Goldilocks & The Dalai Llama

"Why did you call me here?" Goldilocks asked eventually after a minute passed in relative silence for the first time since her arrival. Papa Bear smiled warmly as his eyes met hers, & he reached out to take her hand.
"I was wondering when you were going to ask me that," he said softly, & at once she felt at ease with his mind, in that rarest of moments when people are fortunate enough to meet others of true wisdom. "Why do you think we called you here?"
"I don't know. Nothing makes sense to me."
"So you do know."
"What?"
"Nothing makes sense to anyone really, & from that nothing everything comes. The salmon isn't all wrong, for all the shite he talks!" he laughed as he turned to wink at the fish, still bubbling in laps of the aquarium.

Mama Bear sat swaying from side to side, as herself, Baby Bear, the ferret & three of the huskies sang a passing rendition of 'Om Mani Padme Hum' in a harmony few would have expected from the sextet starting out. Even the toad was puffing out his cheeks to the rhythm as he stared at the temple that had shared his suffering earlier in the day. He tried to sing himself but discovered that his mouth was glued shut by a build-up of mucus that had been let go for too long.
"Everything doesn't come," Goldilocks said when they finished.
"Yes, it does. You just have to be open to the uni..."
"She's right in a way," the salmon interrupted, popping his head back out of the tank.
"How?" Papa Bear & Goldilocks both said as they turned to face him.
"Everything doesn't come. It's already here. Already everywhere."
"That's not what I..." she tried to say before the salmon raised his voice above hers & told her to stop putting herself down.
"Look, if we were only ever to say what we mean, we'd either be mutes or the Dalai Lama!" The toad tried to laugh but couldn't because his mouth was glued shut, so he shot snot out his nostrils that landed at his feet in an oozing pile of green goo that looked similar to what the toad might use as a backpack were he ever to pack his things together & head off on his travels to somewhere exotic.
"That's disgusting!" Mama Bear squealed, her eyes taken by the bubbling glop at his feet, but the toad just shrugged & went back to staring at Shiva.
"I didn't say I was the Dalai Lama!" Goldilocks said as she grimaced at the toad.
"I shouldn't think so," the salmon replied. "For a start, you're very woman to be him. I'm not sure how focused the monks would be if you were leading them in prayer!"
"They'd be focused alright," Papa Bear chuckled, "But possibly not the way Gotama had in mind!"
"Stop it!" Mama Bear said, jumping to her defence as the others were having a laugh at her expense.
"I knew a llama once," Baby Bear said casually, looking up from a notebook where he'd been busily writing a list of the house rules for the ferret. "But she was the least Buddhist creature I've ever met!"
"Not that sort of llama!" Goldilocks said haughtily, getting visibly defensive as the apparent abuse continued.
"There's other kinds?!"
"The Holy kind."
"Shit, like a llama riddled with bullets?"
"NO!" She shouted loud enough to make the toad sneeze again & the bubble to grow. Papa Bear put his hand on her knee to settle her. "I know what you mean," he said reassuringly as her blood pressure calmed.
"I've been wondering for the last five minutes where Dalai is. It sounds like a much more spiritual llama colony than the one I've been to but maybe that was partly my own fault.." Baby Bear continued, blissfully unaware of his ignorance.
"Dalai isn't a place, well it might be but not to the best of my knowledge," the salmon said, attempting to straighten things out. "Anyway, the llama you're thinking of kind of looks like a cross between a camel & a good big hairy lump of a deer," he continued, looking at Baby Bear, "& the Lama you're talking about.." he turned, "is the recent, & still spiritual, head of state of the Tibetan people.
"Ahh!" Baby Bear said, his eyes returning to the notebook. "You should be more specific next time."
"Nobody's asking you to be the Dalai Lama, a mute, or a llama," Papa Bear said fondly. "I only ever asked why we called you here."
"I haven't been here in sixteen years & yet you know where I live? That's what doesn't make sense to me! Any of it."
"We've been looking after you." He fixed his eyes on her as he spoke. Goldilocks found herself starting to laugh in spite of herself at the absurdity of it all.
"I see that alright, & a grand job ye've been making of it!"
"To be the animal you must first live the life. To gain you must always know what it is to lose, so the fear of that failure keeps you clinging to the mountain. What you experience is what creates you. All animals exist in environment." He reached over with a tissue to the coffee table, where an army of ants had arranged themselves in squadrons around the snot, radioing back to the colony on tiny walkie-talkies to check if they could find any viable use for the unidentifiable substance that was jelly like to the touch. Within seconds they were filing out around it, hauling it up onto their backs from all corners as they began to carry it off, chanting "Mortar!" as they went.
The snot quickly disappeared off the table, but the toad was oblivious to the whole episode, as he was generally oblivious to most aspects of existence if truth be told. Papa Bear still held the tissue in his hand so he shrugged & decided to blow his nose instead. They all had the sniffles. It was that time of year.

Goldilocks; The College Years

She sat for hours at her kitchen table, drinking endless chai as she wondered who would have summoned her to the mountains, & why her of all people. A week after getting kicked out of college, when one of her professors found out about her habit & her means of supporting it when he happened across her late one night.

Did they know what happened? She hadn't been to the Himalayas since she was a little girl & even then it was just for a family holiday that got cut short when she misbehaved.

