Giant Pumpkin:



Victor did not like people when viewed all at once. He didn’t engage in conversation because there were too many ways to be misunderstood. He didn’t like handshakes or hugs, and particularly didn’t like birthdays, holidays or any other day expecting people to be excited. He felt phony, as if everyone had to put on flimsy masks and pretended to be people they weren’t.



His mother was a brilliant psychotherapist, and helped countless people with their traumas, and mental illnesses. However, growing up under a parent with such skill, made Victor a fussy little creature. She’s dead now, but her ghost keeps him awake with constant self-analyzing, reminding him of all the ways people could despise him for his errors, a weighty hindsight mixed with curdling doubt. What opportunities did he miss? What relationships he should have spent more time on?



He wasn’t superstitious, and any metaphysical language for his inner world was already trimmed from his mind garden. The single fruitlike structure which did grow in the night soil of his mother’s words, was akin to a giant pumpkin made from a refined and honed self-awareness. It was so large, social interaction required a wheelbarrow. Sometimes he imagined it more like a cart, or pallet jack, maybe a hand truck or dolly. In short; he saw himself as being physically burdened by his own self-perception. He knew he was being egotistical, and he could only tolerate being somebody for so long. He daydreamed about his giant pumpkin rotting out and disappearing.



One October night his fantasy of disappearing took him on a walk. He became lost in his own garden; a vast sprawl of hedges made in self-defense against the gardener. He was not able to return to the house before nightfall. The path back to the house was hidden in the darkness. He curled up in the corner of a hedge and tried to sleep. Victor shivered and waited for exhaustion to bury him. As his eyes dimmed, the night air took on a pregnant silence. Victor welcomed the fresh silence and relaxed into a pillow of soft leaves.



As the hours crept by, the silence started to agitate Victor. The silence grew heavy, and the inner thoughts of Victor were heard in painful clarity to himself. He kept his mouth shut and waited for the silence to be broken. This was an old fight, and the silence could go on for hours; nothing would distract him from the Brownian anxiety jiggling in his head.



Eventually the silence was broken by the caw of crows. Then as Victor looked blankly into the night, a murder of crows flew overhead. Victor wished he could fly into the night like the crow and leave his sleeping body on the ground. The crows seemed to respond to the half-awake Victor and circled around him.



As they looked down on Victor, the crows also thought about being another creature. They thought about being a human being, with arms and legs, and being able to understand the rules of society. The Darkness swirled around both the crows and human, and let their mutual wish come true.



A song of crow voices filled the silence of the night, and the body of Victor disappeared. Victor was gone, his body became the crow’s body and their voice became his voice. The crows were polite and let the human get his wish first. They flew across the night like winkles on a thick blanket of stars. The wind whispered its secrets all around them, and they were free.



Victor woke the next morning in his house, with echoes of the nighttime flight, leaving him with the sense of weightless joy. He remembered the wish, the Darkness and the caw of the crows. He could still hear them, underneath the covers, muffled by the pillows and sheets. As he returned to the duties and chores of the human world, he could still feel the crows inside him, watching the world go by. He found himself describing mundane things, as if he were explaining to the crows.



When the heavy shadow of his self-perception started to bear fruit. Victor found his feet habitually carrying him into the garden to get the wheelbarrow. The crows within called out to him, telling him to leave the giant pumpkin in the garden, let it rot, don’t pick it up. The crows cried out, and with a flutter, Victor was gone. They spent the rest of the day as crows traveling from place to place, doing what crows might consider mundane. They thought in simple terms, trying to explain to the disembodied human about their chores and duties. Victor said nothing and watched from behind their black eyes.



Night came again and the flutter of crows filled Victor with the same feeling of weightlessness. He woke in the next morning as a person again. The rules were being made, and if Victor needed time to escape, the crows wouldn’t mind being his feathers. They were starting to understand too, and today they were hungry. They wanted human food, hot and sizzling and made with fire. They wanted to know the mysteries of cooking.



A mutual understand formed after a few days. Victor would tour them around the side show of human society, and they be there for him if he needed to escape society. By the end of the first week, Victor was comfortable disappearing. The haunted words of his mother could not describe the experience of becoming a murder of crows. For the first time he could remember, he felt out of reach of his mother’s ghost.



Victor’s joy was short lived. On the second week, he woke to find his arm was curled and gray. It was discolored all the way to the shoulder. Only after Victor freaked out, did the crows murmur anything. One of the crows had died, and they were in silent mourning. His freak out included pleading with the Darkness, crying, and sudden swings into anger at the crows. He wanted to go to the hospital, maybe ask if it was curable or reversable, but he knew it wasn’t.



The silence of the crows confirmed everything he feared.



