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 Posted: Tue Sep 26, 2017 11:08 am
You love stories, and your mother is very good at telling them. When she recounts them at night to you, you feel as though you're truly living the lives of the heroes. Before you could open your eyes, you heard her voice soothe you to sleep with tales of the daring, the intrepid, and the strong. She tells you and your sister that before she fed you milk, she fed you stories in the womb.
She tells you your name is Theodore, like your father, but she likes Teddy more. So do you, though you pretend otherwise. It's not cool to agree with your mom.
One day you ask her how she knows so many stories. Who had told her? She smiles and whispers her secret: not someone, but something. She digs at a freshly covered hole and shows you her dusty but sturdy looking prize. This is a book, Teddy. Humans used to keep their stories here because they couldn't remember everything they knew all the time. They had a symbol language like a code on thin sheets of smooth bark, and I can understand what each one says.
Can you teach me?
For a moment she looks so proud. But then something in her posture changes, as subtle as an ear twitch to pick up the quietest noise, and the glow in her eyes fades. No, she mutters, no, I shouldn't. Your father wouldn't be happy.
Please?
Mother shakes her head over and over and moans. You know the signs and stop, nudge her leg, suggest they take a walk. Walks always seem to help her when her mind clouds came back. Thea joins in soon after, eager to stretch her legs even if it has to be supervised.
Later, he shares the secret with his sister, and she grins. In conspiring tones, she tells him that they needed to learn, and in spite of himself, he eventually agrees to coerce their mother over time. Who knew what the humans' books had? What stories had he yet to know of...?
⎿ "teddy" (theodore) :: 347 words ⏋
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Posted: Tue Sep 26, 2017 11:10 am
You and your brother share looks and size and nothing else. He jokes that you kicked in the womb so that there was room for him to curl closer to you, and while that sounds a little preposterous, you agree because it makes you look better. Aren't you? Teddy is soft snow, which means you have to be the icicles. That's how you both survived birth, right? The other sibling hadn't moved when it came out, but you mewled, thrashed, nudged your brother to make sure he followed suit. You fought enough for two, but not for three.
Maybe that's for the best. Even as a young pup, you know that Mother is not always there. It isn't just the books, no matter how much Father hates the human trash. Sometimes she acts like she doesn't remember things. Small details. We were supposed to go hunting, weren't we? Don't worry, Father and I caught a few rabbits.
(You had watched, really, tensed your muscles in the same manner, mimicked his paw steps, focused on the moment of death when the rabbits had each spasmed and then fallen limp. Father was experienced if extra rough.)
You fought enough for two, but not for three, and that's okay. You adore Teddy in his bumbling and adorable manner as he tells you about the latest story he's read about. In return, he praises you for being the cooler sister. Between an absent mother and a ragged father, maybe that's enough. But you will have to work to make sure it stays that way.
And one day, fighting enough for two might not be enough anymore.
So you trade: play fights for stories. Re-enactments of strange human wars that you're sure Teddy doesn't translate well. Mother teaches a word one day: paladin. Righteous warrior. It falls and fits you like your own fur. Let Teddy be the scholar who looks to the past. You will do as you have always done: guard and guide and fight.
⎿ "thea" (theophila) :: 339 words ⏋
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Posted: Sun Dec 31, 2017 4:40 pm
It's too cold for his tastes, but their fur is growing thicker by the week it feels. A Winter Coat, his sister put it, feeling all knowing for once. But all this does is direct his thoughts towards the book he had come across, where humans described how they had lived in the winter themselves. They too had had coats. Did humans have fur like wolves did?
"Skin," his mother says, "like the layer beneath all your hair." She smiles down at him and bumps a cold, wet nose to his chest. "You will become as thick as any foot of snow, like your father."
"But not cold," he clarified, shaking just at the thought. "How did the humans stand it?"
"They changed their coats every day." Theo gasped at the very idea, which prompted his mother to laugh. "They had many coats, and ribbons, and things to put on their feet. They were very soft animals."
But we're not, he almost says. But he doesn't. He knows how Father and Thea talk about him. He's not sure he can be anything but soft. If it means being able to change to what happens around them, like the humans did, then is that so bad?
⎿ "teddy" (theodore) :: 210 words ⏋
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Posted: Sun Dec 31, 2017 4:50 pm
Humans have to be made up. These "books" have to be gibberish scribed by maddened ravens with mud and twigs. They were too stupid to believe to have ever existed. But one day with Father, she learns that truth is stranger than fiction: that his father's father had been told by his own father's father about the two-legged, little haired animals. That they had been the dominant species once. That their intelligence went beyond comprehension. That they had enslaved and taken care of and ignored and destroyed the land itself. And that one fateful day, Mother Nature decided to retaliate, wiping them from existence in the time a lightning bolt touched the ground.
"So, they weren't smart enough to survive," Thea summarizes as she's cleaned. It's normally a thing Mother would want to do, but Mother is Away on a Walk, and so she and Teddy are with Father to be tonguebathed. That's what matters in the end: all the power in the world couldn't help you if you didn't use it well.
She frowned and considered what she would have done, had she been ruler. It was a fleeting fancy and not one she'd remember considering later, when her brother was taken from her and all things unrelated to her immediate existence were insignificant and squashed. Nonetheless, she couldn't help but smile to herself as she wandered those thoughts: at her stone palace of All Plants, the most important area in the entire realm, whose seeds were protected fiercely by an army of squirrels she had trained personally.
Thea rarely entertained something so imaginative, it felt almost as though she was overindulging. She would share later with Theodore, and they would expand it into a royal garden and library, this apparently sacred landmark of humans who wanted to learn. And all who would come to them would bow and beg permission to be in their graces. It was all so...weird. No, she was not someone that important. Just another pup trying to learn what it meant to live in this world.
⎿ "thea" (theophila) :: 347 words ⏋
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