Short story: The human nature – A Fairy Tale?
A father lived deep in the woods in a small house with his two growing children, a daughter and a son. The mother did not love the woods and had therefore left her husband and children many years ago.
The father taught his children to be one with nature. And so the son knew all the birds that lived in the forest, not only the many species, but also each individual, which he could always recognize by the sound of its personal melody. The daughter loved the trees and she too knew all kinds and every single tree.
The father had once moved his family from the big city to the woods because he believed that it was the big cities that robbed people of their minds and natural instincts, thus inciting destruction and violence.
In seclusion, he wanted to allow himself and his family to become part of nature again, because he hoped that it would be his descendants who could survive the fate of the world. It quickly became too much for the woman. She missed the narrow streets, the crowded markets, the idleness and the noise of the busy city. And so she fled one dark night and never came back.
The man taught the children how to make fire with stones, and which berries, fruits, and mushrooms are edible. And for a while the father lived with the son and daughter in happy and calm harmony. Only the wind occasionally swept through the green treetops and became the accompanying music in the symphony of birdsongs and the whispering, greening and howling of the wild animals.
But the older the children got, the more they bothered about the seclusion in which they lived. Increasingly, they no longer saw the wild nature around them as an asset, but as a constant threat.
The birds shit on their heads, ate the berry bushes and fruit trees bare. At night the ominous cry of the owls robbed them of their sleep. And the trees, bushes and weeds grew closer and closer to the family’s small wooden house with the crooked chimney.
And it seemed to the children as if the forest wanted to slowly and cruelly suffocate them and their house. And so, estranged from the father, both son and daughter conspired, met secretly in the forest clearing near the river and discussed that the father was probably not in his right mind to just let nature happen. And they realized that only those who know how to subjugate nature would survive.
And when the father went out to get food and firewood, the children began to tame, to control, to clean up wild nature. The son showed the daughter how to make a bow out of wood fibers and thin branches. The daughter explained to the brother which flints could be used most efficiently to quickly start a fire.
And every day, punctually when father left the house, they would meet in the forest clearing and together they would plan to shoot as many birds as possible with the bow. And it was not long before the magnificent symphony of the birds over the great, wide forest fell silent forever.
And brother and sister worked hard to carry the many small dead bodies to the forest clearing by the river, where in the late afternoon, before their father returned, they kindled a huge campfire in which they burned the dead birds of the forest in droves. And they couldn’t resist the smell of the simmering, tender meat, so they ate a feast that prevented them developing any appetite later when their father was preparing supper.
But he wasn’t surprised because he firmly believed that modesty always comes when people have found their way back to their original nature.
When there were no more birds in the whole forest, brother and sister hunted mice and rabbits and everything that was small and rustled or squeaked and frightened the siblings. Here, too, they ate and became fuller and fuller every day. But the father, exhausted from his long excursions and almost blind to everything that contradicted his ideals, continued to ignore the changes in his children and the forest.
And now it was only the increased hunger that moved the siblings to kill all the deer and pigs. And at the feast in the clearing by the river, they filled their bellies almost to the point of bursting. But the father, who was getting older and more tired, still didn’t notice any of this. And now the weasels, foxes, and wolves died of their own accord, so that the brother and sister laid aside their bows, because they only had to collect the dead animals.
There were so many that the siblings slept into the afternoon for many weeks and then indulged in gluttony while the father progressively lost his sight and noticed nothing.
Like pigs, brother and sister had become so fat that they had great difficulty making their way through dense undergrowth and over gnarled tree roots to the clearing by the river. And so they decided to clean up the forest and once and for all to remove all vegetation between the house and the forest clearing.
To this end, both set fire to different places. But they completely underestimated the destructive power of the flames. At first only individual trees burned, but then the flames combined and became a raging and violent conflagration, which first completely burned down the house with unspeakable heat and breakneck speed and then took hold of the entire forest. Brother and sister had no choice but to throw themselves into the river and stay there, mostly completely submerged, for two days until the fire died out, until the forest was completely burned down.
And when they emerged from the river, there was only a soot-blackened wasteland with gnarled skeletons crouching on the ground, the sad remnants of what was once the forest. A huge cloud of soot and water vapor covered the sky and the sun, everything was gray and dark and the smell of death and ash filled the air.
And the father? He was on his way back, with bundles of firewood hauling in a cart and bags full of fruit slung over his shoulder, when he saw the blaze racing toward him. He parked the cart and put his bags down. And in that moment he finally realized what had happened. He would never see his children growing adult, other people would never follow the example of his family and found a new dynasty of purer, nature-loving people with his children.
And just before the firestorm reached his body, shattering his head and evaporating his brain, just before his body thereafter completely crumbled to ashes, tears welled up in his eyes and he exclaimed in a hoarse voice, „So this isn’t a brain spectre, it’s indeed human nature, destruction and killing!“
Oh, if only brother and sister had known the way back to the city. But that was far away, and the path was completely burned and turned into a wasteland. The siblings had little strength left to anticipate and mourn the death of their father.
They laboriously built a small, shabby hut out of the burnt ruins of the house, in which they lived together in a very small space from then on. It wasn’t long before the brother knew every moss and lichen, while the sister knew every stone and every dry waterhole in this forest desert. And so they ate mosses and lichens, which they crushed to pulp with all kinds of suitable stones. And they drank the water from the shrunken river, which was more like thick, foul-smelling slime.
Both, brother and sister, grew thin as spindles, and days turned into months and months into years. Since we are in the year 2085 and cold winters have long since ceased to exist even far from the equator, the former forest slowly turned into a real desert of sand and stone. The rare rain filled the riverbed just enough for brother and sister to drink. Mosses had become rare. And so the siblings were eating lichens and the putrid bank mud of the river, when a dispute arose among the siblings over the privilege of eating.
So they divided the one shabby hut into two shabby huts, which they built along the river bank at a suitable distance from each other, so as to remain close to their feeding grounds but as far away from each other as possible. But occasional quarrels were not absent. Ultimately, the initial quarrel turned into deep anger, and then abysmal hatred. The brother, now a man, began throwing heavy stones at the sister whenever she tried to approach the succulent heap of putrid riverweed and filthy mud he had first spotted.
But the sun shone relentlessly and hot winds sanded the desert landscape more and more. The bed of the river shrank, and the huts of the quarreling scrawny siblings inevitably drew nearer and nearer to one another. In the end, the brother saw no other way out than to burn down the sister’s hut, whereupon she grabbed an old, rusty and long nail and drove it right into the brother’s skull.
She buried her dead brother where the forest clearing had once been, and yes, she shed a tear in the process. And more tears followed, day after day and month after month. After another year, the sister died, not of hunger, nor of thirst or a force of nature, but of loneliness. How can you go on living when there isn’t even someone to hate, she thought just before closing her eyes forever. Her body crumbled to dust that the wind carried up into the air. And the dust became one with the ashes of the forest and those of the father, and finally fell down on the brother’s grave. In the end there was nothing left but the desert.
© all copyrights (text, idea, drawings) by Stefan F Wirth, Berlin, 3 January 2023
biologe 