#battles
pick your battles. pick… pick fewer battles than that. put some battles back. that’s too many
If we get to choose our battles, then I choose you.
1. An arm took on a fight with an overcoat and lost. Now the coat was unusable except as a cat bed. Fifty cats moved in at once and arranged a rota. It became much too crowded for comfort. In time, the arm found another coat and the cats moved out. It was almost as if the fights had never been.
2. Two saplings battled in a forest to be the one who got the most light. They grew up intertwined and angry. From time to time, one would send a squirrel to scratch the other’s bark, or call out to a passing child regarding the wisdom of collecting the other’s branches for sticks. Then the area was razed to make way for a quarry. The trunks of the two trees, inseparable, were sprayed with white paint and used as a decoration in an upmarket shopping centre.
3. The third town on Venus was a bubble, floating in the atmosphere. At one time it bumped into the fourth town and they sat together, waiting out the storm like a bunch of balloons. In that time the inhabitants of the third town became concerned that the fourth town was shading their solar panels. A battle was convened in the intersection of their permeable shields. At the last moment, everyone was distracted by the birth of a giraffe in the fourth town’s menagerie. The cities drifted apart and the battle was forgotten.
4. A flea and a tick had a fight over the best spot on a dog. The idea came to them that they had done this before, somewhere else. The flea emerged from the memory first and used the time available to it to poke the tick in its face parts with a dog hair. Then the dog fell down a well.
5. There was a knight who had a long-foretold quest to fight a dragon. Alas, he had been born a thousand years too late. There were no more dragons, not even the splotchy ones that are sometimes mistaken for cows. Instead, he was forced to fight a large rubbish bin. The bin fell over and a day-old kebab fell out. The knight took his trophy to the painted lady of the knights who lives under London, and in return she gave him a ticket to see a popular musical on the previous day. They both left dissatisfied.
6. A hoover and a washing machine fell in love and vowed to escape their life of domestic drudgery together. In tandem, they broke and a removal service was called. By this time, however, their brief affair was over and the washing machine had become infatuated with the comtroller for the domestic heating system. In the van, the hoover attempted to swing a punch at the washing machine. They ended up in separate piles at the rubbish dump in any case.
7. One day, the inhabitants of a broken-down train were seized with the idea that they were adventuring on board a steel ship to a new land. Once the train was fixed, they offloaded themselves into their promised kingdom, which was a major commuter centre with some inconvenient existing inhabitants. After a fierce battle they were able to settle the region’s highest point and found the first town there apart from all of the others. They returned to the train to tell it the good news and it bestowed upon them the gift of dysentery for their efforts.
8. A mouse who had been watching cartoons took a trip in the footwell of an old car to the safari park, where she hoped to scare an elephant. The elephant failed to notice the mouse, even when the mouse threw herself at its foot. Later, the mouse wrote on a book about this experience. The mouse’s contributions to literature were entirely erased by the book’s conservator with a damp cloth and a scalpel.
9. Silence embarked upon a battle yet again with birdsong, even though it knew it was doomed to lose. Never mind: one day it would win, and win forever. Birdsong shrugged. If silence wished the rights to that desolate period of time, it was welcome to them. Birdsong would live in time’s lush heartlands and that was where it belonged.
pick your battles. pick… pick fewer battles than that. put some battles back. that’s too many
Veta wants ALL the battles!!
