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All I have to share is that everybody could be happy with a bigger heart and smaller hands. Life could be effortless. Open your mouth to the falling fruit, fill a cup from the sparkling stream, everything else is trouble we get ourselves into. The sunny green world grows its own food, scrubs its air, flushes its waste, charts its course, all despite help from us. What grows on the trees is ours to enjoy until somebody lays down the harvest ladder, nails it to a post, and creates Fence. We should be along for the ride, not living off of tolls. Collect enough food from the trees to survive should be our one commandment. If necessary, kill something delicious. And don’t waste. And don’t steal. Trouble is, seeing two trees together, we imagine an orchard, and seeing an orchard, we imagine it ours, and seeing others in our orchard, we imagine it fenced, and the others expelled. Having spent two nights with the girl of my dreams, eyes as green as spring, he absorbed her and imagined his rivals murdered. In theory, he was the fitter lover; in practice, he was a better fencebuilder than a husbander of trees or girls. He built my sweetheart a house in a tree and ringed it with post and rail. I blamed her for not flying from a window, and turned my back, and spat. His fruit trees choked on worms. His well coughed buckets of ash. His hostage shuttered the windows and doors and turned her sunniness inward. But the fence took root and flourished and fed on the generous earth and overgrew the orchard and the house they had shuttered and barred, the girl so green and sunny and the man who took inventory: One, Two, Everything and Everyone.
Original Copyright © February 11, 2007
Revised Copyright © February 06, 2026
They were torches to our matchsticks. They ate our city’s oxygen along with everything our celebrated bakers, butchers, and distillers prepared to order. Early in the occupation we glimpsed them at the opera, at better cafes, at the racetrack calculating odds. Their uniforms were tailored to broaden their shoulders and taper their waists; the sharp black bills of their caps reflected lustre. No one disputes this. Today the world squints back at the startling clarity of their eyes and calls it all arrogance and brutality, and we don’t deny it, but they spoke our language carefully, not well, but apologetically. You’ll say we were charmed. As more arrived in caravans or after long marches through the provinces, we saw them get out of cabs to help children down from streetcars. Elsewhere, our own terrorists bruised the land with dynamite, derailed trains and unbridged rivers, to the cheers of resisters in exile, but those of us who occupied these roofs and stones had a different sort of politics and bunkered down into the essentials. At brothels, they were favored for their generosity and scrupulous demeanor. For the ladies, and for themselves, they demanded intimate examinations. Ask a madame still alive and she’ll remember. We knew them already as cross-border neighbors and tourists. We understood, also, that the few thousand we hosted were the finest. They should have been as discerning about us. We had them where we wanted them. Memories of their home lives surrendered to the crisp linens, soft women, angular music of our raucous nightlife. After armistace, they resented going home. Partisans condemn us for bringing out our best while battles raged nearby, and we don’t dispute anything that happened. We only want to say it isn’t easy to live, and we too defeated them in our way.
Original Copyright © January 30, 2007
Revised Copyright © January 31, 2026
Very Short Novels 
This is a close relative of a Very Short Novel titled Short for Family from 20 years ago. The revisions…