Monday, May 27, 2019


RUBBER BANDS 

The first stretch is agonizing. The suffering continues as they contract back to their normal size, but now it’s the pain of realizing that they were born elastic.

Some rubber bands, though, never return to their original state. They are stretched around things like stacks of paper, or bunches of chopsticks, and stay that way, sometimes for many years, until old age makes them brittle.

Many rubber bands dream about being solid as bricks, unstretchable by even the strongest hands. Or they may fantasize that they’ve become like their most powerful relatives, the long-lived bungee cords.

On the bright side, the very nature of rubber bands allow them to retaliate when someone stretches them excessively by snapping themselves and, like a whip, inflicting stinging pain on the offending hand.

Thursday, May 16, 2019


PIANO PARTS 

A woman found a box filled with old piano keys in a dumpster. She took the box to a music store. They told her the keys were real ivory and ebony, which they don’t use anymore to make keyboards.

Next day, the same woman found another box, this time containing piano strings, and took it to the store again. Those, she was informed, were very good quality iron strings, but replaced by carbon strings since 1834.

The woman kept finding different piano parts, in the same dumpster. One day it was a set of pedals. Another day it was a stretcher bar or the top board. It looked like somebody in the neighborhood was dismantling and disposing of a very old piano. She felt a strange sadness about the abandoned pieces, and gave them protection in the basement of her house.

One day, there were no more piano parts in the dumpster. Every piece, from the felt hammers to the beautiful golden frame had been stored in the woman’s basement. She could only imagine how beautiful it must have sounded in its day. She called the music store man and offered him good money to put the piano back together again. He couldn’t: pianos like that one didn’t exist anymore, and neither did the craftsmen who built them.

The woman died a few years later, and her house was sold. The new owners found the piano parts in the basement, and took them to the dumpster, a few pieces each day.

Friday, May 3, 2019


COFFINS 

Reality unfolds slowly for coffins. While being built in the carpenter’s workshop, they assume they’ll end up as dinner tables or cabinets. Once their lids are installed, they think, well, perhaps I’ll be a trunk.

When a body is laid inside them, all doubts go away: of course, I’m a bed!

But that’s where the confusion really starts; the coffin is taken to a place with flowers and candles, and people crying and praying as if they’ve lost someone.

Finally, the coffin is buried, maybe so its dweller can relax in the dark until the next morning, but the next morning never comes. At this point, coffins no longer know what they came to this world for, and why they’re covered in dirt after all the effort put into their construction.

For a few lucky ones, roots will show up and connect them with the trees where they came from.