Microstory 1296: The Fisherman and His Small Catch

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There once was a humble fisherman who possessed no skills but fishing, no assets but his little hut, and his fishing gear, and no hope for a better tomorrow. He lived day to day, surviving on the catch he made when he went out to the center of the little pond near his home. Over the years, the fisherman noticed his catches were getting smaller and smaller, and the fish themselves were getting smaller too. During one of these times, he caught a very, very small fish—probably the smallest he had ever seen on his line. The tiny fish begged for its life, claiming that the fisherman should throw it back into the water, and wait for it to grow much bigger. The fisherman scoffed, for he felt he was too old and wise to be fooled by such nonsense. “I might as well keep you, because you may be small, but I would rather eat very little tonight than nothing.” But the fisherman was wrong. You see, even though he was the only one who ever fished in that pond, he did it every day, and what he didn’t realize was that he was cleaning it out more and more each time. The fish population was shrinking by the week. Some small fish were meant to be food for the larger fish, but with nothing to eat, these larger fish died before they could lay eggs. The fisherman needed to learn that good things would come to those who wait. A small catch wasn’t better than nothing if he had to put too much effort into it. He was better off being patient, and waiting for something more rewarding…more useful. But the fisherman was not patient, and did not think things through, and he thought he would spend his whole life fishing in this pond without a care in the world. As it turned out, he was the architect of his own demise. He was starving, and near death, before he finally gave up on that pond, and moved somewhere else.

This story was inspired by, and revised from, an Aesop Fable called The Fisherman and the Little Fish.

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: December 2, 2270

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Back in the first timeline that Mateo could remember, which people often referred to as Reality 2—even though there were many before it, and many since—his life was pretty normal. Sure, his family situation was a little different, but no two families are exactly the same, right? There was a period in life before all this time travel business when he was just an average joe who drove a taxi. Taxis were a little different in Topeka than they were in, say, New York or Chicago. They didn’t roam the streets constantly, waiting to be hailed by someone on the sidewalk. If you wanted to be picked up, you pretty much had to call the cab company. If you saw one driving towards you, it either already had a fare, or was on its way to one. Even though Topeka was, by no means, a small town, it was chock full of licensed drivers, and had a decent public transit system, so the taxi customer base was relatively small, and it wasn’t unheard of for a driver to encounter a client they had driven before. Mateo even had a regular.

Depending on how one measures time, Mateo’s experiences as a driver were thousands of years ago, centuries ago, or only around a decade ago. Either way, there were very few things Mateo could recall about his regular client, which perfectly illustrated the point he was trying to make to himself about his present-day life. Since Mateo literally had no one he could talk to about what he knew of Cameo’s past-impending death, his survival of the burden was entirely dependent on internal conflict resolution. So while they were waiting for something to happen in 2270, he was spending a lot of time in his own head, trying to give himself therapy, which was where his taxi years came in.

The client’s name started with an D, or an F. He couldn’t remember which, but to make things easier, he decided he was going to call him Favid for now. So Favid had some sort of medical condition that made it hard for him to work, and made it impossible to drive. It was something he developed after he started his job, so it wasn’t like he had lied to his boss about having reliable transportation. He did, however, technically lie to his boss all the time when he continued to not disclose what was happening with him. The real problem with his case was not just that he needed a ride to work every single day, but also that he worked at multiple locations around the city. At least twice a week, he would be sent to work at a given site in the morning, and then be rerouted somewhere else in the middle of the day, because something came up. As you might imagine, his wasn’t the kind of position that could be held with public transportation. Lots of employers ask a candidate if they have reliable personal transportation without it being necessary, but in this case, it was definitely necessary. What was Favid going to do if not hire Mateo to basically be his personal driver for a month while he searched for a job closer to home? Mateo agreed to it, even though the money was terrible, because he felt it was the right thing to do. If Favid was rich enough to afford a permanent driver, he could have just quit his job anyway, and lived off his savings until he found something that worked better. So Mateo had to essentially take a sabbatical from his own job, and just always be there for him.

