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Table of Contents
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Once upon a Time there was an Itch.
Simply, an Itch.
It wasn’t a very big Itch.
It wasn’t a small Itch, either.
It was a medium-size Itch.
And the Itch wanted to scratch.
Once upon a Time.
Sometime later, at about quarter past Once upon a Time, the Itch wandered by a tree and started to scratch against it. Now a very strange thing happened: the Itch began to grow in size. In fact, the more it scratched the bigger it grew.
That’s funny, thought the Itch and kept scratching.
A minute later fur began to cover the Itch, and the fur grew arms and legs and a nose, and before long the Itch looked very much like . . . a bear.
A BEAR????
Well, everybody knows that bears scratch when they itch, but not many people know that itches scratch when they’re bears!
And indeed, the more the Itch scratched the more it was a bear, until finally in the place where there was no bear before now stood The Bear Who Wasn’t There!
The Bear opened his eyes and smiled.
“Absolutely yes!” he said, because he was a very positive bear.
He looked to his left and to his right and discovered that he was all alone.
Am I the first? he thought. Am I the last? And he wondered whether it was better to be first or last when you were all alone.
Next, he discovered he had a pocket.
He slipped his hand into the pocket
and found a folded piece of paper. It said:
The Bear scratched his head. “A very good question.”
He continued to read.
“Oh good,” said the Bear, “I hope I am me.”
And he began to walk.
A Fabulous Forest was now growing all around the Bear wherever he looked, and the Bear could not help but wonder whether the forest would still grow if he wasn’t looking, so he closed his eyes. But then he couldn’t really tell. So he peeked . . .
The forest was still growing! And the Bear thought:
THE MORE I LOOK
THE LESS I KNOW
IF TREES AND FLOWERS GROW
WHEN I’M NOT LOOKING.
It was a beautiful thought, and the Bear wrote it down with a pencil that he found behind his ear.
The Fabulous Forest was very quiet that time of Once upon a Time, and the Bear could hear different types of silence. There was the small silence of the leaves, and the deep silence of the ground, and the old silence of the trees. There was one silence which was the most silent of all and the hardest one to spot: it was his own silence. The Bear listened carefully and followed the sound of his own silence, which took him into the heart of the forest.
Suddenly he saw a peculiar figure in the distance.
It was waving at him.
The peculiar figure turned out to be not one but two peculiar figures sitting one on top of the other. They were the Convenience Cow and the Lazy Lizard.
The Convenience Cow was a large, soft cow in the shape of a sofa. You could also say that she was a large, soft sofa with the personality of a cow. She was an easy cow to get along with. She was also an easy sofa to get along with.
Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.
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