Common Ground

Originally published in Bamboo Ridge, #122, Summer of 2022

Well, the first thing I thought was, heck, this is what life is? No-thank-you-very-much-sir, I think I preferred that nice, smooth, cool thing that’s not consciousness but not really unconsciousness either, whatever came before the this, with all the inconvenient feelings and thoughts and perception and stuff, none of which I really considered an improvement.

But there I was anyway. What can you do, right?

What I did is just try to forget I started existing in the first place, but it’s hard to forget you exist when you’re seriously the most uncomfortable you’ve ever been in your whole life. Because the whole world was just this cramped little ball and all the things inside of it, which were pretty much exclusively just the various bits of me, plus some gross oozy-goozy stuff that got up in my armpits and crotch and various other crevices. At least it didn’t chafe or anything, but that was just because I couldn’t even move—all I could do was wiggle, or really just kind of twitch, because wiggling would’ve taken up too much room.

I twitched my feet, my elbows, my belly and my tiny little butt, but all they did was thwump against the edge of the world. Pretty underwhelming. Then I twitched my head, though, and instead of going thwump, it went thwack. Much more satisfying. I kept on thwack, thwack, thwack-ing until one of the thwacks turned into a crack, and this little line squirmed its way up the edge of the world, right where I’d been headbutting it.

That’s when I really threw myself into it, using my whole body, from my toes all the way up to the itsy-bitsy muscles around my eyes. I kept headbutting until my face ached and my head hurt (plus a few breaks to catch my breath and take a nap or two), and then finally—snap! My whole world—

—my whole world—

—split open!

And outside…holy heck! There was another world out there, but instead of being all dark and cramped and stuffed with bits of me, this one was huge and open and stuffed with possibilities. And everywhere I looked, there were bazillions of fluffy little weirdos just like me, all of us headbutting our way out from our cramped little me-worlds into a huge, ginormous us-world!

We were all dying to pick that oozy-goozy stuff out from everywhere it’d gotten sticky-stuck, but the other little weirdos and me were all so excited that none of us could stop talking—even when we had our faces buried in our armpits or our tiny little butts, we just kept cheeping about how those shells were so uncomfortable and wow this place is humongous and do you still remember your first thought I bet it was a good one let me hear it. Then once we’d gotten ourselves all de-oozed and our yellow fluff all fluffed up, some friendly giants—like, gianter than any of us ever could’ve imagined—came and dumped all of us little weirdos into this big noisy machine that bounced us around and sifted us out from our shells, which felt great, because I liked the us-world way better than the me-world, even more than the whatever-came-before that I was talking about earlier.

The big noisy machine plopped us out on this really fun circular conveyer belt thingy where some different friendly giant-giants started sorting us into boys and girls, for whatever reason. They weren’t very fast, though, and there were a lot of us little weirdos, so we all just waited our turn and made laps around the conveyer belt, bumbling around and chatting about what we wanted to do now that we’d made it into the us-world. One guy said he thought that maybe even the us-world had a shell, and we could all break through if we thwacked really hard all at once, and then we’d break into this sort of transcendental-us-world, which seemed like a cool concept, but to be honest, he kind of lost me there.

One of the friendly giant-giants finally tossed me into the bin with all the other boys—it was a little intimidating, to be honest, even though I saw transcendental-us-world guy there, too, talking to these other little weirdos about how he thought we were all just parts of a giant hyperconscience, which bent my brain in all sorts of weird twisty ways. And all of a sudden I felt really, really small, absolutely tiny, insignificant in every sense of the word.

But then I realized that it was okay, because, well, I was all of those things—we all were, all of us little weirdos, and even the friendly giant-giants, too, and there was something beautiful in being small and insignificant together. I told that to the transcendental-us-world guy, and he said yes, that’s exactly what he was talking about! Then we all got really excited, cheeping and chirping and hopping around. Another friendly giant-giant came and took our whole bin to a different conveyer belt, which just went one way and had something really loud and angry-sounding at the end, but I didn’t care, I was too busy being happy that I was alive! I watched the friendly giant-giant walk away and thought, wow, what beautiful creatures, even if it looks kind of dopey and can’t understand us little weirdos, how cool is it that we all get to share this us-world together!

Then the conveyer belt ended.

And we fell into the meat grinder.

And as it shredded my feet and my legs and my tiny little butt I thought no wait please help friendly gi—

That was the last thing I thought.