When he was only four years old he ate a box, and then went around sorting everything. His mother didn’t like it, and told him to eat his vegetables.
When he was ten, he ate a bicycle. It tasted good. At night he had dreams of going fast.
When he was fourteen, his mother took him into her bedroom and made him eat an improvised explosive device. She swore him to tell no one. He told no one.
When he was sixteen he ate a school bus. It was empty; it took a while. Afterward he thought about a career helping people.
When he was twenty-one his father made him eat a squirrel. After that he was prone to spite, very much like his father.
Then both of his parents died, of cancer. He inherited money, and a house.
When he was twenty-eight, he completed a Masters degree in sociology.
At thirty he was engaged to be married. It fell apart; he broke it off. Then he made several bad financial decisions and lost all of the money he had inherited from his father.
At thirty-two, with not prospects in sight for family or career, he concluded that he was a failure. He was angry, lost, alone.
He struggle along doing this and that, and then at thirty-five, unexpectedly, he found a bight star in the morning sky, and ate it.
After that, he immediately started a nonprofit for children. The vision, the theme, the driver — it was children helping children. He was good at this, at establishing vision, at setting up the infrastructure of the nonprofit, at putting the pieces in place, not at relationships, but he was smart enough to hire people for that. It went well. Children were helped.
Then at forty-one, stuggling with lonliness, he went to therapy and tried to make sense of everything that had happened to him.
He wasn’t able to actually figure it out, but one thing stood out, one moment with the therapist. It was just after he told her about his mom, about the IED, and his dad, about the squirrel, when she looked at him incredulously and said, “Amazing. You are amazing.”
“Why,” he asked.
“Because you” she said looking him intensely in the eyes, “You ate a bus!”
Modern Fables and Antifables 
The Lioness
When the lioness first became an marriage and family therapist, she set up her practice in a game reserve to serve the myriad of traumatized animals there. She rented an office and invited all the species in the reserve to come see her for therapy.
She had gone to a good school, and she was naturally gifted with insight. Her first clients observed this, and benefitting from their time with her, quickly spread the word about her skills.
By the end if the first day, several different kinds of animals — water buffalo, deer, wart hogs and rhinos — had come to see the lioness, and many others had made appointments.
That evening, being hungry from a hard days work, she went outside the game park and attempted to run down an antelope for dinner, that being her way , as a lioness. She was unsuccessful, and the terrified antelope got away.
The next day she was startled to find that many of her counseling appointments called on the phone and canceled.
In fact it was the case that no antelope, nor for that matter any of the animals in the area, besides the other lions, ever came to her for therapy again, and eventually her career failed, and she went into another line of work.
She became a safari guide for big game hunters.
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Tagged as a commentary on perception, a fable about discrimination, a fable about therapy, an antifable about lhealthy leadership, An antifable about politics, antifable, modern antifables, randy hasper