Modern Life
(or The Problem With Telling Everyone To Follow Their Dreams Is That Some People Are Pieces Of Shit, With Piece Of Shit Dreams)
Once upon a time, there was a boy who kept sheep safe from wolves.
A shepherd, if you need to label things.
Of course, wolf-protection was the very least part of his job. In fact, no sheep had been killed by a wolf in those parts since the old Mayor had been a boy, and no-one had even seen a wolf in years. Still, that was the way the young shepherd thought of his job.
He dreamed of being a hero. He wanted the people in the village to tell stories about him, and he wanted the girls wearing the sweet-smelling crowns of spring flowers to notice him. He dreamed of the power that comes with being the hero of the story. And every story he had ever heard since he was a small child – every one of them – always said the most important thing was to follow your dreams.
"Wolf, wolf!" he cried one day.
The whole village rushed to the hills to help. They had pooled all their sheep together in a common flock for ease of trade and commerce. It sounds like some sort of socialist nonsense, if you ask me, but I suppose we must all be accepting of how they do things in foreign parts.
Well, when they found no wolf among the flock, the villagers were furious at the boy for wasting their time and for telling lies. The girls with flowers in their hair laughed at him, the elders scolded him and the Mayor docked his pay by half a florin. Then they all went back to the village, leaving the proven liar in charge of their sheep.
Accepting of their culture or not, I think we can all agree the villagers were rather stupid.
The shepherd was full of resentment, and that night he killed the fattest young lamb in the flock, cooked it over the coals of his fire in the hills and feasted until he could barely move. This continued night after night, until finally the villagers noticed their flock had been remarkably thinned.
"It was a wolf!" the boy declared with the confidence of someone with no other option.
To be fair, many villagers scoffed at this.
"Where is the proof?" they asked.
"The boy is a liar" they said.
"Remember, there was no wolf last time," they said.
"There hasn't been a wolf in these parts since the old Mayor was a boy," they recalled.
"Look at his belly sticking out from his shirt...the little bastard has been eating our sheep!" they accused.
To be accurate, many villagers remained steadfastly stupid.
"No one would tell a lie that big," they said.
"He's one of us, he wouldn't kill our sheep," they said.
"What if it really was a wolf?" they asked.
"What if there's a pack of wolves?" they escalated.
"None of our sheep will be safe!" they panicked.
"How will we stop the wolves?" they pleaded.
"Leave it to me," the shepherd replied.
Now, old Farmer Brown had an old brown dog and both of them were grizzled and flecked with grey, with gummy old mouths, their teeth worn down from a lifetime of snapping at everything in the whole world. No one liked the farmer much, nor his dog, and he was the one who had pointed out the shepherd's belly sticking out from his shirt, full of stolen lamb.
That night, the shepherd sneaked onto the old farm, and killed the old dog, bashing its head in with a rock and skinning it with his sharp little shepherd's knife. He threw the carcass into a deep ravine, and walked back into the village as the sun rose over the steeple.
"I have killed the wolf!" he thundered, hurling the dog-skin down onto the cobblestones.
"Huzzah!" the people shouted.
"Our sheep are safe!" they wept.
Old Farmer Brown was having none of it.
"My dog went missing last night, and that looks like his fur," he argued.
"There are no wolves here, and the boy is a proven liar," he continued.
"He has been EATING. OUR. SHEEP!" he tried.
"Boo!" the people shouted.
"No wolves? There's a wolf pelt right there on the cobblestones!"
"Wolf-sympathiser!"
Previous wolf-skeptics were won over.
"Well, night after night our lambs were being killed...last night the boy kills a wolf...and last night no lambs were killed."
"Seems proof to me."
"The boy is a hero!"
"Huzzah!"
And they carried him through the streets and sang songs about him, and the girls with sweet-smelling crowns of spring flowers made a crown of oak for him, and in time he became Mayor.
And he never stopped lying and he never stopped stealing and he never stopped killing.
And whenever any of the people in the village stopped to really think about that, or got anxious about it, or even tried to do anything about it at all...well, there were always more wolves out there for them.
...and so it went on. But the shepherd was living his dream, and every story we’ve been told since we were children agrees that that is the most important thing in the world…
Shit.
(For this story and more, you can buy Sweetness Soured for 99c on Amazon.)