The guppies in the creek swam around happily unaware of the changes - until they started dying. Then they were alarmed and confused. Then they got used to it and were happy again, adjusting the number of children they had to compensate for the decreased average life span.
Once upon a time there was a little frog who hated air conditioning: it made his skin dry, which in turn made him itchy, finally resulting in him being unable to concentrate on anything or get a good nights sleep. He tried for weeks but was unable to find a way out of the air conditioned room. His goal changed from escape to improving his situation without leaving the room.
In looking for an exit, he had come across a bottle of moisturizer. “Now where was that?” He thought. “Let’s see, there was a towel…and, …um, tiles…” He was thinking of the bathroom.
He hopped across the various power cords and dirty plates that crowded the floor, and under the stinking laundry that marked the entrance to the bathroom, up upon the porcelain mountain of the toilet, still further into the sink, past the electric toothbrush and soap, and stretched up on his hind legs and just barely managed to open the medicine cabinet.
“Ah!, there it is!” He said, filled thoroughly with satisfaction. Nothing so pleased this frog, than to look for a thing and then find it.
He managed to drag and drop and push and carry the bottle of lotion to a spot he liked under the bed, away from the direct drying blow of the air conditioning and shining of the sun. And now, safe in his cozy corner, the frog lathered himself white with lotion. He knew that this was just a temporary solution to a permanent problem, but, “that’s all there ever really is, isn’t that so?” He croaked quietly and contentedly thinking of the future not at all.
There was a cow that lived on a farm. She was young but very smart. She was smart enough to know that ‘farm’ meant ‘place where they will kill my children.’ How she got that smart she could only guess, but with nothing much else to do, she spent a lot of time thinking. She knew the patterns of the farm: She saw the other cows were scared of the barking dog, She knew when gates were opened and closed, She knew the bulgy eyed guy was lazy and opened both of the gates for a time instead of opening one - moving the cows through it - closing it - opening the next one - and then moving the cows through, as the others did. In short, she knew she could escape. “But where would I go?” she thought “There are so many fences, there is no longer a meaningfully definable ‘outside’. “For example” she reasoned “pick any fenced in area, and call that the outside - then everything else is inside. In other words, the space outside all of the worlds fences was of a similar size as all the areas within them. They effectively fenced in that last space without having to do anything.” With no outside, where could she go?
She chewed her cud and thought.
my 55 word story ‘The Frogs’ is now up at the 55 word section of Birdandmoon.com!
The rest of the site is very cool so you should check it out.
I made this little song a while ago - I’ve been toying with the idea of making some music and I have ideas I’m excited about but it’s going to take some time.
ps: if you know how i could stream this instead of linking to it please tell me.
When the people came the frogs decided to hibernate - better to sleep than lose your mind awake. “Let’s dig them up and eat them!” the children laughed. In the spring the frogs gathered to count their loses. “Sad about Hubert, such a beautiful voice… Beatrice, please try to remember what you can of his songs.”
This story has 55 words - which is a thing people try to do sometimes.
I made this valentine’s day card version of the fire comic - feel free to email it to someone you like or print it out or whatever:
card
There was a guy who was walking to work and away from a fight with his girlfriend. Then he got hit by a car.
In the hospital he got a call from some friends he hadn’t talked to in a while. He got some flowers and watched TV. His girlfriend brought him chinese food. It was better than work.
A few days later a bird came flying out of nowhere and crashed into his window and fell and disappeared. He managed to pull himself out of bed and grope his way painfully to the window. He saw the bird lying on the ground. It was still breathing!
He called the nurse. It was morning, and the morning nurse was the nicer one. He explained about the bird and she went out and put it in a little box and brought it to him. He looked up on the internet how to take care of it. When his girlfriend visited all he wanted to do was talk about the bird. He asked her to get him some supplies and a cage for it. She thought he was losing it - maybe it was the painkillers. Anyway, she got it for him.
He took care of the bird. It was obviously in pain. Over the next several weeks he and the bird got better together. The bird was now hopping about a little and the guy could take it out of the cage and the bird would hop around on his bed and sit on his shoulder. He and the bird would look out the window together. Suddenly one day, without any previous attempts at flight, the bird took off and flew out the window. “Now he’s happy to be outside” the man thought - he was also going to leave the hospital soon.
When he was finally better, his girlfriend came to pick him up. She threw out the dead flowers and gathered up the cards and other little presents he had gotten. “I’m thinking about quitting my job” the man said to his girlfriend. “Why, you don’t like it?” she asked distractedly as she looked about the room making sure they had everything, though he could tell she was paying close attention. “Yeah, I don’t know, maybe I’ll get a job at a bookstore or something - something that isn’t so draining.”
As she wheeled him out of the hospital (he could walk, but hospitals make you wheel out for insurance reasons) he felt a little different about everything. When they got to the door, he got up from the wheel chair and walked to the car, and when he got in the car he realized he wasn’t exactly inside of it in the way that he used to be. The inside of the car was just another part of the outside. He was never inside of anything in the old way again - and, like the bird, he was happy to be outside.
There was a place full of people, and each had their own fire. It helped to keep them warm and to see in the dark. But fires are both fierce and fragile - so sometimes they had to take great care to protect their fires from harm, and sometimes they had to protect themselves and others from their fires when they were wild.
If they were smart, they fed their fires good dry wood that wasn’t rotted so their fires would burn hot and clean. And if the fire was getting out of control, they could withhold new wood and wait till it settled down, or they could get to a safe place away from others and feed it even more and light up the sky. But they had to be constantly vigilant that they had enough fuel around, because small fires might quickly go out and large ones might quickly burn through their fuel.
Though a fire is a fire, and so a pretty specific thing, hot and bright etc., everyone’s fires were slightly different depending on the exact nature of the fuel they used and exactly how they built it. And when people stood near each other, their fires would mingle. A bright fire could strengthen a little one, or overwhelm it. And someone could even re-light a fire that had gone out, provided the embers were still hot enough. And your fire was changed by the other fires, so it was a sort of record of both who you are and also where you have been and who you have known.
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