After exhausted days of belligerently refusing to turn into the murder of crows, victor relented. When they took flight, his anger vanished, his confusion disintegrated, and only the dark horizon of a windswept night filled his eyes. Within a few days, things returned to a balanced sharing of time between Victor and the crows.

Days passed, then months until the winter wind another crow. This time Victor didn’t panic, and the loss of his leg signaled a growing trend; his death was soon approaching. He was haunted by a dream; A black sun rose over a previously invisible horizon, and those dark light shines over the white and spectral face of his mother; her eyes empty and cruel, bringing the last retort to a lifetime of constriction, squeezing inevitable judgment, until the dark mouth of the sun swallowed him up.



Such was the melodrama of Victor’s mind. The crows watched from within, underneath, waiting for some dreamtime signal. They perched on the fence of his garden and eyed his body through the windows. The 3 crows secretly conversed with each other. If Victor’s body failed, they all died, and if the crows perished, so did Victor. Their conversation turned to conspiracy, and they formed a plan.



The plan was simple; they would convince Victor to permanently disappear in the flutter of crows.



They pressured him with denial, refusing to turn into a crow when Victor wanted, denying him the joy of their nighttime flight. Soon Victor pleaded with them like he pleaded with the Darkness, promising every pleasure of the human word. The crows remained steadfast, knowing they had the whole of the man’s life to wait; they would not age as crows if they remained underneath Victor, or perched upon his fence.



Another year passed and Victor returned to a reclusive state, unwilling to interact with people or society. His existence became unbearable, and without an escape plan, he was corned in the garden, and the giant pumpkin grew to an enormous size. Victor watched it from his window, and each day the pumpkin seemed to grow with a preternatural speed, until the crown of the gourd peaked over the roof of his house.

Every morning the shadow of the garden grew darker. Then on a rain-soaked winter, Victor gave up. He walked out to his garden and stood before the towering pumpkin, its presence pressing down on him until he was a thin line. Then with a small step, he let the crows out. He wanted to never return to the human world, and upon releasing them, completed the wish of the evening wish with the Darkness.



The swirl of shadows fell on Victor, and each tendril became a crow. The 3 crows cawed and cooed as the body of the man disappeared. They saw the giant pumpkin and called out to the night, to the rain and clouds, and their cry brought a tide of crows. Hundreds and hundreds flew to Victor’s house, and they all feasted on the rotting squash, and each crow thanked the Darkness for their meal.

The Small Revolution:



Hello, I would like to share something about the world. Some things are very hard to see due to their size. Eyes alone will not see it; you need technology to see. To see for yourself, you will need a microscope, or a device capable of 600x times magnification. Perhaps in school or a field trip you have used a magnifying glass; a curved lens where things appear bigger. With enough of these, you can see.



We will in a world where we wash our hands, spray and clean our surfaces. We also use heat and chemicals to clean things. The world of the very small is why we do these things. We call these small things, germs, viruses, bacteria, phages, and diseases. These are a lot of words for things we can’t see without technology, but they wiggle around on our skin, on our desks, in the ocean, in the dirt, in our cars, they are everywhere.



They small things don’t have any brains, they can’t think or talk, they can’t drive cars, or play musical instruments. They can’t paint pictures or sing songs. However, they can so something better than us, and this reason is why we clean our faces, wash our hands, and take showers and baths. They can change faster than we can change.



From the time we wake up to when we go to bed, these small things are born in the morning, have kids in the afternoon, and die before you go to sleep. Some are born and die faster, sometimes as little as 15 minutes. We are slow moving giant buildings to them, and our voices are thunder.



We are also small things in a larger world. As we grow up, we discover a world of giants, and these things which do not change very quickly. Perhaps you don’t see the large things yet either. Some large things I have seen are streets, cities, towns, freeways, and schools. They are made up of lots of little things, all doing their tasks require to make the big thing work. Big things take more time to change. A school building requires paint and a sunny afternoon to change how it looks, but a person can change their clothes or shoes in a couple of minutes.



As you grow up, you will change many times, into all sorts of different people. You might feel exactly the same as you do now, you might even look the same, but like your shoes or your clothes, they get worn out and need to be replaced or fixed.



Perhaps when you grow up, or even as a you are now, you might be overwhelmed with the world around you. There might be something going you don’t understand, perhaps something which makes you cry or causes you to become frustrated and mad. There are large things moving around which are so big, you can’t see them, these things I call countries and companies. They have their own dinner time and lunch time, and they eat things like forests and rivers, and they cut them down to make houses and roads.



I like trees and rivers, and it makes me cry when these things get cut down. I can’t stop those very large things, and sometimes I feel like there is nothing I can do and feel trapped. I sit by myself or with a friend and remind myself I am a very small thing, and I can change quickly.

