A RANDOM CREATION STORY


“Just a minute, honey,” shouted the bear with a tricycle on its mouth.  He was a relic, an amusement, a bonafide house oddity.  His name was Isaac.  We liked to ride the tricycle when we we and the bear were younger, but then the bear started to eat us, so we stopped.  I lost three sisters that way.
     “Hurry,” shouted the jar of honey which had evolved into an intelligent life form after being left in the freezer for five months.
     “Why in such a hurry?” shouted the bear.
     “Because the moon stew is boiling over.”
     “Sweet mother of Jesus!” cursed the bear as he smacked himself on the tricycle.  I snickered as he ran into the kitchen and stirred the moon.
     My daughter, an honor student at the local middle school, came in, having smelled the moon.  “Hey!” she exclaimed jubilantly.  “Moon stew!  How do you do it, Uncle Tyler?”
     She was addressing me, since she did not know I was her father.  However, my friend Tyler was visiting, and since he believed my name was Godfrey for some strange reason I could never figure out, he assumed she was talking to him.  “Well,” he lied, having no idea how to make moon stew, “I get the moons from the freshest mountaintops on Thursday spring evenings.  Then I sprinkle them with powdered cheese and sing them to sleep.  Then I crush them and mix them with flour and milk.”
     “I wasn’t talking to you, stupid.  I was talking to Uncle Tyler.”  And she pointed to me.
     “Him?  His name is Godfrey, and he’s your father!  And furthermore, he’s mute!  How do you expect him to answer you?”
     She grinned.  “I don’t.  I only ask him questions to tease him.”
     I smiled ominously.  My daughter trembled.
     “Is it true that you’re my father?” she asked.  Then she broke out into a laugh.  “Ha, ha, can’t answer.”
     I yanked a copy of her birth certificate out of my pocket, handed it to her, and walked into the kitchen.  Tyler laughed.
     The bear was eating the honey savagely, and its screams filled the room.  “What are you doing, Isaac?” I asked, since my muteness had all been a cover for a secret Albanian plot.
     “Revenge is sweet!” he screamed.  I shrugged and peeked into the pot.  The moon stew had entirely evaporated.
     “Hey Isaac,” I said.  The moon’s gone.  Should I go get another?”
     “Go ahead,” he said with his mouth full of honey.  I walked out the back door.
     I only saw one moon in the sky, so I grabbed it.  Predictably, my neighbor, Nadine Rufus, shrieked with disgust.  “That’s the last one!  Didn’t your mother ever teach you to share?”
     I pulled a copy of her birth certificate out of my pocket, handed it to her, and went inside.  Actually, the bit with the birth certificate is something I do with all females.  That’s why I’m forced to live in an isolated part of Alaska and only allowed out on holidays.  Fortunately, this was Labor Day, which counted as a holiday for me, so I was staying with my grandfather in Colorado.
     When I got back inside, the honey was dead.  “Sheesh,” I said, “can’t you go a day without eating someone?  First my sisters, then my father, then the milkman, and now this!”
     “Mmph,” answered Isaac.
     I shrugged.  “This is the last moon.  Let’s make it count.”
     “The last moon?” rasped my grandfather, who had just come in carrying a bag of plastic straws.  “That’s a shame.  That means several thousand lunar-centric religions will be extinguished soon.”
     “Good riddance,” I said.  “I know too many people who believe in that junk.  Maybe they’ll convert to Rastafarianism now.”
     “Why would you want that?” asked my grandfather.
     “I wouldn’t, I was just saying,” I mumbled.  I began mixing up a new batch of moon stew when Tyler and my daughter came in.
     “So your name is Tyler too,” said Tyler.
     I nodded.
     “Why didn’t you tell me?  I thought it was Godfrey!”
     I shrugged.
     “And what is this unsightly mess!  Isaac, have you been eating honey again?”
     The bear nodded, knocking his tricycle against the table and breaking a salt shaker.
     “Oh, Isaac,” said my daughter, and she got a rag to wipe up the salt.
     The moon stew was bubbling away, so I turned down the heat and covered the pot.  My grandfather, who inexplicably had no name, sniffed the air in anticipation.  “Ah, the world’s last bowl of moon stew.  To think that my family should have the honor of eating it.”
     “Did you ever doubt?” asked my daughter with joy in her voice.
     “Doubt?  I never dreamed of it.  I thought the moons would last forever.”
     “Maybe we should have put some of them in a museum or something,” said Tyler.  “Now my only children will never see the moon.  They’ll look up into the summer night sky and see only stars and blackness.”  He sniffed.
     “Too bad we can’t reach the stars, or they’d make a good meal,” said Isaac.
     I stared at the bear.  “Can’t you ever think of anything but food?”
     “Tyler!” shouted Tyler.  “You can talk!”
     “Oops,” I said.  “Yeah, I guess I can.”
     “You were lying to me all that time!”
     “Sorry.”
     “Why, Tyler?”
     “I figured that if everyone thought I was mute, women would stay away from me, and then I wouldn’t have to do that thing with the birth certificate so much.  I know how it bothers people.”
     Tears came to his eyes.  “Oh, Tyler.  You’re so sweet.”  He hugged me warmly.
     The telephone rang.  I grinned.  “Well, now that the cat’s out of the bag, I guess I might as well answer it.”
     Tyler gestured good-naturedly toward the phone.  I picked it up.
     “Hello, Tyler Kentlehedgerowkeepmansterfoalbuddy?”
     “That’s me,” I answered, giving the finger to my grandfather for changing the family name.  He was stirring the stew and didn’t notice.
     “We know what you’re up to.  We’ll contact the United States government unless you return to Albania immediately.”
     I froze.  With a clatter I fell to the floor.  Fortunately, no part of me was hurt.
