The Fourth Wall

 

Once upon a time there was a bear.  The bear lived in the forest, ate berries, and occasionally climbed trees, just to look around.  As there were no people around to give the bear a name, he was just bear.

          Meanwhile, not too far from where the bear lived was a lost hiker.  His name was Larry.  Larry had a backpack, hiking boots and a hat.  He looked a lot like a hiker who was lost in the woods.  Larry ate bologna sandwiches, Saltine crackers with cheese and drank soda pop.  Larry had never before climbed a tree.  That’s not important to the story, I’m just letting you know.

          Our story narrator, initials: ZC, seldom went hiking in the woods, didn’t care for bologna and avoided bears at all costs.

          As today’s story begins, bear is high atop a tree looking around, when he spots, what appears to be, a lost hiker, while our narrator sits comfortably at home typing this story.

          Unaware of the bear, Larry clomps through the woods and instead of looking where he is going, he’s looking down at his compass, trying to figure out how it works.

          Meanwhile, slowly and quietly the bear climbs down the tree and is now standing directly in the path that Larry is on.

          It is the sound of heavy snorting that first gets Larry’s attention, so he looks up.

He stops in his tracks and very slowly he slips his compass back into his pocket.  Larry isn’t sure what he should do, so he just stands there.

          The bear, of course, immediately begins to question Larry’s judgement.  When faced with a life-or-death situation, Larry’s first thought was to save and protect his compass.   First off, he doesn’t even know how it works.  Second, it caused him to look down instead of where he was walking, and lastly – should Larry get eaten by the bear, the safety of Larry’s pocket isn’t going to keep his little compass from getting crunched between bear teeth, or least of all, get a little bear saliva on it.

          Okay, so while the bear was thinking all this, and our lost hiker Larry, stood frozen in panic, our story narrator left his keyboard long enough to get a second cup of coffee.  Hopefully you didn’t even notice he was gone.  I know, I didn’t.

          I should interrupt here to tell you about a few things on our narrator’s desk, for when he came back with his second cup of coffee, he used one of them.  Now I’m sure you’ve all seen the various canisters in the kitchen.  Some hold flour, some have sugar, some tea, and so on. 

Well in the case of our writer’s office, he has various canisters filled with things like courage, compassion, strength and well, a whole host of attributes he could use whenever someone in his story needed a little something extra.

In the case of this story, our narrator felt the bear could use a little dash of compassion.  So with his non-coffee drinking hand, he sprinkled a little compassion on the bear.  Now, when the bear looked at the scared, lost hiker standing before him, he no longer felt the urge to attack, but rather he slowly walked up to Larry and said  he would be glad to show him how his compass worked.

Not only was Larry surprised but our narrator was as well.  He picked the canister back up and saw that it wasn’t compassion at all but was filled with silly.  Now he was not only wondering who switched his containers around, but he was very much annoyed that he had ruined the tension in the story.  Now it looked like some goofy, talking bear story.  Not at all what he had in mind when he sat down to write.

ZC was so annoyed at first that he shut his computer down and went out and sat on a lawn chair in his backyard.   He wondered if he should just abandon the whole story or just try to fix what had been ruined.  He didn’t really want to write about a silly, talking bear, but he also knew that once an attribute had been sprinkled, it couldn’t be un-sprinkled.  For the remainder of that particular story, that bear would have the ability to speak and could possibly do very un-bear-like things.

It wasn’t until ZC noticed a butterfly land on top of his dog’s squeaky toy hamburger that he began to wonder what would happen if he added several attributes together.  What caused him to think of this was the fact that just as the butterfly landed, the squeaky toy hamburger squeaked.  Never did he think a butterfly would be heavy enough to cause the toy to squeak, but it did.  He heard it.

He got up from his chair and went back into his office to see what attributes he could mix together.  He was excited now to see just what he could create.  He pulled a pencil from the little cup on his desk and grabbed a sheet of paper from the printer.  As he lifted up the first canister, he wrote down what it said on the label.  Just as he had seen before, the label said, Silly.  The canister next to that said, Strength, so he wrote that just below silly.  By the time he had gone through all of the canisters, he had an entire list of attributes written on the page.  

Now he could start to mix them to see what was going to happen.  First, he thought, I will try to stop the bear from being silly, even though he had his doubts.

In a separate container he mixed all the things he imagined a bear should be.  He sprinkled in Loud, Serious, Determined and Active.  He wasn’t sure any of this would overcome Silly, but as he opened the story back up right to the spot where the bear is standing in front of Larry, he sprinkled his new mixture.

Unfortunately, not all of it landed on the bear.  Larry must have inhaled a dose of Active as it was sifting down onto the page.  He immediately jumped up, spun around in mid-air, and ran faster than his hiking boots were ever designed for.

  What ZC discovered was that his new mixture of Loud, Serious, Determined and Active, when sprinkled onto a Silly bear, created a republican.  He recognized it right away.

This was about to be a completely different story.