Well, sabbatical probably wasn’t the right word, because he was still taking other fares; he was just limited to which ones he could accept. The customer had to be close to where Favid was working that day, and their destination had to be close too. This was at the very beginning of nontraditional ride-sourcing companies that relied on the ubiquity of smartphones to plan routes, and facilitate payment. So it wasn’t impossible for Mateo to know where it was any given customer wanted to go before he offered his services, but it was difficult, and that only added to his financial woes. Still, he was always there for Favid, because he needed the money more than Mateo, and again, it was the right thing to do. He could always rely on his parents to give him a little money for rent, while Favid enjoyed no such safety net.

But this story isn’t about how great of a person Mateo always was, or a way to relate what he did back then with what he did recently when he erased his group’s memories so that they wouldn’t have to interact with a new friend they knew was destined to die. This story is about the conversations Mateo had with Favid. More to the point, it’s about the fact that Mateo could remember that these conversations took place, and could even recall a few details about them, but not the conversations themselves. For every ride, Favid paid partially with actual money, and partially with interesting stories. He would always have a new tale about something that happened to him, whether it be recent, or awhile ago. They were always fascinating, and they always lasted from the moment he crawled into Mateo’s car, to the moment before he stepped out. It was almost as if Favid wrote these up ahead of time, and knew exactly what he was going to say, and how long it was going to take. He was a brilliant storyteller, which is an important characteristic, because it would go on to inform his future.

One day, as they were nearing the end of their business relationship, Mateo asked Favid whether all of these stories were true, or if he was making them up. None of them featured ghosts or aliens, or anything. He could reasonably believe that each individual story really happened to Favid, but combined, they seemed a little improbable. How could one person really have gone through all this? No, they were true. Of course, Mateo had no way of verifying them, except for the one where he found himself in the newspaper, but he still chose to believe it. The real question was how Favid was capable of remembering all these things. Was he embellishing the details, or did he really have such clear images in his head? It was then that Mateo started questioning if his brain was wired differently than other people. He was never a rockstar student, which explained why he was driving a cab, and not running a multi-billion dollar biomedical conglomerate. He hadn’t realized until then, however, that maybe even regular people had better memories. Maybe he was even dumber than he knew.

It occurred to Mateo that he couldn’t remember a single particular conversation in his life. For instance, he had dinner at a restaurant with his parents the other day. What did they talk about? What was one single sentence that Randall said to him? Nothing. If he tried to have a flashback to that hour of his life, the three of them would just be sitting there in silence, smiling at each other, because that was all he knew for sure actually happened. He and Favid were extremely different people, and this idea was only reinforced weeks later—after their special arrangement was long over—when Mateo realized he couldn’t remember any of the stories Favid told him. If someone asked him to regurgitate one of them, or even provide a summary, he would not be able to do it. Those memories were gone. He could tell you the places he took Favid. He could tell you the kind of clothes he wore, and even how long their arrangement lasted. But he couldn’t relive the events themselves, because his brain just didn’t retain that information. Over the years since then, he tried to deliberately prevent himself from forgetting these kinds of things, but it never worked. He continued to lose what he would later learn were called episodic memories; not entirely, like amnesia, but enough to bother him.

Favid went on to work at a public library. Per Mateo’s suggestion, he applied there to no particular job. They actually created a position for him, so that he could use his storytelling skills to regale audiences, both kids and adults alike. Some of his stories were probably the same ones he once told Mateo in the car, but he also started making them up, and adapting stories that could be found in the library, written by someone else. He became a bit of a local celebrity; a very much-loved pillar of the community. He later thanked Mateo profusely for what he did for him; for helping him with rides when he was desperate for help, and also for putting him on his truth path. He wrote a book about his life, which sold pretty well in Topeka, and the surrounding areas. Mateo was in it for about two pages. It was one of the most rewarding times of Mateo’s life, which only made it more frustrating that he couldn’t really remember much from it. He went on to become an unwilling time traveler, and alter history so that none of it even happened. New realities formed to replace the old one, and if Favid still existed in this one, he never knew Mateo, and perhaps never found his true calling, which was an incredibly sad thought. But even this isn’t the point of the story. This story is all about Mateo’s memories, and what he was going to do with them.

