|
Wednesday, October 17, 2007 Question is whether the writer can finish this story by Christmas. It's unlikely that it could be done in time this year.
Sunday, July 28, 2012. Still not done. |
DEATH FOR CHRISTMAS A happy story by Wayne Timmons
(1) You know Christmas is a good time for everybody apart from the grumbly feelings some people get because the parking lots are full of unethical shoppers willing to stoop to any miscarriage of traffic to finagle a parking plot. Christmas is a good time for animals all around the world, too, apart from it's cold in the northern hemisphere and lots of them have to hibernate to make it through the winter and others can't find enough to eat not to mention the woods are leaf bare and it's hard to hide from children with BB guns or worse, but the animals of the world know they got a hard job and they don't mind keeping at it and they love Christmas. They do everything humans do at Christmas except they don't drag a tree into the house. They give presents and sing songs and drink egg nog when they can get it. Actually, it must be admitted there are some other differences between animals and humans when it comes to Christmas. Animals don't shop for presents; they keep a sharp eye out for goodies all year and stash them away for the giving season. It's an instinct with them so Mother Nature in her wisdom saves them from the last minute rush on Christmas Eve. So animals come out better on that count. And they come out better when it comes to Christmas spirit, too, because, if the truth be known, animals of the world generally have a better attitude than humans: They're happy with a lot less and they love each other and leave each other alone except of course for predators who eat animals gentler than them but that's life and this ain't no fairy tale. The predators take their place in the Grand Scheme of Things and animals accept that even though lots of humans can't. Anyway, one of the biggest differences between humans and animals is that humans have cars and animals don't. Animals roam around on foot and scratch up food close to home and confine their love-life to candidates in their immediate area. Humans, on the other hand tear around in laughable bent steel boxes that suck up everybody's air, turn stinky, noxious gasoline into poison gas that destroys the atmosphere, and skip over the surface of Mother Earth so fast that most humans at one time or another drive into other bent steel boxes, resulting in other, even more laughable bends in the steel and sometimes hurt humans and sometimes worse. Which brings to mind the plain fact that animals are smarter than humans. Even humans know that but they hate to admit it because it conflicts with their view of themselves and their importance. Animals learned how to live quite well on the planet a long time ago and it used to be very pretty here. But there are other facts about the animal kingdom that aren't generally known among humans and animals in the last few thousand years have developed a kind of persnickety, stand-offish attitude where humans are concerned because they have watched this species coming along it seems like forever and for all the fuss and time it took they expected a much grander result. Still, they have kept their hopes up and have maintained a polite attitude toward us, always open to the possibility that we might grow up and take a hand in helping with The Creation, but, frankly, they've got their fingers burned a few times, so to speak, and they've found it wiser to keep a safe distance. Consequently, the animal kingdom decided a long time ago to hide the depth and breadth of their knowledge and abilities. The first most obvious and, if you think about it, common sensical fact about animals that humans don't know is that all the animals talk to each other perfectly well. But there is an ancient covenant amongst the animals never to speak to humans, enforced by magical decree. There was a dog who, early one morning in 1905, in Philadelphia, under the influence of alcohol (he had lapped up beer from a bowl in a saloon--he had never taken a drink before and so lost his proper judgment) had the temerity to break the covenant by saying "Good morning" to a pair of policemen who happened to be strolling by. The dog instantly disappeared in a cloud of green sparks and smoke. News of this infraction spread rapidly through the animal kingdom and was universally known within a day of its occurrence, but humans demonstrated their usual lack of grasp of important issues by hardly publishing the story at all. Proof is that very few humans have heard of that dog. But that's another story and far from our topic. The point is that most animals are quite civilized and a few pf them even have great powers. A very few of them--you might call them wizards--can even travel by spirit (we call it "out of body experience"). They travel forward and backward in time, they speak in the spirit world with human sages who have evolved enough to know what's what--they do all kinds of things every day that would make most humans pop a blood vessel if they had any idea. The only limiting factor on all this spirit-travel is that it's very taxing to go zipping around in spirit when you have a flesh-and-blood body at home waiting for you to come back and operate it. Without its spirit, a body can't even manage to stuff grub into its own mouth. Now lots of humans reading this won't believe it. They'll say, "If animals are so danged smart, how's come they don't build skyscrapers or airplanes--how's come they don't farm or produce TV shows or make guns to defend themselves from hunters? Why ain't they accountants and doctors? Why ain't they rich?" Well, the answer is--animals are above all that. They learned the formula for living in happy harmony on the earth aeons ago and they know helping with The Creation has nothing to do with any of that--though there are wise beings among them whom you could call doctors and maybe even accountants. Anyway, this is a long way from the topic which really is what animals do at Christmas. Which was maybe a poor way of leading up to what this account is about, namely what happened to a certain raccoon family one Christmas. (To be continued.) |
Metro-Glamour Magazine
Fiction |
Metro-Glamour Magazine - Copyright in perpetuity
Fiction