only differences between me and the doomsday preppers you see on television is that I’m smart enough to not advertise all my secret plans to the world, and also I don’t have any. Some preppers have the money to build or commission bunkers. Others have purchased luxury space in old missile silos; dumping tons of money into something they probably won’t ever need. The less wealthy kind of prepper just squirrels away food and resources as they can, and reinforces their homes as much as possible. These tend to rely on their firepower, because they believe profoundly in gun ownership, so they would be spending money on them either way. I’m not any of these things; I really just come up with end-of-the-world stories, and have trouble distinguishing them from reality, which is true of all my stories. And that reality is that the end of the world probably wouldn’t happen all of the sudden. Yeah, maybe a supervolcano will erupt without warning, or an asteroid will decimate these lands. It’s an interesting thought experiment. Assuming you survive the initial event, what would you do next? Are you a series regular on this post-apocalypse series, or just zombie fodder? The most likely scenarios, however, will involve a slow-burn of destruction. Hell, we might be heading towards the end of civilization right now, and not know it. King Dumpster is certainly doing his level best to make that happen. Just like the truth behind most holidays, no single day will mark the end. Institutions will slowly erode. People will stop having faith in their leadership, and the market will drop steadily as fear replaces hope. Before the nuclear missiles fly off to enemy countries, sanctions and bad trade deals will create extreme tension amongst once-friends. Allies will leverage each other for control, until there’s nothing left to control but a big pile of crap. Sure, maybe the bombs will drop on everyone, but the most likely outcome is that people will just give up on life. Governments won’t be able to survive anymore. Ineffective factions will attempt to take their place, but a lack of vision, and no sustainable distribution of resources will just make things worse. Infrastructure will fall, and no matter how deep you dig into the ground, your life will have no meaning. You’ll live on down there, but nothing will get better, so if you’ve already had children, it’s best that they don’t. I’m fascinated by disaster scenarios, but those stories only ever end one of two ways. Either everyone dies, or the cataclysm gives rise to a societal phoenix. They usually ignore the possibility that we’ll trudge on long after any arbitrary defining moment, until our descendants suffer diminishing returns. So I guess what I really love isn’t survival, but civilization. I love the world, so let’s do everything we can to protect it, and make it better.

Microstory 26: What Does the Fox Want?

While Linda Carnegie was in the middle of setting the table, she looked up and saw a fox staring at her from outside her door. He watched her intently, like he was waiting for an answer to a question asked long ago. She was entranced by him. The patio outside of her apartment was closed off by a fence and thick shrubs, so he would have needed to make a concerted effort to get through it. He couldn’t have just been passing by. He moved his head to one side, which she interpreted to be an invitation. She had no choice but to accept this invitation. It was more of an order, and less of a request. Still in her slippers, she opened the glass door and got down on her hands and knees to crawl through the brush. One of her neighbors was outside waiting, not for Linda, but for the magnificent creature who had already invited him out. The fox started running away, but kept one eye on the two of them, slowing down as needed. The more she followed it, the more urgency she felt. They looked to the right and saw a few of their other neighbors, running after a squirrel. Up ahead, they were closing in on an elderly couple who were following a rabbit that was hopping every once in a while, keeping its dependents moving as fast as they could. As they continued the pursuit, they could see more people, in groups of at least two, each chasing their own animal. The ground shook and they ran faster, until they felt safe enough. Linda turned back and watched as a fiery mid-sized aircraft fell from the sky, and demolished the apartment complex.