Bacon or Sausage? (Fable) 1/17/13 Edit

Two little piggy banks sat high up on top of a dresser. The first named Bacon, plumpish and with no clothes at all, save a cheerful cap and four socks, one for each piggy foot, was kind but perhaps half-baked. He spent every hour of the day looking out the window closest to the dresser, dreaming of the day he would fly right through it and high up into the sky. Far beyond the room where he had been placed by Peter, the child whose room this was, he could see the beautiful garden of flowering shrubs and wildflowers where his best friend Dorothy, the yellow canary bird, flew about.

“Good morning Mr. Bacon! tweeted Dorothy as she flew past the window, for tweeting is what real canaries speak. Bacon smiled and thought.“Oh how graceful she looks!”

Just like a sunbeam going about its morning business, and just as yellow, Dorothy flew here, and there, and everywhere tending to her daily chores. One day, Bacon would fly just like her; or so he thought in his feeble porcelain mind.

Then there was Sausage, the other piggy bank who was quite the contrary of Bacon. Machiavellian, which is to say someone who deceives in order to get what they want, would have been a more proper name for Sausage. He walked about the dresser, feeling proud, wearing a suit and top hat like the great opportunist he was. Unlike Bacon’s daydreaming, plotting his escape out of Peter’s room was Sausage’s every day affair. He had plans to run away to the city and become rich. There was only one problem; his current fortune amounted to one single copper coin. That is all Peter had deposited through his slot merely days ago when Sausage had arrived to the room; therefore that’s all the money he really had.

And so twisted tails and button snouts, it came to happen that Sausage had a genius idea to steal Bacon’s fortune; that was bulging with Peter’s savings to the point of blowing up. One morning while Bacon sat mooning by the window chattering with his friend Dorothy, Sausage intentionally dropped his only coin over the dresser, and this one landed down below on the room floor.

“Holy Toast & Scrambled Eggs!” squealed out Sausage, for “squeal” is what pigs cry out when surprised, even if they are piggy banks. “I’ve dropped my coin!”

”Oh no, Sausage!” squealed Bacon as he was also a pig. “Poor Peter will cry a bundle if we don’t get it back! What will we do?

“Fly, Bacon!” suggested Sausage. “Fly to the bottom of the dresser and rescue the coin! You can do it! You can fly! Go on jump!”

Bacon, good and kind-hearted friend, though gravely and exceedingly gullible, agreed to the idea and prepared to jump. Dorothy was terrorized by the bird-brained idea and urged her friend to reconsider.

“Tweet! Oh dear, oh dear!” tweeted Dorothy grave and alarmed. “For all the pigs flying in the sky, Bacon! Do you fancy yourself a bird? This is madness! You’ll only fall to the floor and break into a million pieces!” But Bacon believed her to be impertinent and unconvinced of his imagined talents in the art of flying. “Silly bird, why you think you’re the only one allowed in the sky? I’ll prove you wrong, you’ll see!”

So to prove that he could fly just as easily as the canary bird, Bacon took the first and final plunge into the air and fell to the floor, broken into a million pieces.

Victorious and with a little skip to his step, Sausage slid down to the floor using a jump rope he previously hid behind a wistful portrait of Peter, took all the coins that came out of Bacon’s shattered porcelain body, and ran off to the city to be rich. That morning Peter’s savings flew away, not to mention his breakfast.

The End