craig james hildebrand, WHAT I WAS AFRAID OF
-----------------------------------------------------------------
I just killed an ant trying to save it from drowning.
I was washing my hands and there it was. It was tiny, expecially
small for an ant. I thought that it might be a baby ant, and when
you only live as long as ants do then baby ants are especially im-
portant, so this one needed to move up out of the way so that I
could wash my hands and we could all go home happy, but I was in a
rush because I wanted to write a story about the poor boy in Pin-
nochio that gets turned into a wolf. Or a dog? Or a fox? A donkey,
it was a donkey. Not Pinnochio, he only gets donkey ears and a don-
key tail, but the poor kid that actually Becomes a donkey, after
shouting and screaming for his mother to come get him but she never
shows up, and if only she'd gotten there in time to see the color of
his eyes or the shape of his nose, or Something that would tell her
that this donkey was once her son, but no, she never gets there, no-
body gets there, and we watch as this boy 100% becomes a donkey and
can only bray and can't tell anyone what happened or who he once was,
and he probably doesn't even get to Think like a donkey, but has to
always think like the boy he used to be, and I couldn't get over how
hard it would feel to be a donkey that thinks like a boy that hadn't
always been a donkey, but my finger was too fat trying to scoot the
little guy out of the way and he got squished, real squished, and
there was nothing left for me to do but run the water and try to
deal with its consequences.
|