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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
He wasn’t doing enough, for the world, and he knew it. It was killing him. Getting through another day was hard, for this man, knowing how little he was doing, for the world. It’s not like he wasn’t doing plenty. He was doing plenty, but however masterfully he did the indispensable work for which he was appreciated and renowned, and believe me there was plenty of that, there were others, he knew, who did it better, for less (in most cases much less) with fewer expectations, in places he wouldn’t practice, for patients who needed it more and who might even say thank you instead of suing you afterwards for crooked stitches. He hated those pussies, but he felt he needed to be more like them. He’d been enjoying having wealth while publicly despising it and acting suicidal about being so pampered by life (and again ridiculously overpaid) amidst such suffering, in the world. It was an appealing character, but it couldn’t, I’m looking for an analogy: the character couldn’t take root in his behavior, I guess. Anyway, it was hard to pull off “Woe is me I got another pay increase through arbitration; they basically forced it on me,” for a man who declined to donate to charities until he could scrupulously study their financials. After his reboot, he deflected all talk of money, saying he had accumulated wealth inadvertently by making more than he spent and not losing any. All the world required was that he be timely, do no harm, remove the proper organs and leave neat stitches, but he did more, for the world, but never enough. I should have told you. He deprived himself and resented it. It turned him into a bore. “Good deeds not done rob the world,” he said, and died.
Copyright © January 15, 2026
Very Short Novels 
This is a close relative of a Very Short Novel titled Short for Family from 20 years ago. The revisions…