Tag Archives: modern antifables

July 4, 2013 · 4:00 pm

The Sun and The Mountain Stream

The morning sun, blazing in a clear, blue sky, pieced the mountain stream, all the way to the rocky bottom. It shone its white, wavery lines into the cold, silver water.

The water in the mountain stream rushed away, down the mountain slope, crashed over the rocks and disappeared around a corner, running deep along the edge of a rocky cliff where the sun didn’t shine.

“What?” said the sun. “Did I say something wrong?”

The water ran dark and strong, saying nothing.

“I was just trying to help with a little advice,” said the sun.

“It didn’t help,” murmured the stream.

“It’s been ten years!” said the sun angrily, “Don’t you think it’s time to get over it. You have tributaries now, and you need to calm down, take life seriously, do what you need to do, for them.”

The water ran deeper now, dark and grey, along a stretch of the stream where both sides of the canyon rose up steeply and cast a dark shade over the whole of it.

The sun threw up his hands in frustration.

The water ran deeper now, within herself.

“It was good advice!” said the sun, “If she could just understand it.”

“It is a deep hurt!” said the water, “If he could just feel it.”

A cloud passed in front of the sun. The rays disappeared from the stream, even where it ran out into the open.

The sun darkened. The water darkened. Dark cried out to dark, and deep cried out to deep.

Then the sun, without a word, wrapped dark arms around the dark stream, and the stream reached up and hugged the sun, and then there was deep and quiet calm.

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June 26, 2013 · 2:53 am

The Gazelle Who Married a Lion

Once their was a gazelle who married a lion. She met him when she found him in a field beaten near to death by a local pride. Right away she saw that he needed her.

She nursed him back to health, and then she fell in love with him. She told her gazelle girlfriends, “I just love taking care of sick things!” But she also liked the lion because he was fierce, wild and beautiful. He was indeed amazing: he was also an addict. He was addicted to running things down and killing them, not just for food, but for sport.

They made a home together. The hunted together. They had a family.

One night the lion came home from an unsuccessful hunt. He was angry. They argued. He mauled her. The wounded gazelle left the next day. Her girlfriends told her to never go back, but she did, and she took her gazelle-cubs back with her.

Things were good again for some time. Then her fierce lion love attacked one of her cubs. She left that night.

A week later she went back. She was lonely. She was out of food. And she told her girlfriends that the incident was her fault. She had made him mad. Moreover, he had apologized to her and told her how much he needed her.

When the gazelle got home, the lion promised it would never happen again. The next day, he ran her down in an open field and ate her.

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June 12, 2013 · 2:14 am

The Corvette and the Peach

Once day a Corvette was on its way to hangout with family and friends when it looked up at a billboard and fell in love with a peach.

It was the most perfectly fresh peach that one could ever imagined. Even going by at speed, the Corvette could see its soft fuzz. A small slice had been taken from it and was lying at the front of the billboard. The Vette could see the sweet moist flesh, perfectly ripe, red and yellow — totally gorgeous!

“I love that peach!” said the Corvette, and veering off the freeway at the next offramp, it made its way back through the city streets to find the billboard peach. And then there she was!

The Corvette parked, turned off its engine, turned on the radio and settled in to flirt, joke, adore and enjoy some superfun.

Six months later the sign company came and took down the billboard and put up a picture of a bottle of Coke. They had to ask the Vette to move to get in close enough to do their work.

“What happened to my peach?” said the Corvette as workers left.

“I think they must have all sold all the ones they had in stock,” said the workmen.

Then the Corvette hung its head, drove away through the city streets, hopped on the freeway and headed up to the house.

When it got there, no one was home.

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May 29, 2013 · 5:48 pm

Naked

He came to church in his three-piece suit, fitted, stylin’, stood on the platform with a wireless mic at his cheek, iPad in hand and soliloquized!

He was eloquent! It was beautiful! Totally inspiring! The thousands of people who heard him went home raving!

Once the sermon was put on the church website, there were thousands of hits within a few days! Word got out.

“He rocked it! That was so inspiring”

There was another man who came to that church the same Sunday and stood in the back with a skirt on. Then dropped it. Then he took off his shirt. He was totally naked in church.

