Fictional Understandings 1
Co-ordinated by Mandroid3000
Next installment

Greeting and welcome. Make yourself comfortable for what is sure to be a revealing and enlightening series of short stories from a diversity of contributors. Voices new and young, professional and retired, sane and not so much. All have a right to be heard. And we provide the forum.

Our mission is to enable understanding through the presentation of differing perspectives in a safe, non-judgmental space. For this, our inaugural edition, we have the following two contributors:

Bernard Laksley – a humidor salesman
Michelle Carmichael – a high school student and part time usher

Our brave contributors each had 500 words to tell us a tale about:

A travesty in the forestry industry and its ramifications on a child.

Let’s see what they came up with, shall we?

Wood Trouble by Bernard Laksley

Forestry is a necessary industry and a good one. Manly, but also womanly. I guess. Chicks like trees. Hugging them. Like they don’t hug me. Maybe men are like trunks and women are leaves and kids are shrubs and pets are moss. Seriously, I’m just typing this as I think of it.

This was the thoughts of Bolo Manman, the biggest lumberjack in Vermont. He didn’t think that bit about typing, that was me Bernard. But Bolo liked forestry and he got paid to do it and he wanted to stop the travesty that was happening.

The travesty was that some guy, who doesn’t even smoke wanted to keep the trees and so he made an accident and lumberjacks were dying. And the guy wanted to impress chicks, but he didn’t so it was all for nothing. Gotta be a man, hahaha. You get nothing. So Bolo was going to take him down.

No one said there couldn’t be vampires in my story. So there is. You see those people what was holding down Bolo were not just  people, you know. They sucked all the blood and blamed it on Bolo. Because I forgot to mention that Bolo liked to stab beer cans with his teeth and suck the beer out like a vampire. He even sharpened his teeth on a chainsaw so he could do it.  So people thought maybe he wad the vampire.

They arrested Bolo and put him in a prison cell with no windows because he was a vampire, but it actually just made him go crazy. So he punched his way out and pulled thesze big tress out of the ground and stabbed the vampires in the heart with like a big redwood and then got a medal for saving the forestryu industry and the President'’ soul (indirectyly).

So Bolo stopped the travesty and the special raminfications on a child,m whicn I forgot to add, is that there could still be humidors. And this kid called Bernie, whose dad died of lung cancer inherited his dads expensive cigars, and because he had a humidor because of Bolo stopping the travesty, when he turned 18 he smoked them all and scored lots of chicks because he looked really smooth. THE END!

Whispering Wind Tell Me Secrets by Michelle Carmichael

Harry had a fluffy tail and liked to eat flowers. He was a rabbit and his friend was a porcupine, his name was Barry (not Spike, as you might think! lol don’t go there. Courny!). Harry was just a boy and the flowers he liked best were in the forest.

One day he was eating the forest flowers when they saw these big men cutting down the trees and being given bags of money by a guy in a suit who was fat and bald. “What are they doing?” asked Harry.
“OMFG. They’re trading little bits of paper for whole trees,” Barry observed. He was very observant and when he said something it was usually very profound and condemning of his parents and people who just don’t get it.

“We better stop them, this is a travesty,” said Harry. Spike tried to pop the tyres of the truck. But the truck was big and squashed him. Harry cried and was sad for many weeks. He even stopped eating flowers.

One day a the wind came whispering through the trees. “Harry the rabbit,” it said in a voice like star shine. “Don’t worry, one day mankind will cut down all the trees and die and the rabbits will be able to hop about and everyone will be happy.”

“Who’s that?” Harry asked. He was worried, but the voice went away and he hopped off and sat and shivered. Then he saw a pretty fairy who said that it was that whispered. Then the fairy asked what the secret was, and Harry said “You’re not a fairy.” And the not fairy said, “Hahaha, it’s me Barry. I’m a forest spirit now.”

Harry was happy and played with his spirit buddy and heard secrets from the wind. But one day the men who were cutting down the trees saw him hopping around playing with invisible things and said, “Poor, rabbit. It’s crazy. Let’s be nice and shoot it.” And they did.

Mankind is dumb. They think because someone’s different that they can just kill them. US out of Iraq

Wrap Up

Thank you so much to Bernard and Michelle for those powerful tales. It’s always hard to go first and, boy, did they set the bar high! Mull over the challenging issues bought up by these two.

Next time we’ll have a retired stopwatch repairman and a deck swabber writing about a scary thing that happened to them when they were filing their taxes.

Discuss this article on the forums. (0 posts)