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.
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