Member-only story
Updated Fables (Homage, And My Deepest Apologies, to Aesop)
THE MERRYTHOUGHT* AND THE SEA
After a chicken dinner, two small boys were fighting a heated battle over a wishbone on a cliff. Each pulled as hard as he could on one end of the dead bird’s furcula, until the bone snapped. The winner with the larger piece fell backward yelling, “I win! I win!” But he was already over the precipice, plunging towards the dark sea roiling and frothing around jagged rocks like hunger foam in a giant’s mouth. Nothing gone over that cliff ever returned alive. The other boy looked at his 3/8ths of a chicken bone and smiled.
MORAL: Losers, wait to dance on winners’ graves. In the internet age, it won’t be very long.
REJECTED MORAL: Even a fraction of a bone is better than no bone at all.
*Merrythought is the cutesy name people now long-dead and out of our hair gave to the forked bone between the neck and breast of a bird. It’s the same bone we superstitiously call the wishbone. Perhaps it should disturb us that both they and we have associated pleasant thoughts and cheerful wishes with the ritual breaking of the bones of innocent others we have consumed.