According to Nerakali, brain blenders were not capable of erasing their own memories. They could add memories from their alternate lives, but they were not capable of removing them. The way she explained it, erasing memories wasn’t like deleting a file from a computer. A blender had to basically absorb a target’s memory, so that the target no longer had it. The memory has to go somewhere, so if a blender were to try to do it on themselves, all they would be doing is removing the memory from their head, and then putting it right back. That was why Mateo had no hope of forgetting Cameo’s death, and would have to figure out how to deal with him without giving anything away. He took this on himself so that no one else would have to do it, and it would hopefully turn out to be the best decision he ever made, because maybe he didn’t really have to erase his own memories to forget them. After all, his brain wasn’t very good at remembering things anyway. It would always be in the back of his mind, but if his plan worked, he might be able to bury it so deep that it wouldn’t be able to rear its proverbial head, and overwhelm his thoughts.

Through Nerakali’s instruction, he learned how to blend brains. He didn’t reveal to her why he wanted her to teach him how to do this, but she was pleasantly respectful of his wishes, and didn’t ask questions. Once he felt ready, he reached all the way back to the second reality, and found the events he was looking for. He blended his own brain, filling himself with memories of the stories Favid gifted him with. The time he fell into the crocodile pit, and just chilled with them until zookeepers came to the rescue. The time someone in a grocery store parking lot wasn’t looking where they were going, and ran straight into his cart, knocking all his food out, and then just drove off. The time the cops banged on his door in the middle of the night, because they had the wrong address. Mateo could remember it all, and it was so much that he could barely think about what it was he was trying to forget. It might take a few days to have any real results, but he already felt better after the blending was done. He didn’t even scream like other blending people did. That was because he didn’t have any bad memories of Favid. No, his real name wasn’t Favid; that would be stupid. His real name was Erotan Blumenthal, which was so much cooler.

“Are you okay?” Leona asked.

There was probably a big goofy smile on his face. “I’m great.”

“Did you blend your brain with memories of another reality.”

“I did.”

She didn’t say anything, but she was clearly waiting for him to elaborate.

“They’re not relevant. I just wanted to remember something really nice.”

She seemed to understand that he wasn’t ready to clarify, and may never be. She just sat down next to him, and presumably enjoyed her own moment of self-reflection.

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Dardius: Hogarth and Hilde (Part VI)

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The only way Hogarth Pudeyonavic was going to repair the planet-hopping machine called the Nexus replica, and make it back to Dardius, was to study a working version of the machine. They were rare, though. The first one created in this universe was thought to have been built by a special choosing one named Baudin Murdoch; also known as The Constructor. This turned out to be untrue, however. No one actually knew where they came from. They were always just discovered on a planet, and there seemed to only be six total.

The question now was where they would go to study one of these Nexus replicas. The one on Dardius was out of the question, of course, because if they could get there, all their problems would have been solved anyway. That only left four possibilities, one of which was rumored to be extremely dangerous, and they didn’t know where it was in normal space anyway, so that wasn’t that helpful. Earth, Gatewood, or Durus. Hogarth had to pick one out of these three to travel to. She didn’t know anything about the Earth Nexus replica. She didn’t know where it was, or who was in control of it, or what. Gatewood was technically the closest of all, but only by a small margin, and if Hogarth was successful with her plan, that probably didn’t matter much. She and Hilde had been to Durus a couple times, and each time was a unique experience. All signs suggested that things were a lot better there than before, and even with the bureaucracy, whoever was now in charge was the most likely to be willing to help them. It wasn’t a certainty, but they were better off taking  a chance on them than anywhere else.

“How far is it?” Hilde asked as she was standing just outside the chamber.

“From here? Roughly eighteen-point-four light years.” Though Durus was once a rogue planet of unknown origins, it somewhat recently found itself attached to a star system called 70 Ophiuchi, which was about sixteen and a half light years from Earth, and enjoyed no terrestrial planets of its own.

“This thing can take us there?”

“I don’t see why not,” Hogarth replied.

“It’s a teleporter,” Hilde began to argue. “It can definitely take passengers to the other side of the planet, but that doesn’t mean it can go farther than. My car was never able to travel to the stars.”