     “Who turned down the thermostat?” demanded my grandfather in his rough voice.  “You all know Tyler doesn’t take well to that!”
     “I did,” said Isaac.  “It was so hot my tricycle was melting.”
     “Well that’s what happens when you make moon stew, boy!  It gets hot!  If you couldn’t take it, you should have left!”
     Isaac rose to his hind legs and challenged my grandfather with his gaze.  In the meantime, my daughter picked up the phone.  “Is anyone still there?” she asked.
     Tyler was good enough to turn the thermostat back up.  I stood.  “Give me the phone, sweetheart.”
     She stood in a defiant pose and shook her head, her ear plastered to the receiver.  After a moment, a look of puzzlement passed over her face, followed by shock.  “You mean, he’s a spy??”
     Everyone in the room looked at me.
     “I confess.  It’s true.  I am a spy.”
     “Tyler!” shouted my friend.  “How could you!  Don’t you love your country?”
     “Of course I do,” I answered coldly.  “I love it so much that I want to protect it from itself.  I had to come here to—“
     “Excuse me,” said my daughter.  “The phone seems to be plastered to my ear.  Can someone help me get it off?
     I sighed.  This had happened before.  “Isaac, do you think you can help?”
     “Sure,” the bear said.  He went over to my daughter, killed her, and began to eat her corpse.
     I slapped my head.  “That’s not the kind of help I meant, Isaac.”
     “Oh?  Sorry.”
     “Anyway, as I was saying, I came to America so that it would not destroy itself with greed.  I wanted to show it that the answer to conflict sometimes lies in making peace, not in making harsh demands.”
     “I can agree with that,” said my grandfather.
     “And to that end, I pretended to be mute so that I could get into the higher circles and listen to national secrets without anyone being afraid that I would spill the beans.  But now,” I added, growling at myself, “now that is impossible.”
     “So what will you do now?” asked Tyler.
     “I have only one option.  I will forget about the whole thing.  Anyone for some moon stew?”
     “Aw,” said my father, “the stew was ruined when Isaac turned down the thermostat.  It’s probably still frozen.”
     I checked the pot.  He was right.  I emptied out the lump of stew onto the table, which broke because it was made of plaster.  All the furniture was made of plaster, in fact, which was probably why the phone had been plastered.  But I would think about that later.
     “It’s ruined,” my grandfather mourned.  “Nothing for it but to throw it away.”
     “Wait!” said Tyler, his free hand batting idly at Isaac’s tricycle.  “Maybe this is what we’ve been looking for!”
     “What?” I exclaimed.
     “The nature of moon stew is that if you freeze it and then thaw it right away and then take it outside and throw it, it travels a huge distance and grows a millionfold!  We could throw it out into space and make a new moon that no one would ever get at!”
     Since he was clearly making this up for no reason, I threw a chair at him.  But his interesting comments had made me wonder about something.  I began to contemplate what he had said.  And then it hit me.  I threw it back at him again and thought some more.  Then it hit me again.
     Enraged, I turned the pot upside-down and stood on it so that I would seem taller.  “By all that’s wonderful, Tyler, why do you keep throwing that despicable plaster chair all over the place?”
     “I’m trying to learn to juggle,” he explained amicably.  He picked up a paperweight and hurled it at me.  “Whoops, I’m not very good at this yet.”  He threw a table at me.
     “Tyler, calm down and come outside.”  I set the example by walking outside with the frozen moon stew.  Nadine had gone inside, so I lost no time in screaming out my anger to the world.  When I was finished Tyler hurled the moon into the sky, and as it grew a millionfold, it stuck there.  There!” I said.  “Now we’ll always have a moon.”  And that was how the moon came to be.
     Isaac came out of the house with a transistor radio.  “I’ve just invented the transistor radio!” he said.  And that was how the transistor radio came to be.
     “Good for you, Isaac,” I said.
     The elated bear bounded over to me and began to roll his tricycle around on the ground.  I stepped gingerly over him and went inside.
     “Did you have a nice swim?” asked my grandfather, who had gone senile.
     “Yes, grandfather,” I answered, following my principle of always lying to senile people.  “Would you like one too?  I’ve got one in my knapsack.”
     He frowned at me.  “Tyler, my boy, it’s time I told you something about your poor dead mother, bless her soul.”
     “Yes, grandfather?”
     “Yes, it certainly is.”
     We fell silent.
     “Well?”
     “Well, what?”
     “What about her?”
     “She was named Tyler.”
     “Now that’s just stupid,” I said, which was also a lie because I actually didn’t care.
     “I know,” he said.  “I thought it was time you knew.”
     I staggered out the door and wandered aimlessly, struck with indifference at this uninteresting news.  I noticed Isaac sitting on a rock and chewing on Tyler’s dead body.  It didn’t bother me because at least that was one less Tyler to get confused about.  “How have you been, Isaac?” I asked.
     He began to blubber.  “I’m sad.  I’m sad because I’m ugly.  I’ve got a tricycle stuck on my mouth.”
     “Nonsense,” I said.  “No you don’t.”
     “I don’t?”
     “No.  So cheer up.”
     “Oh.”  His face brightened.  “Thanks, Tyler.”
     Pleased at a good day’s work, I went to bed.  That night, I dreamed that the moon Tyler and I had put into the sky had always been there, shining as a mysterious beacon to be admired by all the peoples of the world.  I dreamed that in every corner of the globe, parents taught their children about the moon’s eternal majesty and explained in beautiful terms exactly what its presence meant in their unique and fulfilling worldview.  I dreamed that the moon was a true part of history.
     I woke up with tears on my pillow.  My grandfather had been peeling onions in my bed again.

THE END