A greeter rushed over to help, a friend came down from the balcony to assist, his step-mom, seated besides him, immediately turned her attention to him, as if to a small child. They got his clothes back on. Very few people actually saw it; those who did, helped redress him.

No one involved said anything; they simply covered him, and walked out of the church with him and his step-mom at the end of the service.

A visitor, who had seen both the three-piece man and the naked man that day, said to his friend leaving church with him, “I’ll be back next week.”

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March 27, 2013 · 3:36 pm

The Love Marriage

Once there was a woman living in Hyderabad who thought winged and feathered thoughts immeasurably fast.

If you asked her how she felt, she would apprehend her interiority as fast as instant curried rice. “I felt sad at precisely 9:14 am yesterday and it lasted ten minutes. I felt ebullient at 3:10 today, immediately following my first Chai. I will be feeling about 93.3 % maniacal tomorrow at 7:05 pm when I ride the elevator down to the parking lot after work.”

If you asked her what she thought about something, anything, she told you instantly.

“I think that the partition was a horrific rejection of community. I think that Indian women should demand what they want and believe that they deserve it! I think that everyone should fly somewhere far away at least twice per year.”

Her parents arranged her marriage, as had been the custom in her family for generations, and thus it came to pass, that decked out in gold, one Saturday evening during a monsoon, she married a nice Indian man.

He was known in both his family and hers to always think turtlish and carapaced thoughts immeasurably slowly. The families thought him solid.

During their first year of marriage, as with all couples everywhere, they kissed and they missed. During their second year, they began to list, then to subsist.

If she asked him, “How do you feel?” he would say, “I don’t know.” If she gave him a week to figure it out, he still didn’t know.

If she gave him a year, he would muse philosophically and pause for a bit pacifistically, like Ashoka, and come up with nothing that she considered to be a good come-back.

One day, after a cup of Darjeeling at a sea-facing terrace in Goa, he did hold forth.

“Violence stems from poverty, inequality and addiction,” he said, “and mostly from the lack of love.” She was astonished.

He was silent a while then spoke again.

“Women,” he said, “might do well if they continued to nurture others while yet leaving them alone from time to time and moving forward with their unique interests and goals.”

“Well and good,” she said. “Now that I’ve got you talking, let’s get to the bleeding heart of the matter. What is going on inside of you right now? Tell me about your feelings Tell me how you feel. Today, I felt moody, happy, quizzical, intense and relieved. How do you feel? How do you feel about me? I’m worried, frustrated, anxious and concerned about you. Your turn. How are you feeling this instant about me?”

He looked at her, started to speak then stopped and rubbed his chin.

“I feel …” He began, but he couldn’t get there and so he paused.

“For God sake,” she said, “Say anything.”

“I can’t think when you are pressuring me,” he said.

“I don’t want to know what you think,” she said, “Tell me what you feel. Just spit it out!” She paused for a sip of tea.

“I feel … I feel … I feel … a deep love for both of our families,” he blurted out and looked down.

They raised 3.1 children, enjoyed six grand children, and lived to hold three great-grandchildren.

In the end, everyone said about their marriage that it was a model of true love and devotion, despite the well-known laugh the families often had at gatherings over the fact that in sixty years of marriage he never said anything.

At her funeral, her sister said, “Her sweet husband never did get a word in edge wise or even on an angle, except that one time when she paused for a sip of tea.”

And everyone who knew them well laughed.

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February 25, 2013 · 5:47 pm

Framed

Once upon a time, in a very near land, a group of framers came into bitter conflict with a group of anti-framers.

The framers insisted that everything be framed. They like a sense of line, of border, of box, of defined space, of in and out, of this side and that, of boundary and partition.

Their hero was the man in the frame, splendid in his uniform. His shoulders were squared, his beard trimmed, his eyes fixed and unblinking, his medal in perfect position on his chest, his decorative frame ornate, the glass that covered him clean and bright.

The anti-framers didn’t. They didn’t like a man enclosed, a line that separates, a sense of edge, a covering of glass. They didn’t much care for a one-thing-in and a one-thing-out, a sense of separation in the world. They liked a migration here, a movement over there, an uncaged land, a blurred edge, an open space.

Their hero was a woman in a field, her dress askew, her eyes half-closed, her mouth smiling, her body in motion, jumping over a fence, her arms spread wide like wings, her hair out-flowing in the wind.

