Prompt: Animal fable “The Scorpion and the Frog”
Time: approximately 60 minutes.
Once upon a time, a young man named Phil wanted desperately to get out of his home town. He had spent his whole life there learning to do what everyone in the town did, work at the mill. The mill provided employment and sustenance for almost everyone in the town either directly or indirectly. Phil’s parents, his grandparents, and his great-grandparents all worked at the mill when they were his age. One day, Phil couldn’t take the boredom anymore, and he decided to just up and leave. He packed his backpack with enough food and water from his house to last him a week, and he started walking.
After three days and two nights of walking, Phil no longer recognized where he was. He was finally out. His home was far behind him now. A certain wave of peace and apprehension tingled over his skin, and he smiled. When night came that day, Phil found himself face to face with something he had never seen before, except for in pictures: a wild river. The banks of the river were overgrown with grass, and trees there provided shade. He thought it would be a good place to sleep, and it was. He lay down beneath one of the trees and had a good night’s sleep.
When he woke up, Phil was no longer alone. He heard two people whispering over by another tree. One of them had a mustache and the other a green hat. It seemed like they were just waking up as well. Phil went over to them and said “Good morning.” The pair stopped talking and diverted their attention to him. “Who are you?” the mustache asked.
“Phil,” he said.
The green hat asked him what he was doing there.
“Leaving home,” Phil said. “I want to get as far away as I can.” He wanted keep walking and leave them far behind as well, but he felt the sudden need to be polite. “Who are you two, and what are you doing here?” he asked, feigning interest.
The mustache said “I’m Vittori, and this is Federico. We are thieves, and this is our home.”
Phil felt urgency to leave, but continued the conversation anyway. He looked at the rolling river and asked “Do you know how to cross the river? It’s my first time here.”
Federico smiled and said “As a matter of fact we do! And for a price, we could…”
Vittori nudged his companion and cut him off. “Usually, for a price, we take travelers across the river, but you seem like a smart man. We could just point you in the right direction.” Vittori pointed down the river and said “Just follow the river that way until you get to the downed tree. Once there, simply crawl under the tree, walk a little bit more, and you will find a bridge.”
Phil smiled and said “Thank you,” even though he doubted their directions would be of much help. They were thieves after all. Still, he was anxious to get back to walking and away from the pair of thieves, so he smiled again and followed their instructions. “No problem at all,” said Federico. “Good luck!”
Phil walked for a while, and just as he thought he would never find the downed tree, it appeared ahead. The tree had a massive trunk and was surrounded by a steep cliff on one side and the river on the other. Once he got close enough to the tree, he realized that the space beneath it wasn’t big enough to crawl under with his backpack on his back. He looked up at the towering thickness of the tree’s trunk and realized it would be almost impossible to climb. The only way past was under.
Phil took off his backpack and slid his backpack under the tree to the other side. He took a deep breath and began to crawl in the dirt, which rose up into a dust into his face, filling his nostrils. He sneezed and coughed underneath the tree, which only made more dirt rise up. He tried to take a deep breath, but that only made things worse, so he closed his eyes, held his breath and pulled himself out from under the tree to the other side. As he got to his feet, he coughed and wheezed, dusting himself off.
When he opened his eyes, he saw the beautiful morning horizon on the other side of the river, and in the distance he could just make out the bridge that the thieves had told him about. Smiling, he reached down for his backpack only to find that it wasn’t there. He could hear voices laughing somewhere in the trees behind him, and his backpack was nowhere to be found. He looked under the tree down the path up which he had come, then stood up and looked at the bridge in the distance. Phil sighed and closed his eyes to think, and asked himself “Why me?”