By Stacey Lounsberry
“How could people do such things?” the boy asked.
“People can do a lot of things,” the storyteller replied.
“I never could.”
“You could, and you would, in the right circumstances.”
Nearby, a snake slashed its tail, its fizzing hiss short and purposeful. A small rabbit jerked between its grip; abruptly, the boy dug the angled heel of his boot at its back until the snake’s midsection was crudely severed.
The storyteller nodded. “The right circumstances.”
Penitently, the boy prodded the slowly dying bunny, which lay just out of reach of the snake’s mouth. “I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I’m so sorry.”
A wonderful micro that speaks (or hisses) incisively and beyond its size! It feels very elegant, boiled down to its essential grandness, something like an Aesop’s fable in a postmodern world.
Lovely work. A full story in such a short space.
Powerful, loved it!
This is incredible and terrifying in equal measures.
Loved the predator and prey symbols, and how the white rabbit might as well be the boy’s innocence, reflected in the first question “How could people do such things?”- without a surprise that pureness was quickly killed.
The rabbit snatched away by the snake, the bitterness of knowledge, the darkness of human nature, and the boy, predator and prey, with his cruel actions proving the storyteller right.
Loved the full circle moment and the realization that one will and can do cruel things if the right circumstances arise even if it goes against our inner values.
Was his cruelty justified by acting in response to the “right circumstances”? Is there such thing as right or wrong circumstances? I wonder.
At the end of the story nobody won, which for me felt quite inevitable. The rabbit died. The snake died. The boy did something he never though he could do and for what? As soon as the question left his lips, the rabbit was already destined to die.
To be immediately taught that lesson…