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

Fox and Witch – a fable – Part I

A fable about competition, hate and bullying

Once a fox and a witch had a competition about who of them would be the fastest runner over a distance of thousand meters through the wild forest. The fox won the competition with a big head start, but the witch was fully unwilling to accept this result, complaining she was in a disadvantage, because he was a fox and she a witch, who could fly like a bird, but had only two legs to run. The fox agreed without any opposition. But the witch could never forget her great failure nor could she ever forgive the fox his success.

Only two weeks later, the fox woke up in his earth-hole in a late afternoon. With narrowed eyes he lifted his snout in the air and smelled a hot summer day, knowing that it very soon would find its end, when a black cover of veil would swallow the red-glowing sun. The fragrance of wild roses and even lavender from the garden beyond the rotten big wall twirled with a slight gust around his head. Then the hissing beat of two heron wings, very close to his hole, which slowly disappeared flap by flap in the depth of the big forest with the huge swamplands at its opposite end.

The fox left his day’s lodging, and when he reached the top of the adjacent green hill, the cumbersome whirring of slowly tiring carder bees accentuated the magnificent final act of the passing day like a fainted opera orchestra . The sky pulsed in a deep bloody red, while streaks in purple and orange, billowing around the glowing horizon, were mercilessly drowning the setting sun. The entrance to the forest was close, and the fox already saw the two oaks, which since more than five hundred years guarded the bumpy path into the woods , and heard their continuous quiet creaking in that mild summer breeze.

When the fox was in order to enter the forest, the witch suddenly appeared. „Where are you going to?“ she asked. He answered: “ to the forest, my world, my habitat, the place, where I live.“

The witch laughed and informed him with a nasty laughter that the council of the forest had excluded him from the forest community of the old beech grove behind the green hills. „Excluded? Council?“ the fox responded surprised. „There is no council, the forest is a natural system, all regulation happens by itself.“ The witch, standing in the air and flying with her mysterious black robe, consisting of thousands of tiny black whirlwinds, laughed again, trying to make it sound compassionately: „I founded that council, because new times require new and much more efficient ways of organisation. All forest animals agreed, some of them representing the executive board members. The wise owl is the president, the tiny mushroom man its deputy. Our decision was democratic, not against you personally, it’s all about the safety of our woods. If you wouldn’t be a loner, if you only had a vixen, she would groom you at positions, which you cannot reach by your own, believe me, you miss something. The new pest of ticks in the woods can only be explained with you as their major vector. We reconstructed that very carefully. Different species of ticks, one even imported from Africa, by migrating birds. These bastards are so big. Once one of them followed me in my cottage and attached itself to my left butt cheek. …“. „I never had ticks in my life, never leave the human trails, didn’t you know that the ticks lie in wait in the grasslands and are dispersed by all their different hosts?“

 

Witch and fox, oilpainting on canvas, Berlin 11 June 2020, copyrights Stefan F. Wirth

 

„My dear friend, oh poor fox, loners never control their parasites, wait…“, and the witch swished down towards the fox’s head, intending to embrace him consolingly, but she flew so fast that her body accidentally overturned. She scraped with her enormous dentition over the fox’s forehead, her incisors densely covered with trumpet lichens, what she thought was the latest craze in fashion, and faster than the blink of an eye her left canine tooth, angular like a lump of rock, reached the Fox’s right ear and cut it off. The fox howled stridently. Instead of his hairy upright earlobe,only a black amorphic hole remained, filled up with viscous whirling blood. His whole body trembled, the control of his legs failed, and he fell to the ground. His voice didn’t want to obey him any more. His eyes stared into an impermeable black haze. „For all the heaven’s ghosts sake, what a mishap, what an incredible misfortune, a tragedy. If only we witches were able to conjure, I would heal you immediately, but we witches can only fly. Oh fox, the next time, when someone approaches you, don’t move unexpectedly, the consequences may harm you forever…“ . And with a short hiss only the witch disappeared without any other word.

Laboriously the fox rose his painful body up again. His brain pulsing excruciatingly with each heart beat. He cumbersomely trotted along the forest path, passing the two old oaks, representing since hundreds of years the entrance to a former oak forest, today consisting of beeches in most parts. The night was dark, only diffuse beams of light went astray in the dense crowns of trees, emitted by the almost full moon , still swallowed by the shades of the forest.

A narrow runlet of blood divided his forehead into two asymmetric parts, dropping rhythmically onto his nasal root, while he noted remarkable changes in the woods, unusual noises, the odor of autumn in the midst of summer, an air humidity like in rotten moors, an oppressive misty wall around him, which he never saw before.