Another word for change is revolution. Typically, this happens when something larger cannot change fast enough. The smaller things start to add up. This happens with trash; each little piece adds up and becomes a big thing. It fills our oceans, our landfills, and rivers. When the trash becomes too large there will be no rivers and forests.



As a small person, soon to become someone else, please remember you can change. You can change what you throw away, and you can change what you pick up. You can change because you are small. Perhaps with enough change, forests and rivers don’t have to get washed away by trash, or nations, or companies.

The Spinning Room:



I remember the first time I discovered every house has a spinning room. I was 9 and my grandmother was dying. She had been dying my whole life; always in bed, strained coughing, and a parade of people saying goodbye to her. To me, she was the dying grandma, but to everyone else she was a withering hero.



The day she died, everyone cried and cried. They had been practicing their sad feelings for years, and when the day came, there was a flood of tears. It was too much for me, I fled to my room, and locked the door. I could still hear everyone sobbing, so I covered the windows, and pulled a pillow over my head. Still the murmurs found a way into my ears.



I couldn’t take it anymore, and started to spin around in circles, like I was at recess. I got so dizzy I couldn’t hear my parents crying. I kept spinning and spinning, until I got sick and fell. I watched the room in a blur of nausea. When I got up, I couldn’t hear any crying.



I ventured out into the living room, my parents were sitting with calm smiles and pleasant voices.



I asked mt parents about the room she used to sleep in, which was locked, bolted, and forbidden. They never talked about my grandmother again. Which made me think something happened while I was spinning, something to do with the qualities of the room itself. It was as though she never existed. Later, and in the following years all things associated with my grandmother disappeared. It was as though I stepped into a different world, one in which my grandmother had never existed.



Spinning in my room was helpful as a teenager. The nausea of being dizzy drowned out everything, and when I opened the door, the world seemed lighter, or different. I tried spinning in other rooms, like the bathroom at school, but the dizzy was mundane.



When we moved, my bedroom didn’t work, but the kitchen did. I would wait until everyone was away or asleep. I would sneak through the dark hours and twirl around in circles until I felt the world disappear, and nausea washed me into another place where my problems didn’t exist. Spinning in a spinning room was required. Some subtle mechanism would shuffle me into another reality, another dimension of existence. With enough spinning I could travel out of reach of any problem.



When I was 27, I moved out and acquired my own place, I decorated my spinning room, which was my bedroom. I draped thick curtains over the walls and added extra locks on the doors. Work and adult life brought more waves, more problems for which I used my spinning room to deal with. My mother died, and after a few days of relentless spinning, I found a world in which she never existed, and my father was happy. He never mentioned her again, and I didn’t want to return to a place where the grief of her life could be seen.



Later when my father died, I spun for a couple days, and found a pleasant universe where all his possessions where already dealt with, and the rest of my family was at peace. I didn’t mention his existence to my family, because some part of me knew if I brought some secret knowledge from another dimension, the magic of my spinning room would be broken.



I met someone, a partner to share my life with, but love hurt too much. I felt needles which others call kisses, and I heard the whispers of shadows; things not best repeated. I spent a lot of time spinning, so much I was haunted by emotional exhaustion from trying to find a world where misunderstandings are forgiven, only to find nothing. I felt helpless, and spun myself into a nausea so deep, when I finished, I was in a world where they never existed.



Peace followed me into my withered years, gracing me with its unchanging silence. Until one day when my apartment building burned down. My spinning room was destroyed, and I was stranded.



Luckily, I was in a world of great abundance and found a new place soon after. It was a community of older folks like me. It was full of survivors; veterans, vicious warriors who had their own emotional scars. I found a spinning room in the bathroom on the 3^rd floor and used it to dial in the kind of world I wanted to fade away to.



I heard transcendent rumors on the 3^rd floor, whispers of a world without death, a world where everyone fades into the night quickly, rather than the withering gloom withering. After some effort I saw a glimpse. I couldn’t reach it alone; it was too distant for a single occupant spinning room, I needed help.



I told the others living here about a different world, other than being a burden to your family with a slow crawl. I was surprised at their eagerness, how much we were tolerating an existence because we saw no escape, but I saw it, and after a few visitors in the Spinning Room: my vision was shared.



We vowed to travel together; tonight we would all fall into the silence as one. They said goodbye to a few people, I said goodbye to no one. We met in the bathroom of the 3^rd floor.



I went first, showing the cosmic coordinates, the frequency of spin and the duration. After 3 hours, I came to the black gate again and saw the void beyond. The cold and silent plateau greeted me with uncaring eyes. I waited at the threshold until the others arrived. Their forms resembling mine; shadows with thin lines, cast by some unknown light. We gathered ourselves, blending into a single shadow.



We stepped over the threshold and into the world of a greater darkness. I see now without eyes and hear without ears, and feel the world spinning in ceaseless motion, forever escaping itself.