“True,” Hogarth agreed, “but your car didn’t have this.” She stuck her hand outside the chamber, and shook it around. “Or this.” She pulled her hand back in, and returned to shake something else at her.

“I don’t know what those are.”

“The first one is a power cell from the Nexus replica. Most of them were damaged beyond repair, but this one is more or less intact. It should give us the boost we need to make one jump.”

“It should?”

“The second one is a navigational module. I don’t technically need it, since I can find out exactly where Seventy Ophiuchi is, but I might as well use it since the calculations have already been done for me.”

“If you put find a way to put those things in this teleportation machine that Pribadium built, then why do you even need to repair the Nexus at all?”

Hogarth climbed out of the access panel, and stepped over to hunt for a particular tool in her box. “First of all, it’s not a Nexus; it’s a Nexus replica.”

“Why do people keep calling it that? Where are the original Nexuses?”

“Nexa,” Hogarth corrected again. “The real Nexa were built in another universe. These just look like them, but they used this universe’s physical laws.”

“Another universe?” Hilde questioned. “You mean a fictional universe.”

“Way I hear it, it ain’t so fictional. Anyway, to answer your question, I still need to fix the Nexus replica. This one is too small, and it’s unique. I’ll be able to jump to Durus, but I’ll have no way to jump back. Pribadium never created a retrieval function, and she obviously didn’t build a companion on the other side.”

“Okay, but...” Hilde began, “don’t we have to jump back anyway? We have to come back here to repair this one.”

“Well, that’s not really what I meant. That’s one reason I’m choosing to go to Durus. I know there will be someone there who can help us come back, but it won’t be a permanent solution. The Nexus replica is.”

“Are you sure we should do this? I’m not convinced the Nexus replica needs to be repaired. I mean, who is using them? Who, for instance, both needs to instantaneously travel from Gatewood to Glisnia, and is allowed to?”

“That’s not my call,” Hogarth said. “Someone thought it should be a possibility, and I’m honoring that by fixing what broke.”

“Someone,” Hilde reiterated. “We don’t know who it was, or why they did it. Maybe it’s part of an alien invasion, or uh...a time invasion. We just don’t know. You’re presuming benevolence with no evidence.”

“I choose to believe,” Hogarth said as she was crawling back into the access panel.

“I think I know what this is.”

“What what is?”

“You don’t like to feel useless. This has always been your problem. You gotta keep moving, like a shark. I never could get you to relax, and think things through.”

“Well, when you can literally explode at any time, and be unwillingly transported anywhere in time and space, you don’t really have the luxury of being cautious. If I see an opportunity, I have to take it, because there’s no guarantee I’ll be able to change my mind tomorrow.”

“Well, maybe you could slow down now. You said your explosive time power-slash-affliction thing is gone.”

“I said I feel like it’s gone. I don’t know for sure. That’s why I never let you out of my sight. I can’t risk leaving you behind, not even now.” She worked in silence for a moment. “There.”

“It’s done?” Hilde asked. “That seems fast.”

It did seem fast, but it wasn’t difficult at all for Hogarth to adapt the few parts she salvaged from the Nexus replica wreckage to the teleporter Pribadium that invented a few years ago from scratch. It was pleasantly intuitive. What Pribadium built, and how she built it, made so much sense—and so elegantly exploited known properties of physics—that it was actually shocking no one had invented time travel before her. Hogarth was finished in a day. It should have taken weeks. “Yes. Are you okay doing this? Maybe you’re right, and we could survive being separated for a little bit. You don’t have to come with me if you don’t want to.”

“No. We’re a package deal. I’m in.”

“All right. Let’s get packed up. Proverbial wheels up proverbially in five.”

By the time Hilde was finished making sure they had enough provisions to survive something going wrong, Hogarth was already looking through the system at the interface terminal. “What is it?”

“There’s something funny here,” Hogarth answered.

Hilde didn’t bother asking for an explanation. She wouldn’t understand it, even at its dumbed-down level, so she just waited for her wife to figure out what she needed to on her own.

“I’m looking at the navigation, and there’s something here that wasn’t there before,” Hogarth went on. “Or maybe we just couldn’t see it while it was still hooked up to the replica.”

