The Tile Trap

One day a man went into his bathroom and realized that the floor tiles had lit up in an elaborate pattern. When he touched the tiles, they changed appearance. There was a strange logic to their workings, like a rubik's cube or other puzzle. After playing for a few hours, he had managed to make most of the tiles go unlit, but more lit ones kept popping up all over -- behind the toilet, under the counter, even on the lower parts of the bathroom wall. And then he noticed that on the ceiling, one of the tiles had a bomb icon on it. He knew that if the bomb tile became lit, the bathroom would explode.

Frantically he tried to put out all the tiles. For many hours he struggled, but no matter how rapidly he worked, more kept lighting up. "I won't be run out of my own house! But I can't stop the tiles! There are only two possibilities: I can keep working and eventually die, or run away." He kept at it until all his fingers were bruised and he was tired and sweaty. When he could take it no more, he left the bathroom and went to get his jacket and leave the house. But then he stopped, and thought, "I don't have to be defined by this decision. I am my own person." He took his jacket back off and went to fry some eggs for a late brunch.

The Peacock Juggler

A peacock who was starting to lose his tail plumage felt unmasculine and took up juggling to help impress the hens. Soon he could juggle seven bowling pins while standing on one foot. The pea hen he was most interested in didn't seem to care, but other passersby were impressed, so he became a street show on a nearby boardwalk.

On the night of his first show, he juggled 9 pins while skip-roping. And then, (and who can say if this happened because it was in his peacock nature, or just because people weren't putting money in his tip jar), he spread his feathers in an impressive finale. The crowd went wild and he earned a lot of tips. "It was dark, so they couldn't see the missing feathers," he told himself as he went home that night. "But I mustn't let that become part of my act." However, it happened anyway. Every night he would end with a huge flourish of his feathers.

He became a big hit on the boardwalk, and soon was opening for a stage magician. But every morning he would wake up with one fewer feather than before, and he would cry in anguish about the trap he was in. He began drinking heavily, and it started to affect his performance.

Eventually he ordered a very expensive, very elaborate custom taildress. But in order to have it installed, he had to have all his natural tail feathers removed in a painful surgery. There would be no going back from his fake tail feathers.

The new feathers were beautiful, but they didn't look quite real. People noticed. "Hey, those aren't his real feathers!" people would exclaim, especially those who were returning to see his show a second time. "Why did he get fake feathers?" The peacock had no answer to this. The people did not understand, and the peacock did not understand either. He drank more and more heavily until his relatively early demise.

The Tallness Pea

In a far off medieval land, a princess celebrated her fifteenth birthday. One of her gifts was a magic pea, which she ate, and promptly grew to ten times her normal size. The doctors tried to cure her, and the court wizard tried to melt her back to size, but these failures only resulted in embarrassing scars and a couple of beheadings. After a year of being ten times her normal size, the princess gave up all hope of ever being normal-sized again.

She took up knitting, but found it unrewarding, because she had to knit ten times longer than regular people did in order to get a finished product. Jazzercise was likewise useless, because even though she kept in shape, she found that princes were not interested in marrying her. By the second year of being ten times larger than normal, she was in a deep depression. The castle halls had all been heightened so that the princess no longer had to crawl on hands and knees -- instead she only had to duck down into a hunch. This had been a great expense which caused the king to be somewhat resentful, and the king's artist had grown to despise the princess because the widened castle halls were much uglier than the short, attractive halls that had been there before. Likewise, the cook, gardener, horse trainer, and fencing instructor held obvious grudges. The princess, who was shy and had no friends, eventually decided to run away from home. Nobody followed her.

She didn't go far before she found serfs toiling in the field. They ran in terror of her, but she calmly picked up two of their plows and began plowing the earth for them. She was very good at it. In the coming months, the serfs came to call her The Plow Goddess, and though she didn't really make life much easier for them (because she ate so much of what she tilled), she raised their spirits and made them happy, and she felt like she had a purpose in life.

On her eighteenth birthday, she suddenly shrank back to normal size. Her wicked grandmother's curse had run its course. When the king heard, he sent for her to return to the castle at once. The Plow Goddess was no more, but her hands would never be the hands of a princess...