Short Story: “Where the Moon
Came From”
long
time ago, when the world was young, and everything in
it, the Earth was not as it is today. There were fruit
trees and nut trees everywhere, of course. But when you
picked a banana, you could eat the whole thing, skin
and all. You didn't have to peel it. Or, you could peel
it and eat the banana, and then you could eat the skin,
which was also delicious. (It had a nice chewy
texture.) And then you could eat the branch it grew on,
and the leaves. You could eat the whole tree, right
down to the bark, which had a kind of …barky
flavor. But you could eat it. It was good. You didn't
have to crack open a nut, because the shell was just as
good to eat as the nut itself. You could eat the grass
and the bushes. You could eat the stones. You could
pick up a handful of dirt and eat it.
Of course, it just
looked like stones and dirt. The earth was chocolate
cake. And the stones were actually loaves of bread and
biscuits and poppy seed rolls and cinnamon rolls and
hard rolls – lots of hard rolls. And all the
little pebbles were actually candies and mints and
chocolates with soft centers.
The rivers flowed
with milk or honey or orange juice. There were
waterfalls of melted
cheese, and waterfalls of hot
fudge sauce and waterfalls of golden caramel. The
mountains were made of ice cream. And natural springs
bubbled up from the ground brimming with ginger ale and
apple cider and root beer and every kind of fizzy soft
drink you could think of.
There weren't any
oceans in the beginning, just rivers and streams and
lakes and ponds, all of them full of food. There
weren't any fish. In fact there weren't any animals at
all. And there wasn't any plain water. That's why there
weren't any real animals or normal plants.
And there wasn't
any homework. That's because there weren't any schools.
That's because there weren't any teachers. That's
because there weren't any students. That's because
there weren't any people.
There were no
offices, no stores, no factories. No nothing. Just lots
of delicious free food. So who needed all that other
stuff?
There was just one
living thing on the planet. A giant. He didn't have a
name because he'd never had any parents to give him
one. (Where he came from is another story which we
don't have time for here.) But not having a name didn't
matter because there wasn't anyone else around to talk
to. There was just this one giant, and the incredible,
edible planet he lived on.
The giant had pale
skin and lots of freckles. And lots of free time. He
couldn't think of anything fun to do with his free time
except eat. There was no one else to play with and no
one to teach him how to do things or suggest games and
hobbies. And there were no chores to do because there
was no reason to do them, and no one to make him do
them. So he ate. A lot. And the more he ate, the bigger
he got. And the bigger he got, the more he ate. Instead
of having a piece of fruit, he would eat a whole fruit
tree. Then he would have two or three. Pretty soon he
was eating a whole grove of them, and drinking a river
of milk to wash it down until he'd drained it dry. If
he wanted salad, he would rip out huge handfuls of
lettuce and tomatoes and cucumbers and radishes and
whatever else was around, then throw them into a pond
of salad dressing.
All the houses were
gingerbread houses. All the rooms were mushrooms. All
the tables were vegetables. The ponds and lakes were
full of soup or pudding and he would bend down like a
horse sometimes and suck these up until they were dry.
Pancakes grew on the ground on stalks, and he would
have a few hundred of those, drenched with maple syrup
from a nearby maple syrup river.
And that was just
breakfast.
Once, when he was a
little hungry, he ate a little of Hungary.
When he got tall enough he would
reach up and grab a cotton candy cloud out of the sky
and eat it.
One of his favorite
dinner was spaghetti. He would go to a volcano that
boiled over with spaghetti sauce. As it flowed down the
mountain side, it cooked a forest of spaghetti. Then it
would snow and the snowflakes were grated Parmesan
cheese.
The strange thing
about the giant is that the bigger he got, the lighter
he became. He began to float, like a balloon. He would
skim over the surface of the earth, looking for things
to eat. He got so big he blocked out the sun wherever
he went. When he looked down, all he could see was his
shadow darkening the earth.
Eventually, most of
the earth had been stripped and sucked dry and scooped
out and emptied of everything he could eat. All that
was left behind were huge empty pits whose surface was
a kind of dark, bitter, chewy rind. He could have eaten
that too, but it didn't taste very good.
Finally, the pits
were all linked up together with each other and covered
about two-thirds of the earth, forming one great
gouged-out pit that meandered here and there like an
old abandoned strip mine with a few untouched islands
rising above it. The giant had become such a gigantic
blimp that he had to carry huge stones in his pockets
to weigh him down so he wouldn't float off into thin
air. They weren't real stones, of course, just stale
dinner rolls.
And the fatter he
got, the lazier he got.
One night, while he
was sleeping he rolled down into the bottom of one of
these gigantic pits and then a shooting star flew up
his nose and woke him. He sneezed and yawned and
stretched and scratched his nose and then he thought,
as long as he was up, he'd have a snack.