“You mean, like, an extra location?”

Hogarth tilted her head a little as she was looking through the data. “More like an extra set of locations. There’s a hidden partition here. I mean, it’s not a partition, since it’s not a disk, but you know what I mean.”

“No, I have no idea what you’re talking about, Piglet.”

“Oh my god.” Hogarth stopped and turned to Hilde. She held one fist up in front of her. “Imagine this is a hard drive. There’s data on it, and we can read that data, because that’s what it’s designed to let us do. She placed her other fist next to the first one. “This is like a hidden section of data that we couldn’t read before, because they’re not even connected to each other.” She shook her fists to illustrate the space between them. “When this thing was hooked up to the Nexus replica, you could only see the first section, because there was a physical separation between them. Basically, Hilde, I screwed up when I adapted it to Pribadium’s machine. I...I hooked it up wrong, and it gave us access to all this new information.”

“What does that mean?”

She pulled up a cosmic map, which showed dozens of destinations that weren’t there before. “It means there are a lot more Nexus replicas out there. This is still just a fraction of them. We may even be able to reach the original network...ya know, the one that’s in a different universe?”

“Are we going to do that?”

Hogarth revealed a sinister smile, and pointed at one of the destinations. “No, we’re going to go here. This was hidden behind a virtual protective layer of its own. I think it’s the origin of the replicas. That’s where we’re going to find what we need. Durus doesn’t have to be involved at all.”

“If you think it’s safe enough...I’m down.”

“Let’s go.”

Hogarth queried the destination, confirmed the power requirements, and set the timer. Then she and Hilde stepped into the transportation chamber, and waited for the countdown to be complete. Ten seconds later, they were standing in a Nexus pit, be it a replica, or a real one; Hogarth could not yet be sure.

Hilde looked around, but didn’t move. “Are we okay?”

“You’re okay,” came a voice from a dark corner. A figure stepped forward. “How did you get here?”

“We found the hidden partition,” Hogarth explained.

The woman stared at her a moment. “Oh,” she realized. She didn’t seem too terribly impressed. “Okay.”

“Where are we?” Hilde asked her.

“This is my workshop. You didn’t ring the doorbell.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I’m kidding, it’s fine. I’ve not had visitors in...a couple million years, probably.”

“How are you that old?” a wide-eyed Hilde questioned.

“Old?” the woman asked. She laughed for a good solid minute. “Honey, someone who’s only a couple million years old would be, like, a week old in my terms. You two have been alive for, what, ten seconds? Ya got about ten left.”

“My name is Hogarth Pudeyonavic.”

“That’s a mouthful.”

“This is my wife, Hilde Unger.”

“It’s nice to meet you. I’m Engineer Azure Vose.”

“Engineer? You engineered the Nexus replicas,” Hogarth guessed.”

“Yes, well, we automated the process in my home universe, so it just seemed like more fun to move on to somewhere else.”

“Two of ours were destroyed, at least. One was repaired, but the other still needs it.”

Azure shook her head at medium speed. “They’ve all been destroyed.”

Hogarth was surprised. “What?”

“Come on,” Azure said. “You’re time travelers, right? Everything that will inevitably be already is right now, and already was a long time ago, and won’t be for awhile? They all get destroyed at some point...multiple times, actually. There’s no such thing as the present, so I repair them now, or later; in the grand scheme of things, it doesn’t really matter.”

“It matters to us. We need it repaired now, in case someone needs to use it soon. And by soon, I mean from the time it was destroyed, onwards, as perceived through linear time.”

“Well, where do you wanna go?” Azure asked. “I will send you wherever you want, to do whatever you want, and then I will go back to whichever replica you’re talking about, and do whatever I want with it, whenever I feel like it.”

Hogarth wanted to argue more, but Hilde could tell it wasn’t going to do any good. She was ripped from her life before she had the chance to go to college, so she didn’t understand a lot of this stuff, but one thing she was always good at was math. She wasn’t able to make a full calculation, but she could come to a decent enough estimate. This Azure Vose person was claiming to be billions of years old. In fact, she seemed to be more than twice Vitalie’s age, which was already insanely old. This wasn’t the kind of person you messed with. If she made a decision, you just kinda had to accept it. “We were hoping to get to a planet called Dardius. It’s in a galaxy called Andromeda Twenty-One, but the natives call it Miridir.”

