Short Stories

The story of the little men on skates

Once upon a time there was a planet where you were born, lived and died on roller skates. He also traveled, dated, and worked on roller skates. Its use was mandatory because walking was a very slow process and took a long time. Some inhabitants didn’t even take their rolling feet off to sleep.

No one was ever late for work or classes. Only the strictly necessary was spoken, because even the syllables were accounted for. All activities that could make us lose precious seconds were forbidden: talking about the rain and the good weather, buying candy, crawling around in the socks in the morning, tangoing, or having babies. A baby takes time and that makes us less effective.

But why did people run like this?

Because on the next planet lived gray and sad beings, who had decided to make people racehorses. To do so, they had transformed them into beings who lived only for speed and stress. These beings made bets and threw people who lost the race into the intersiderial trash. People were nothing more than slaves…

The human body cannot live at 500 kilometers per hour, so people have suffered from various diseases, the most catastrophic of which was skull fractures. Whenever a child fell, his brain would shrink to pea-size. As these fractures were becoming more frequent, people became less and less intelligent. No one had yet come up with the idea of ​​inventing a helmet to protect the head.

But the gray and sad beings were running out of slaves and so decided to invent the helmet themselves and make it compulsory to wear. Because people had their brains protected, they could use it to think. For example, to think about why they should walk so fast.

Then, little by little, they began to slow down and realize that running is no good. That this only enslaved them more to the people of the gray and sad beings. So they began to play, talk, play, make friends, without fear that it would hurt them. And they didn’t even see time pass by …

Everyone signed up for dance courses, watched the sunset, took long walks through the woods. The transformation still took some time. But the stomach and headaches are gone. And babies began to be born again… Sophie Carquain Petites histoires pour devenir grand (2) Paris, Albin Michel, 2005 (19459002]

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