The fox passed the clearing with its fern growth, their leaves drooping as if there was a longer drought, silence. Did all birds oversleep the night? He finally reached the red narrow stream, which he always used to cross by passing the huge fallen birch trunk. But the old deadwood was now decayed into many bulky fragments of wood, scattered around an area of several square meters.

There hadn’t been any unusual weather conditions, no drought, no thunderstorm and no temperature drop in the hours and days before, a steady summer time, only rarely some rain droplets. The birch trunk was still stable and elastic, when he saw it the last night. A miracle that it broke into pieces all of a sudden. Silence, only his fast heartbeat that echoed in his seemingly permanently weight gaining skull cavity. He inhaled a glutinous mass through his nostrils, warm with the smell of iron and perspiration.

The tiny stream purporting to be a rushing torrent, a disturbing costuming, as it had obviously happened with the entire forest, which was absolutely familiar to him until only one day ago, but now had become a strange world, with himself as a stranger in the midst of a trascendent otherworldliness.

The weird impetuous water movements whirled well audibly, at least with his uninjured left ear. A misty twilight hid much more than it revealed. But that ebullient barrier still needed to be crossed. The fox carefully tried to adjust his eyes to the darkness, but with only a very moderate success. In the midst of cumbersome dark shades of an unsettling night, he could recognize the arrangement of all single remains of the trunk.

At first, there were two almost similar shaped and sized pieces of dead wood, aligned offset to one another. Thus the foxes balancing act would begin with the left block of wood, whereby he would need to switch to the right, after having left three-quarters of the first piece behind him. The second birch log staggered in the water flow, but the fox was sure to master this task even despite of his meanwhile very restricted sense of balance. After passing both logs, he would even have the choice between a branch on the right with a medium diameter, not much wider than the fox’s snout, running parallel to a much bigger rounded trunk piece on the right. A clear obstacle course to cross a tiny stream, suddenly disguising itself as kooky torrential river.

Blood slowly dropped into his left eye, deafness of his right ear, and he felt anxious about his general ability to hear even with his left side. No croaking of frogs or toads, no chirping of crickets or cicadas. The water noises in front of him sounded far away. It was still dark, and the fox saw the wobbly single components of his bridge mostly as silhouettes.

But he decided not to lose any more time, the rebellious stream needed to be crossed as it was a firm component of a natural daily routine, an essential component for a successful coping of a fox’s future. A careful first step with his left paw, and he crossed the left log until the end of its third quarter, where he with a fluid movement switched to the right.

In the moment the fox had decided for inexplicable reasons to balance along the standing upright edge of the small branch instead of crossing the much bigger rounded trunk, the moon lost its last cover behind the skeleton of a dead pine and all of a sudden illuminating the entire night sky in its full splendor.

The fox, almost blind with viscous droplets of blood in his eyes, tipped slightly sideways to the left, an almost invisible and very subtle movement, when a thin somehow diffuse, but bright light beam was reflected from the seething water on his right side and disabled the fox’s sight completely for about two seconds. Two seconds with remarkable consequences, because his slight weight shift in combination with unpredictable water movements, his short sightlessness and the wounded ear resulted in a total disruption of his entire equilibrium sense.

As if the branch under his feet had perceived the loss of control of the fox’s body and as if this seemingly dead piece of wood suddenly acquired a spiteful liking for even more instability, it followed the left-side motion of the fox and rolled against the big log, which due to this friction in turn got on motion and turned in a clockwise direction against the adjacent branch.

When the two unequally sized remnants of the dead birch had decided to release a brisk impulse of new signs of life, centrifugal forces threw the fox’s body in the air, from where he roughly landed in a 90 degrees angle to the subjacent branch with his head directed towards the waterside. And his head, unfortunately not lighter than the moving crazy water surface, was submersed, while water immediately invaded all his facial cavities, even washing around his right drumhead, which lacked its external auditory canal almost entirely, a cold pain, which the fox tried to ignore. He only cumbersomely could lift up his head, gasping for breath, when his hind legs, pointing towards the big log, all of a sudden were pulled between the two unequally sized, still incessantly grinding against each other. A clearly audible crackling on both sides, followed by several further grating sounds, made the fox remark the smashing of all his leg bones. At the end, courageous natatory movements with his forelegs released him from this awkward situation. He slowly crawled with all his remaining powers to the opposite stream bank. And there, he rested for a felt eternity, being completely exhausted.

The fox felt no pain any more, but only indescribable weakness. Surrounded by an unreal silence, he licked his wounds.

END OF PART I

Berlin, 10June 2020, copyrights Stefan F. Wirth