There once was a town that was besieged by beasts. Cats caught the fish from the lake, curling their paws beneath the waters and hooking them out with a quick swipe of their claws. Foxes ate the chickens in the hen house, biting off their heads with a single snap of their jaws. And packs of wolves… well, they would eat your own grandmother in her bed if they caught so much as a sniff of her.
So to keep themselves safe, the people of the town built a wall that stretched around the whole of the town.
In the days that followed its completion, the cats climbed over it, the foxes burrowed under it, and the wolves bit through the wires as if they were string. Only the people of the town were stopped by the wall, trapped inside and unable to escape.
“What’s wrong with the wall?” they wondered, and together set about identifying where they had gone wrong. It needs to be higher, they said. Deeper. Stronger.
Those were the faults they identified. Those were the faults they vowed to fix.
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Notes:
1. Written December 2019
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