“Oh yeah,” Azure said. “I know what you’re talking about; I can do that.”

Hogarth still wouldn’t let it go, so Hilde had to interrupt her yet again. “November 25, 2263, by the Earthan calendar. That would be great.”

Azure started walking towards the control room. “All right. Give me a minute. You’re lucky. The original Nexa can’t travel through time. Well...except occasionally, when the story calls for a time adventure.”

“What?” Hilde asked.

“Don’t worry about it.”

“Wait,” Hogarth said. She didn’t let Hilde stop her this time. “I have so many questions...about so many things.”

Azure smiled sincerely. “The answer is yes; this is my natural hair color.” She winked, and slipped through the doorway.

A minute later, they were back on Tribulation Island. Pribadium, Cassidy, and two Vitalies were already there. A woman walked in and introduced herself as Meliora Rutherford Delaney-Reaver. Then she escorted them halfway across the world.

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Microstory 1295: The Birds and the Seeds

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An eclectic colony of birds was once hopping about the ground, pecking at the seeds that lay in the soil. This was a great place for them to live, for there was always plenty of food around, and the humans who tended the crops did not pay them any mind. They just kept hopping joyfully, and partaking in the seeds. “Careful,” said one of the birds to the others. She was a raven, which meant she was a little bit smarter than all the others. “Those brown ones there; those are hemp seeds. Be sure to pick up every single one, or you will be sorry later.” When they asked her why it was so important they take all of those particular seeds, she replied, “hemp is a very important plant for the humans. They make many things out of them, but what we’re most worried about are the nets. Other humans will use these nets to catch the birds.” The other birds heeded the raven’s warning, and did not leave one single hemp seed on the ground. Months later, however, the birds found themselves being swept up in a hemp net. They asked for the raven to explain, but she did not understand. “The humans should not have been able to make any hemp ropes without the seeds to grow the plants,” she said. “This shouldn’t be possible.”

The crow was even smarter than the raven; so much so that she did not get caught in the net at all. She landed next to the poor birds, and said one thing before she flew away. “These are not the only hemp plants in the world. Danger lurks everywhere.”

This story was inspired by, and revised from, an Aesop Fable called The Swallow and the Other Birds.

Microstory 1294: The Flies and the Gnats

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A business of flies was so tired of having to hunt for food. They wanted to find a consistent and endless supply of resources, without having to work for it. Meanwhile, a cloud of gnats would scold them for thinking this way. “You should want to work for your food,” the gnats would say. “You will feel better for it.” But the flies were not convinced. They knew there was something else out there, so they sent scouts out to the unknown lands, in search of exactly what they were looking for. Finally, they found it in the form of a dumpster behind a restaurant. This was where the business of flies decided to live. The restaurant always dumped their leftovers at the end of the night, without fail, and it was always full of tasty treats. This went on for generations to come. The gnats, on the other hand, continued to travel from house to house. Whenever they exhausted the resources they had found there, there was nothing else they could do but move on to the next. Some houses were kept cleaning, and were no good. One night, the cloud thought it had discovered a great source of honey. “This is amazing,” the said. “We worked hard, and did not give up, and this is our reward.” But the honey was a trap...literally. While they were busy applauding themselves for their work ethic, a human came by and sucked them all up into a vacuum cleaner.

This story was inspired by, and revised from, an Aesop Fable called The Flies and the Honeypot.

