wahgnube, the little story teller

Except he’s not little, nor tells stories.

No points for guessing whose eyes have been on leaky faucet mode all day. I mean it’s quite insane. Happy carol on TV about hope and happiness – tears, stub toe on sofa – tears, stress smoothening f e code still broken – tears, generally sit around – tears. Sometimes it’s coupled with some emotion/memory, sometimes, just tears. I have been drinking even more water and so on to compensate for such bodily fluid loss. I showered for almost a couple of hours in near steam and feel a good deal more relaxed, and more in control of the renegade tear ducts. Shape up little duct thingies, I’m a male, society expects me, and in turn you, to meet some standards. Anyway, all that time I was abusing my skin to feel better about myself; I came up with the old horse wanting to cross the river story. Of course, it’s not the least bit good, but it means something to me.

So we have this old horse that�s always been on one side of this river. Now, I say old, not age wise, but in his head. He’s (yes, it’s a male horse) stuck in his own ways of doing things, and fears deviation. When he was a kid, his master (probably doesn’t exist, and not important to the rest of the story) fitted him with blinders. These were magic blinders. Not only did they force him to only be able to look straight ahead, they also had this intense electromagnet that suitably aligned itself at an angle with the earth’s field and that forced our poor horse’s head to focus only in one direction – the other side of the river. Now, to put things in perspective, this is a cold cold country, Greenland say. The water is frozen, but just so, and it’s not frozen solid enough everywhere. He must be real careful about how he chooses his path to get to the other side, to avoid – freeze drowning. As much as he can turn his eyelids within the blinders� constraint, he can catch the shadow of a rickety bridge. A very rickety bridge. (How does he know this from just the shadow? He’s an intelligent horse, and trained well in structural mechanics.) So now he has a choice, he can choose to carefully plot out his path along the frozen portions of the river, or choose the rickety bridge. The problem being, he understands he is large (though we called him little) and the bridge is definitely rickety, and if it breaks when he’s on it, he’ll crash through the ice and – freeze drown. So given the choice between the rickety bridge he barely can see, and the complicated, long drawn path ahead, he chooses the ice. He may have been wrong, and it was a hard decision to make (for a dumb horse anyway. Come on. Hey, you just said he’s smart. My story. My horsie.) Now, why all this complication to get to the other side you might wonder. He sees luscious grass on the other side. (Now I have no idea about the dietary preferences of horses, but this little/large smart/dumb horse thing needs grass to live.) Now, to must of us regular folk, grass is just part of the scenery. It looks good, and we like it if it’s there, but aren’t terribly annoyed if it isn’t. But not for our horse. That’s his primary diet, and this grass he sees looks perfect, beyond perfect, and wet and juicy. He was dying to eat her it. Not in a, he really wanted to way, it was so much more. It’s like he needed it to live way. (Need I remind you that a horse’s dietary requirements are different?) Now this place is cold. The grass he’s been eyeing and needs to get to feels cold and frigid. Since he’s insanely intelligent and wants to make sure it’s happy, he builds all sorts of contraptions – from those green house domes to keep it warm and unfrigidey, to sprinkler systems with happy nutrients sneakily mixed in the water and other things. But he can’t get across. So he builds another contraption to get them to it, and he does. (If he’s so intelligent, why didn’t he just build something and fly across? Because he’s dumb.) So now as far as he can see, the grass is in its happy place. It still looks luscious. Now there is another strange complication. He doesn’t want to just go across and trample it either. Which was another reason why he didn’t fly across in the first place. He now concentrates a large deal on the icy pond, using all his mental resources (not too much, he’s a HORSE remember?) and plans his path. Very slowly. It is a lot more complicated than he had anticipated, and he was a lot less magically gifted than he had once assumed. But he braved on, charting and mapping and planning and what not. In this time, the horse being myopic as well, he stopped looking at the grass and starts staring at patterns on the ice. (How did he see the grass earlier? He had glasses then. They broke somewhere along the way. Stop it with the annoying questions). During this time, this wasn’t ordinary grass as he’d always realized. It was special. The specialest grass in the land. In any land. (For purposes of assigning a gender to said grass, and for advancement of the story at different points, this said grass is governed by a grass fairy. A female fairy.) It wasn’t stupid grass either. It noticed the new glass bubbles and what not keeping it warm and making it happy. It begins to wonder who might this be? And the fairy with her telescopes spots our friend builder horse on the other side and lets the grass know. (So, since this is always the sequence of events, whenever I say the ‘she saw’. I mean the grass asked the grass fairy, she saw and let the grass know.) Moving along, there comes a point when the grass really wants the horse to be on this side. She starts wondering why the horse doesn’t just cross the damn river? Isn’t there grass there too? Isn’t there grass anywhere else? What gives? Now in order to complicate matters further, the evil master had our horse fitted with these magic blinders when he was born. So the poor horse doesn’t know anything else. He’s so engrossed in his plans to get across (now not focussing on the grass, but everything else in between) that he fails to notice there are a bunch of storms where the grass is cold (cheap construction materials used in the previously mentioned glass houses). She begins to wonder if he even wanted to get across any more. Time moves on. One day our fairy can’t take it any more, and flies across the river to confront the horse to see him furiously working on plans. He explains them to her, and how much he needs to get to the grass, while coming up with his hover pad so that he can be there, eat her it, and not trample it at the same time. Now another rather sad portion of the story I neglected to mention, these blinders weren’t “fitted on” the horse in a regular removable way. He’d been put through extreme surgery to prevent it from falling off. The fairy doesn’t notice this, she keeps attempting to yank off the blinders and show him some of the other shrubs (in a “shrubs are soo much lower grade and unneeded compared to the specialest grass” way) that are right there. While doing this (she’s a VERY strong fairy type) she yanks of part of his facial skin and one of his eyes. There the poor horse stands staring at the grass with the other eye. His eyes all leaky, not tears, but blood.

No, I needn’t have made it gory just at the very last moment. And for those wondering, the fairy and the grass are not the same thing. This is a generic grass fairy that tends to the needs of all grass (or so she thinks). The grass was what the horse really wants to get to. I also forgot to get into how the blinders also further complicated things in explaining to the specialest grass it was the specialest – when all he could ever see was it. That’s for another time, my fingers and head hurt.