Several times during the past few days, my wife and I both have awakened with "charlie horses" in our legs. Mine have been minor, but hers have been more severe, bad enough for her to wake me up to ask me to help knead them out of her legs.
This afternoon, after we returned home from dinner following a long day at work, she mentioned that her legs still ached from her charlie horse incidents.
I responded to her comment: "Let that be a lesson to you! Don't allow horses in the house."
She snorted at me, then said, "But they're nice horses...."
"Nonsense," I replied, "they're dangerous beasts, with razor-sharp steel teeth and kicks that can cripple an elephant! And if they're not kept under control, they chew on the four-poster bed, ripping the beautiful wood into useless splinters!"
She smiled at me. "Oh,they eat wood. Then they must be saw-horses."
"Yes, they're saw-horses! They're constantly sawing away, taking down wood in any form. I told you, they're dangerous!"
"So," she said, "that's why you so rarely see trees in pastures where you see horses!"
It was then that I had the vision: A strange children's book (i.e., a book for strange children).
The book would be about a sad horse named Charlie.
Charlie the horse was routinely banned from farms where people had taken him in because his habit of chewing on every piece of wood in sight left a massive pile of splinters in his wake.
One day, after Charlie was banned from yet another farm, while he was plodding down a little country road, head down and tears streaming from his eyes, he saw way off in the distance a large peach orchard with hundreds and hundreds of trees. The trees were stout and robust, their green leaves fairly dancing in the breeze and their fruit almost bursting with ripe, sweet flavors and aromas.
The sight of all those lovely trees, with their big, full trunks and lots of bark to bite, made Charlie smile for a moment, forgetting that his latest farm family had unceremoniously ejected him from the barn and chased him off the farm. When a horse smiles, it looks for all the world like the chemical symbol for stupidity. But Charlie's smile, as I said, was brief. For just as the smile caused his nose to begin to crinkle slightly, Charlie noticed another horse standing in the orchard.
The horse Charlie saw standing in the orchard had a very wide stance, its legs spread far, far apart and its backbone forming the peak of its sharp, featureless body. Its tail seemed to be invisible, but its head was round and shiny, a very odd shape and shimmer for a horse.
OK, this is where it stops, at least for awhile. I’m looking for someone else to write the next paragraph. Are you game?
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