The sun rose & fell in the day, but these days she never noticed, her basement flat dark enough at the best of times, darker again when she pulled the blind down one day & didn't pull it up the next. The single fluorescent bulb that lit the room hummed light in an aura around itself, leaving large swathes of her bedsit in murky shadows, one of which included the kitchen table where she now sat, staring at the letter. She looked from it to the train ticket that was stapled alongside it. Old Delhi Station, around the corner from where she lived in a rough part of town, to Pathankot, an open return. She needed a reason to leave, & now she had one, albeit one that looked like a drunk four year old had written it blindfolded with the stub of a crayon.

She got up to bring more milk to the boil in a pot on her two ring stove that sat on the drying rack of a sink that constituted the entirety of her kitchen. A black bag clung to the sink's edge, teeming with all manner of new civilisations beginning to form constitutions in their mother tongue in the mould that hugged the pizza boxes & the half-full cartons of gone off milk, separated into layers from the length of their presence; cheese & water, a noble diet. Taking her chai to the bedroom, (a two step journey to the left of her kitchen), she put it down on a bedside locker in the shadows, pulled out a backpack & started throwing clothes around the room in a frenzy to make all proven psychopaths look like solid citizens with upstanding roles in the community.

That was two days ago. She didn't need to arrange much, there wasn't anyone who really cared whether she came or went anyway. An only child, orphaned at twelve when her parents died in a terrible accident involving an alligator & a banjo, she learnt the way of the world from a young age & grew into a beautiful & educated young woman with the taint of the human condition ingrained in her reckless abandon. The people who did care, she pushed away, fearing the feeling of getting too close to someone when you've seen how quickly life can take them from you. She took to reading, that break from the everyday & trip into the magical world of another's imagination drawing her from her own harsher realities. She was insightful, clever & had developed a dry wit of which her parents would have been proud had the octopus not taken exception to the alligator playing the banjo. Wrong place at the wrong time. It happens everyday.

Two days ago & still she wondered, looking at the letter as she climbed onto her bus. 'The world works in its own ways,' she said to herself as the only other passenger on the bus turned around to stare at the foreigner's arrival.

The melting pot

A sequel to a tale where 'Atime' is recognised as a huge oak table on which life, the universe, & everything have come to exist...

Once upon Atime, in a village near a lake, there lived a very small caterpillar called Jenny & a parakeet named Sam. One day, while they were resting together in the shade of a chestnut tree, Jenny said "I wish I wasn't so hairy. All the older girls are beautiful, but I'm hairy & fat."

Sam, perched on a rock drinking a coconut through a straw, said nothing for a moment as he finished chewing on a slice of pineapple. He sat there, his little beak rotating like a cow salivating in a field, staring at a loose stone in the wall that he was sure looked like a cheetah. "D'ya think that rock over there looks funny?" he asked eventually, after a couple of minutes passed in silence, "Or is it just the sugar going to my brain?"

Jenny, with little caterpillar tears forming on her little caterpillar cheeks, refused to look at the wall but instead turned to Sam & sobbed, "You never listen to me anymore!"

Sam continued his intense study of the rock, tilting his head to the side on occasion to see if the perspective would change his observations. "I suppose," he said, in a matter-of-fact manner befitting of a wisened teacher, "If you look at it from the side t does look quite like a whale drinking tea."

He turned his head to Jenny for the first time, her little caterpillar body shaking with rage & followed her eyes down as she lowered them toward the ground. "You are not yet any more to listen to, my child," he said softly in a failed attempt at compassion, 'my child' used more as a turn of phrase more than a literal idea. Jenny's parentage, whilst relatively unknown, wasn't thought to have held any parakeet ancestry.

"When you see what is older, you see what is change. That change is not better nor worse, it just is. Soon you will no longer be hairy, but the soil that you crawl across will miss you. You are growing, it's life. Nothing lives that cannot grow." He held his head once more to the strange rock, & pointing his wing towards it continued; "This cheetah, for example, cannot live because it cannot grow, but if it is helped to do so, it will flourish & thrive."

Jenny, by now recovering from her selfish pout & replacing it with a quizzical furrow of her little caterpillar brow, rose up on her legs, sucked in her cheeks & turned around in circles. "There are no cheetahs here!" she squealed dizzily, steadying herself from the spin. "You are wise in many ways but on this I am lost."

He pointed again at the rock, this time with both wings. "But that's a rock!" She would have shouted, if little caterpillars could shout but instead just eeped. "Ah yes," he replied, "but a rock with the potential to be more."

Together, with a decent amount of trouble considering their physical limitations, they maneuvered the rock back to the home they they shared with a small frog called Boris & a cat with a caffeine addiction. "Two weeks," Sam assured her. "No more, no less. Love, nurture, water & a small mixture of spices ground into butter. The occasional walk, a daily bath, & music to help it sleep."

So they waited for two weeks. Every day Jenny came into the room with the rock. She looked at it, poked it, & even once licked it to see if she could taste a difference. Together they took it for walks around the market & down to the river for lunch. Sometimes in her excitement she even asked Sam if she could bring the rock for a swim, but he was quick to remind her that neither caterpillars nor cheetahs were noted for their swimming. They washed it, they groomed it & once tried to teach it Swedish but it struggled terribly with pronunciation.

On the morning of the second full week, Sam was up early preening his feathers & spreading jam on toast. When it came early into the afternoon & Jenny was nowhere to be seen, he sent to her room to see if she was there. On the ceiling of her little caterpillar room he found her hanging in a cocoon.

He closed the door, went into his room & lay in bed. "Life is what happens when you're not paying attention," he said to himself before the cheetah ate him for his lunch.