And so the groups drew up battle lines, and took their stands, the “This-is-the-way-it-is!” and the “What, are you kidding me?” kind of thing. “We like a frame!” proclaimed one side emphatically, “We hate a frame!” wrote back the other defiantly.

And then one day it happened, what no one at all thought was possible. The man in the frame jumped out, and ran hard for the edge, and crossing it ripped off his medal, and flung it in the grass and tearing off his uniform ran like crazy across an open space and disappeared into a hazy horizon. Boom, he was gone, and everyone was stunned.

The Framers were aghast! They vilified him greatly, and took his empty frame down off their wall.

The Anti-framers were cool about it all and gathered in huddles and said it was no big deal, that it was no one’s business what the man in the frame did or didn’t do, and that he could have his medal back if he wanted, or not, as the case might be.

And then, it happened again, or something nearly like it.

The woman who was jumping over the fence, landed on the other side, looked back, and standing very still seemed deep in thought. Then she pulled herself together and stepping resolutely back across the fence, she walked slowly straight into a frame. She stopped there, in the center of the square, and buttoning the top button on her dress, and pulling her hair back, her wry smile transformed into a look of sudden relief.

The Framers cheered, and gathered around her frame to show support.

The Anti-Framers?

They couldn’t believe their eyes, and proceeded to vilify her greatly for her betrayal, and they attacked her with new rigor, railing at her chosen lines, her new found border and her protective glass.

These two events had a profound effect upon the land. The Framers went to work and drew up tomes of law and rule, they codified and rigidified and recruited too.

The Anti-Framers did the exactly the same, and grew increasingly adroit at systematically and methodically deframing the land.

And so it went until the world was completely divided into the framed and unframed, and the sides filled up, and the battle lines were drawn, and then the thing that hadn’t happened yet — it happened.

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February 18, 2013 · 5:32 pm

Dreaming of Beautiful Fish

One day, a man had a dream that he went fishing in a deep lake. The water was dark, green and beautiful.

He fished alone with an old pole he knew well.

He put on a small lure, plain and simple and ran it deep. In the first pass he took a heavy fish. The fish ran hard under the water, pulling his pole down, then broke the surface with a splash.

He waited for another run, the thrill of the fight, but the fish had given up, and he pulled it to the bank.

It lay in front of him, beautiful and quiet. Very gently took it up and removed the hook from its soft, red mouth.

It was a dark green fish with a perfect red mouth and a perfectly symmetrical pattern of vertical black stripes. It was long, healthy, fresh and so very finely demure. He looked down and thought how beautiful it was.

Then the fish looked up at him and said softly but so very clearly, “We are here.”

And he threw his lure back in the deep pool to fish again.

Then the old man awoke, and thoughts ran in his mind, and rising from his bed, he said to all the world, “Together we might fish like that for people and for their beautiful children, trolling deep, and throwing back in, and in doing so we may catch more beautiful ones as well.”

And then exiting his bedroom, he stopped and paused and said to know one in particular but to everyone in specific, “Come fishing with me.”

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February 12, 2013 · 6:03 am

The Woman Who Took Pretty Good Care of Herself

Once within the once of the very essential once, there existed a nice-enough young woman who, after she had given birth to a beautiful baby, liked it so deliciously and lip-smackingly much, that she decided immediately to have another one.

Her boyfriend didn’t seem to mind at all.

She noticed that the superlative thing about having babies lay in how it changed the basic way other people treated you.

She had grown up in the middle of war, a twenty-year pitched battle between her mom and step-dad, but after she was pregnant the world seemed to still and calm around her, as if she were in the eye of a storm, and she felt more normal than she had ever felt in her life.

She had never been one that anyone took particular notice of, even her boyfriend, but pregnant, the kid who sacked her groceries in the supermarket insisted that he help her shopping-cart her goods out to the car. The ladies where she had her nails done wanted to touch her tummy, and her boyfriend quit asking her to do drugs with him.

The rounder she grew, the better it got. Random people would smile at her across a room; women she didn’t even know would approach her and ask when she was due. And men were particularly appropriate around her, and kept their distance better. Other moms came over for coffee and told her their birthing stories. She told hers.

And then there was the sitting time, when she was nursing, and pregnant again, just sitting, with no one expecting anything from her except that she, “Take it easy.”  In the evening when she and her boyfriend were watching TV, and she was holding the baby, she could even ask him to get her a snack, and he would get it! Babies made him a better man. They made her a better woman.

