Once upon a time

Once upon a time, there was a psychic blackbird who lived near a very twisty old yew tree. Among other things she'd found out that determinism was false, when GOOG was going to break USD500, and where the local sparrowhawk hung out. Being psychic was sometimes very good indeed, but mainly it sucked, which is pretty much what you'd expect.

She ran a little fortune-telling booth under the yew tree, where her customers could enjoy the arils while they waited. One day, a giraffe came to see her. He was a very brainy theoretical physicist with diffuse ambitions and many failed love affairs. They looked at one another, brown-eyedly.

The blackbird saw that she was going to fall wildly in love with him. But that was all she saw. This is why being a psychic sucks.

She sighed.

The technology stuff is overbought, she said. Go for commodities.

Moral: futures are for the stockmarket.

Once upon a time

Once upon a time there was an accident-prone bumblebee. She made origami cranes and was heartily sick of "bumble" puns. She wore scuffed purple knee-pads she'd inherited from a friend who was into skating. The kneepads were kind of embarrassing, but most of the time she was alone, and it saved on bruises to her fuzzy black knees.

The way she saw the world tended to make everything more than it was. She'd get overwhelmed and bump into things. She preferred the small exact folds in her tiny coloured squares of paper, plain and patterned, covered with four-petaled flowers or stripes or diamonds, which were suddenly birds. One fold at a time.

When she looked around her house, she saw many more cranes than there really were, a folded faceted flock of thousands. She smiled.

Moral: for the bruises, wear knee-pads. Otherwise, your eyes are fine.

Once upon a time

Not so long ago, there was a stick insect. She was very beautiful --- the absolute spit of a twig. No insectivore gave her even a first glance, let alone a second one.

The stick insect liked romance novels and spent her weekends at the shooting range improving her accuracy. She figured that it was best to be prepared. She was a really terrible shot, but she daydreamed about taking out a predatory bird or two, SWAT-style.

But mostly, she made like a piece of wood. She was great at it. She had the most sophisticated anti-bird system in the world. To realise her dream, she'd have to go out to the end of the branch wearing a caterpillar hat and make like an edible cheerleader.

But she didn't. She made like a stick, and dreamed of riot shields and hand signals and automatic weaponry. Perfect.

Moral: sometimes life is dreaming and staying alive.

Once upon a time

Once there was a crab who lived under a rock, thinking. The rock was flattish and shaped a bit like a big stony dinner plate. It had a couple of barnacles on it and a flea-circus style population of tiny invertebrates of one sort or another.

The crab liked it under the rock. It was dark and salty.

Was it better under the rock? Perhaps there was a whole new world out under the sky, or in the many tiny pools bunted with bubbly seaweed and anemones nearby. On the other hand, she wasn't a crispy sun-dried crab up on the beach like the ones coasted up on the tide.

She blinked an eye on a stalk. And then she blinked another eye on a stalk. She watched some pretty silica fragments run through a crack in the rock like a tiny marine lava lamp. She clicked a claw. Mmmm, watery, she thought.

Moral: sometimes, you are your shell.

Once upon a time, 3

Not so long ago, there were some very fine cliffs overlooking the sea. On the cliffs lived a chough with a mind full of keen observations and lovely red legs like stalks of coral, neither of which she knew about.

In the sea and rocks below, there lived an otter who was an amateur astronomer. She kept her telescope and an increasingly chaotic collection of back issues of Astronomy under a rock.

The chough and the otter were great friends. They liked to talk about everything under the sun. The otter cracked crab claws and talked about Mars, and the chough stalked around beautifully, like a feathery fragment of night in the sunshine, and worried about things. I just don't know, she said. Life is so mysterious.

That's true, agreed the otter, lying on her back and combing her tummy-fur.

I don't know how to do it, said the chough.

What? said the otter, opening and shutting her nostrils.

Life, said the chough. The answers are all hiding. It's like the dark side of the moon.

The otter polished her nose. Did you know that the moon wiggles a bit? It's called libration. Over time, you can see 59% of the moon's surface from the Earth.

The chough put her head to one side. Really? she said.

Yes, said the otter. You can see more than you can't.

Moral: Sometimes gravity is working for you.

Once upon a time, 2

Long ago, there was a baker in a small town. Each morning, he would add butter and sugar to flour and magicks, and hundreds of delicacies would line up in his window, light as air and as fragrant.

On the outskirts of the town was a painter. She lived in what had once been a stable made of stones. All day long she mixed colours and water and imaginings, and canvases gorgeous with sunshine and fields lined the walls.

In the afternoons, after the redemption of morning light and before the dappled forgiveness of later, she would remember that she was hungry. She put her brushes into pots and tuppence in her pocket and walked the old pebbly path to town.

Two cakes, or half a dozen biscuits. Perhaps a twist of sweet bread. Her hands were stained and striped with paint. Green-and-purple trelliswork decorated her fingers, her palms spotted with rose madder, carmine beneath her fingernails, her knuckles a sunset. The baker watched her hands and saw magicks, which he made into cakes as light and golden as the wheat at dawn.

Moral: One never really knows what one's handiwork is.

Once upon a time

... there lived a remora who dreamed of true love. He was a thoughtful type, and read all the literary papers. He had long been suckered to a blue whale, who was very clever but didn't tend to the remora's brand of ocean-gazing. The remora spent a lot of time worrying about the difference between commensalism and mutualism. That was partly because it was a real worry for him, and partly because worrying about that sort of distinction was part of what did it for him in life generally. If he was bored, he'd look for a distinction to draw. Or one to collapse, if it seemed too obvious that there was one.

One day, he asked the whale what she thought. I don't know what you mean, she said. Well, said the remora, do you think that I'm basically just hitching a ride, or are you getting something important out of this?

This what? said the whale.

Me! said the remora.

The whale turned her eye to him bemusedly. But you'll always be there, she said.

Moral:

Stop up the access and passage to remoras,
That no compunctious visitings of nature
Shake my fell purpose, nor keep peace between
The effect and it!