The Story of the Great Bunny    

 

 

 

A long, long time ago in a galaxy far, far away there lived a happy little village of people. They were happy all the time. They always stayed in their village, and never left it. They simply were not curious to know what lay beyond. Besides, everything they needed was right there: they had lots of gardens with fruits and vegetables, and a clear, blue river ran right through the center of town. Little bunnies and deer frollicked all over, and they were very happy too, even though the villagers ate them regularly for supper.

 

    You see, the bunnies and the deer simply chose to ignore the fact that they were getting eaten, and so they remained happy.

 

    The people in the village had much the same attitude as the bunnies and the deer: they ignored all the bad things that happened and focused on the good things. So they were very happy.

 

    None of the children in this town had to go to school, because there were no teachers and nobody cared about anything that happened outside their village and nobody cared about anything that happened inside their village unless it was a good thing. So the children ran and played all day, and were very care free.

 

    The people of this village did tell each other stories, however, of how they had came to live in this village. The stories said that one day a giant  flying bunny rabbit had descended from the sky and decided it would be really cool to stick a bunch of people in a village with some water and some deer and some vegetables and some fruit and some bunnies to eat. So the all-powerful flying bunny had wiggled its whiskers and waggled its ears and had created this village and all the people who lived in it.

 

    The villagers really liked this story, and so they told it to everybody who would listen (which was everybody) and they made sure their children knew it too, so they could tell their children.

 

    Whenever something good happened people would gaze up at the sky and wave to their creator, the flying bunny, though he was never around to wave back. Whenever something bad happened the people would shake their heads and mutter, 'Great Bunny wills it so' and promptly forget about the whole thing and go take a nap or something.

 

    Everybody was so wrapped up in staying happy and making sure that they didn't have anything to think about that nobody noticed some odd things: First of all, how come nobody had ever seen a flying bunny, much less the Great Flying Bunny? And how come the bunny would have given the villagers other bunnies (albeit land bound ones) to eat? And if the Great Bunny was so nice, why did he let bad things happen in the first place? Nobody ever thought of these things, because if they did they wouldn't have been happy, and they really really wanted to be happy.

 

    Then one day the earth trembled and shook and a giant earth quake levelled the whole town and everybody in it was squashed flat as really flat pancakes. This really was a shame, because the earth had trembled and shook sometimes before, though definitely not this bad. The people of the village had always assumed that the Great Flying Bunny was somehow responsible (though they weren't sure how -- maybe he was thumping his feet?) and they really didn't care anyway because this was the Great Bunny they were talking about, and he would take care of them.

 

    But now everybody in the village was squashed as flat as really flat pancakes, so there was nobody left alive to wonder what had gone wrong, not even a bunny or a deer or a head of lettuce. If there had been anybody alive they probably would have lamented that if they'd just thought to develop buildings that wouldn't fall down so easily maybe this wouldn't have happened.

 

    But mostly they would have lamented that nobody had ever questioned the Great Bunny's judgement in creating a village on a fault line.