Microstory 1293: The Predators and Their Spoils

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A tiger, a wolverine, a hyena, and a black bear once became a hunting party. They decided to join forces, so no prey would be able to escape their grasp. The tiger was sort of considered their leader, even though the team-up was more or less the wolverine’s idea. The tiger was the largest, and this was her territory, so she determined which animals they were going to go after, and what strategy they would use to catch them. Though they were hunting together, they were not eating together. The general rule was that each predator still got to keep for themselves whatever they caught, just as it would be if they were operating separately. They really just stuck together to instill more fear in their targets, so it would be easier to take them down. This seemed to have a side effect, however, when they eventually found that the animals figured out how to steer clear of this fearsome four. They learned how the the predator group hunted, and more importantly, how to avoid them. This quite nearly caused the group to disband, and head their separate ways, but the black bear had an idea. All they needed to do was travel north, to a land where the animals knew nothing about them. They needed to regain their element of surprise. This seemed like a good idea, so they packed up, and moved out. What the black bear failed to mention, however, was that there were fewer animals in the north, because it was always sparsely populated. They continued to struggle to find food, until one day when the hyena was able to run down a moose who had been drinking by a stream. It was quite large, but it was also alone, so if they followed their own rules, only the hyena would get to eat. “We can change the rules,” the tiger said after a long pause in the argument about it. “We are the ones that made them up, after all! We shall divide the moose into four equal parts; one for each of us.” And so they did, and it was fair, and they were full.

This story was inspired by, and revised from, an Aesop Fable called The Lion’s Share.

Microstory 1292: The Coney and Her Ears

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A lion was trying to eat the meat of a goat he had captured when the goat’s horns scratched his face up. One of them nearly took out his eye when he leaned over, and this angered the lion greatly. Not wanting to risk anything like this happening again, the lion stood on top of his proclamation rock, and proclaimed that all animals with horns of any kind will be banished from the lands. Anyone fitting the description was required to leave within one day. Now, of course the coney did not have horns, but she did have long ears on top of her head, which the lion might take offense to. She could not sleep that not for fear of the lion becoming angry with her for staying. He did say that anyone with horns of any kind should leave; perhaps her tall ears were close enough. When she stepped out of her hole the following morning, the sun’s light fell upon her head, and cast a long shadow on the ground before her, making her ears look even larger than they normally did. She even convinced herself that they were horn-like. Now she was certain that it wasn’t worth the risk to stick around. She was so upset about having to move, but she did not want to suffer the lion’s wrath. He was such a fearsome creature, and she was such a little thing. “Goodbye,” she said to all her friends. “I do not want to go, but I have no other choice.”

“Good for you,” said the badger.

“How is this good?” the coney asked.

“Why, all the horned animals are looking at this development the wrong way,” the badger tried to explain. “Sure, you have to move, but you should be happier than anyone. After all, you’re not supposed to want to be eaten by a predator. It is the rest of us who must continue to live in fear.”

This story was inspired by, and revised from, an Aesop Fable called The Hare and His Ears.

Microstory 1291: The Rooster and the Wolf

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A wolf was walking through the woods when he came upon a farm. He was so hungry, and hadn’t found food in days, so he thought this was the perfect spot. Unfortunately, the farmer had placed traps on the edge of his property, and one of them caught the wolf before he was able to even get close. This was very early in the morning, so only the rooster was awake, patrolling the grounds. When the wolf saw him approach, he knew he had to come up with a story. If he freely admitted his intentions, the rooster would cause a ruckus, and the wolf would surely be done for. So he spun a lie about how he hadn’t even noticed the farm, that he was just passing by on his way to a watering hole, and that he had no plans to harm anyone there. As convincing as the wolf was, the rooster knew that he was lying. He did what he believed to be his job, and woke the whole farm, particularly the farmer. Well, the wolf, knowing this would be the end of him if he didn’t do something, focused all of his attention on the line he was tied up in, and gnawed it apart as quickly as he could. He didn’t make it into the treeline before the farmer managed to fire his shotgun, though, and hit him with a couple shots. It wasn’t enough to kill him, but it did damage his right ear enough to cause permanent hearing loss. And that was enough to anger him greatly. Yes, the wolf was indeed planning to invade the farm, and take some chickens. But he wasn’t going to be greedy about it. Now things were different. Now he had a vendetta, and he felt that he had no choice but to make things so much worse at the farm. At the time, he was a lone wolf, but that didn’t mean he was an omega, or that other wolves wouldn’t help him. So he gathered up all the others he could find in the area, and galvanized them into warriors. Then they attacked the farm together, and killed nearly everything there. But they left the rooster alive.

This story was inspired by, and revised from, an Aesop Fable called The Cock and the Fox.