Once upon a time, there was a diligent and hardworking beaver. All day long the beaver toiled at his dam, cutting down trees and dragging them to the place where his tiny little brain told him the sound of rushing water was loudest. It was just a very little stream, but it was what was there, so it’d have to do.
“What’re you doing?” the other animals asked him.
“Dunno,” said the beaver. “Feel like it. I like this.”
“You don’t know why you’re doing it?” they said. “That’s silly.”
The beaver grumbled at the laughter of his friends and neighbors, but continued to work hard. Day and night, sun and rain, down came the trees and up came the dam. Plastered with stream-mud, built on tree-bones, higher and higher.
“Silly,” said the mice and the voles and the grubs and the spiders and the millipedes. “Silly!”
And the beaver grumbled some more, but with his mouth full. There was work to be done.
None too soon, either. The rain was coming.
It came in fast and hard and in sheets, accompanied by a wind that could shred treetops and tear teeth from mouths.
The beaver’s teeth were safe inside the beaver’s mouth inside the beaver’s nest under the bank, where he listened to the chaos and madness for two days. On the morning of the third day, the beaver came above the waterline and looked around.
His dam had worked beautifully. The rainwater had channeled itself into the stream, and now the forest was a lovely beaver meadow, comfortably drowned.
“Hah,” said the beaver, as he watched the corpses and homes of his friends and neighbours bob in the froth. “Who’s silly now?”
Then he gnawed down a funny-looking tree, took a big bite out of the weird-looking branch hanging off it, and fried himself to death.
Several of the brighter woodland creatures could’ve told him that was a power line. But they’d all left or drowned by then.
***
Once upon a time, there was a poor and miserable family of two: Jack and his mother. All they had to live in was a shack made of two boards nailed together, all they had to eat was old dry dirt. The one thing they had left in all the world was his father’s old bare-boned stock portfolio.
“Jack,” said his mother, “take that damned thing into town and sell it, would you? We can’t eat paper, and believe me we’ve tried.”
Jack nodded and walked to town and walked back and walked back into town with the stock portfolio this time and sold it off and was almost all the way back home with the proceeds when he ran into a mysterious stranger about five hundred feet tall.
“Psst,” said the stranger. “Want to buy some beans?”
“No,” said Jack.
“C’mon,” said the stranger. “They’re magic.”
“No,” said Jack.
“Plant them and they’ll carry you up into the magical cloud-realm of the giants, where you can steal all the loot your tiny arms can carry.”
“No,” said Jack.
“Aww, c’mooonnn.”
“No,” said Jack.
“Tell you what,” said the stranger. “Pay me just five bucks and you can buy this mystery bag that contains a randomized number of beans with a chance to contain a magic bean of rare, super rare, epic, legendary, or mythical qualities, each exponentially more potent than a regular magic bean.”
“I will buy every single one of them,” said Jack.
And that was how Jack came home with no money, a cartful of painted navy beans, and ten thousand dollars of bean debt, which kept him miserable and enserfed until his grandchildren died without descendants after decades of back-breaking labour and hardship.
***
Once upon a time, there was a king who loved two things: his family, and making numbers go up. His principal means of doing the latter was logging, for his kingdom was well-timbered. Many trees were felled, many logs were hauled, many numbers were delivered to the king, and with these he purchased fine things for himself and his children. This pleased him so much that he would order more trees to be felled, and so it continued for some time, until the kingdom’s landscape was much troubled by erosion. The peasants complained, but they were only peasants and as such irrelevant.
At length came a warning, delivered by an ancient crone who stepped through the castle’s guards as if they weren’t there. She walked through the king’s court and touched each courier, and as she touched them they were stricken dumb, until she stood before the king in a true and deep silence.
“I am of the deep and rotten woods,” said the witch. “I am of the swamp and bog. You’ve wrecked your lands, and now you wreck mine. Leave it be or suffer the consequences.”
“Pish to threats,” said the king. “I will not accede to such boorish behaviour. Nuts to your nonsense, alarmist upstart.”
“Very well,” said the witch. “Until the day you cease to destroy my home, I curse you thus: for every hundred logs taken, one of your children shall fall into an everlasting sleep. Only by returning the landscape to what it once was shall you see them ever wake again.”
“Fuck you,” said the king.
“I’m sorry?” said the witch.
“Fuck you,” said the king. “You think I care? I love two things: my family and making numbers go up. You want to make me choose between them? Easy. Numbers. Fuck you, and fuck my children too. Let the little bastards rot in their beds, I’ll console my grief with luxury. I’ll chop logs just to watch ‘em burn! To hell with you, to hell with them! To hell with this metaphor – I DON’T EVEN CARE ABOUT TREES! ALL I NEED IS OIL!”
The king ripped off his robes to reveal an expensive and well-fitted suit and screamed in pride and despair, as if someone had stuck a lightning rod up his urethra.
“I LOVE IT. I LOVE IT SO MUCH I CAN’T LIVE WITHOUT IT. I LOVE IT AND THE NUMBERS. BY GOD, DAMN YOU AND ALL THIS EARTH!”
Then he hurled himself out the window and ran off into the wilds, on all fours, like a beast. He was never again seen as he was, although an unidentifiable and mashed mass of flesh was pried out of the moving parts of the largest pumpjack in the kingdom some weeks later. It looked to have been trying to mount it.
The witch, the king’s children, the loggers, and the rest of the kingdom perished due to famine as their crops failed and local trade networks dissolved in a furor of paranoia and starvation.