Sometime during her third pregnancy her boyfriend’s addictions worsened and he stopped working. But she noticed almost without thinking about it that this turned out well for her also. Now he was around more to help with the little ones.

After her fifth baby, she received government housing and food stamps and she and her boyfriend ate well and were happy and got a truck and settled into life, except when he would leave for a week only to return home and sleep for another week. Then they would fight, like her parents had taught her, viciously, and she hated him.

“You stupid drug addict!” she screamed. “You don’t think about anybody but yourself. You are the most irresponsible person I have ever known!”

When she had her sixth baby her own family pretty much stopped coming by. But that meant less stress, because they were always implying, with this or that remark, that she wasn’t doing something right or that she might be doing this or that wrong. During her seventh pregnancy she didn’t even tell them she was having a baby. At least her boyfriend remained loyal to her.

After her ninth baby, she swore she was done.

After her twelfth, she knew she was done.

After her eighteenth she was done.

But, upon giving birth to her twenty-fifth child, she knew she wasn’t.

It still felt normal to her.

Upon bearing her thirtieth child she took an oath to quit, and she told her boyfriend, in one of her everyday fits of rage, “I hope that you die at work!” He was working again. She didn’t like that.

That was the year that her boyfriend disappeared.

After popping out her thirty-fourth baby she swore off having them forever, although she knew that it would be a fight, and she had her tubes tied.

But by then the whole baby thing had become impossible, and she had no choice but to turn the lot of them over to the foster care system; although she kept the youngest one to hold and nurse, and she also kept a few of the older ones to help her cook, do the dishes and go to the grocery store. In his manner, she was able to maintain the life-style she was accustomed to, her sitting time and her exquisite and delicious sense of normality. She was at peace with the world.

She lived on, and then on, and on, and then on some more, eventually to the ripe-melon old age of ninety-eight, and by the time of her death she had the distinction of having three hundred seventeen grandchildren and one-hundred eighty-nine great-grandchildren.

To the very end, she looked rather good, considering her usage and her age, and at her somewhat unattended memorial service, her friends who knew her well, remarked quite nicely on her.

One stood up and with much approval from the people gathered in the church, noted wisely that “Her riches were in her children, and in her many grandchildren, and great-grandchildren.”

Another said this, to sum her up, and got it quite right, “All things considered, she did a pretty good job of taking care of herself.”

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February 12, 2013 · 1:53 am

The Cowboy and The Commandments

One day a large, particularly well-scrubbed cowboy walked into a church with a six-gun swagger, leaned over the raised partition of the desk of the lovely office manager and demanded, “Repeat the two most important commandments!”

The office manager rolled her chair back, looked over her shoulder to see if the cavalry might be riding in from the behind her, and seeing no one, did a quick check to see if the front of her desk was high enough to prevent a rodeo trick.

The big white hat then said loudly,“You shall love the LORD your God with all your might, all your soul and all your strength, and you shall love your neighbor as yourself!”

He paused for effect and asked dourly,”Don’t you know the commandments?”

Then the cowboy leaned further toward her over the desk and asked for a gas card.

In precisely that moment, the pastor came from the back to say that the church wouldn’t be giving out any gas cards to men in cowboy hats who could quote the commandments.

“What kind of Christians are you?” asked the cowboy incredulously.

“We are the kind who don’t give away gas cards,” said the pastor.

“No, you are the kind that will rot in hell!” said the cowboy.

“Are you freakin’ kidding me,” said the pastor, “we’re Baptists!”

“Hell was created for Baptists!” yelled the cowboy. “Because they don’t help anybody!”

“Actually, I have  thought of that possibility,” said the pastor. “We are so messed up here! You wouldn’t believe what we refuse to do for people. We refuse to pay their cell phone bills!”

With that, the cowboy turned abruptly on the heels of his shiny cowboy boots and blasted out of the office door.

“Pray, for us!” yelled the pastor to the large white hat as it floated away from him across the parking lot and headed straight toward a fullsized, late-model black and chrome truck.

Then, just as the office door had almost closed, the pastor and the office manager thought they saw the cowboy throw one of his hands in the air as if to worship — or perhaps not.

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