The Line Between

All the other moths wept. They pressed around him by the billions, railing him a saint and vowing to change their lives. «What the world needs now is love," they cried as one bug. But then the lights began to come on all over the world, for it was nearing dinnertime. Fires were kindled, gas rings burned blue, electric coils glowed red, floodlights and searchlights and flashlights and porch lights bunked and creaked and blazed their mystery. And as one bug, as though nothing nad been said, every moth at that historic assembly flew off on their nightly quest for cremation. The air sang with their eagerness.

«Come back! Come back!» called the poor moth, feeling his whole heart sizzle up this time. «What have I been telling you? I said that this was no way to live, that you must keep yourselves for love — and you knew the truth when you heard it. Why do you continue to embrace death when you know the truth?»

An old gypsy moth, her beauty ruined by a lifetime of singeing herself against nothing but arc lights at night games, paused by him for a moment. «Sonny, we couldn't agree with you more," she said. «Love is all that matters, and all that other stuff is as shadow. But there's just something about a good fire.»

Moral: Everybody knows better. That's the problem, not the answer.

The Fable of the Tyrannosaurus Rex

Once upon a very long ago, in a hot and steamy jungle, on an Earth that was mostly hot and steamy jungle, there lived a youngish Tyrannosaurus Rex. (Actually, we should probably refer to her as a Tyrannosaurus Regina, since she was a female, but never mind.) Not quite fully grown, she measured almost forty feet from nose to tail tip, weighed more than six tons, and had teeth the size of bananas. Although no

intellectual, she was of a generally good–humored disposition, accepting with equanimity the fact that being as huge as she was meant that she was always hungry, except in her sleep. This, fortunately, she had been constructed to deal with.

Thanks to her size this Tyrannosaurus was, without a doubt, the queen of her late–Cretaceous world, which, in addition to great predators like herself, included the pack–hunting Velociraptor, the three–horned Triceratops, the Iguanodon, with its horse/duck face, and the long–necked, whiptailed Alamosaurus. But the world was populated also by assorted smaller animals — much smaller, most of them — distinguished from one another, as far as she was concerned, largely by their degree of quickness and crunchiness, and the amount of fur that was likely to get caught between her fangs. In fact, she rarely bothered to pursue them, since it generally cost her more in effort than the caloric intake was worth. She did eat them now and then, as we snap up potato chips or M&Ms, but never considered them anything like a real meal, or even so much as hors d'oeuvres. It was just a reflex, something to do.

One afternoon, however, almost absent–mindedly, she pinned a tiny creature to earth under her left foot. It saved itself from being crushed only by wriggling frantically into the space between two of her toes, while simultaneously avoiding the rending claws in which they ended. As the Tyrannosaurus bent her head daintily to snatch it up, she heard a minuscule cry, «Wait! Wait! I have a very important message for you!»

The Tyrannosaurus — an innocent in many ways — had never had a personal message in her life, and the notion was an exciting one. Her forearms were small and weak, compared to her immense hind legs, but she was able to grip the nondescript little animal and lift him fifteen feet up, where she held him nose to nose, his beady red–brown eyes meeting her huge yellow ones with their long slit pupils. «Be quick," she advised him, «for I am hungry, and where there's one of you, there's usually a whole lot, like zucchini. What was the message you wanted to give me?»

The creature, if somewhat slow of action, atoned for this failing by thinking far faster than any dinosaur. «A large asteroid is about to crash into the Earth," it chirped brightly back at the Tyrannosaurus. «So if you happen to be nursing any unacted desires, now would be the time. To act them out, I mean," it added, realizing that the Tyrannosaurus was blinking in puzzlement at him. «It'll happen next Thursday.»

«Asteroid," the Tyrannosaurus pondered. «What is an asteroid?» Before the little creature she held could answer, she asked, «Come to think of it, what's Thursday?»

«An asteroid is a rock," the animal informed her. «A big rock up in the sky, drifting through space. This one is about half the size of that mountain on the horizon, the one visible over the trees, and it's heading straight for us, and nothing can stop it. You and most other life on Earth are doomed.»

«My goodness," said the Tyrannosaurus. «I'm certainly glad you told me about this.»

After a thoughtful moment, she inquired, «What does it all mean?»