Some Original Fiction

Snow Crash, despite it's pulp fiction pace, still has a couple insightful moments like this one:

Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherf... in the world. If I moved to a martial-arts monastery in China and studied real hard for ten years. If my family was wiped out by Colombian drug dealers and I swore myself to revenge. If I got a fatal disease, had one year to live, devoted it to wiping out street crime. If I just dropped out and devoted my life to being bad.

This rang so perfectly true, not for me, but for my wife. She's constantly playing out scenarios involving mexican drug runners, dark alleys, and martial arts(or knives, or guns). And she loves bunnies. So I wrote a story for her:

Melinda was an english lop with long, silken ears. They were finely veined, and Melinda was always careful when grooming them to never leave a mark.

Melinda was never the biggest bunny. Sometimes, in fact, she was the littlest rabbit, but she was always careful to eat healthy foods, and exercise regularly. She would tie her ears back, and make experimental runs in her little part of the forest.

Melinda had a little sister that she loved to visit. They liked to talk about different ways to spruce up their burrows, or different ways to prepare their meals of Italian parsley, with Cheerio croutons, and garnished with small triangles of banana.

One day Melinda heard about a new way to make a banana pie. She wanted to share this with her sister. As she hopped towards her sister's burrow, she began to worry. Something seemed off. Maybe there was too much quiet, or maybe some of the undergrowth wasn't where she remembered it. By the time she got to her sister's burrow, she was creeping forward on her belly.

She sat just inside a hawthorn bush and watched and listened, waiting, almost paralyzed. Finally she heard scuffling, and a group of chinchillas were backing out of her sisters burrow. Dragged behind them, kicking powerfully, and swearing as only she could, was her sister.

Melinda's first instinct was to charge. She always imagined herself as hardcore. She knew she was in shape. She knew she had an aggressive streak. She knew... that in reality, she was the littlest rabbit. And littlest rabbits don't win by charging. Littlest rabbits observe from the shadows. They look for advantages. They find leverage, and they are patient. So she squashed her instinct, opened her eyes, and watched, disapproving, as the chinchillas did their slow, nefarious work.

She saw their darting gazes, alert for dangers from every dark crevice. Melinda saw her angle. She darted from bush to bush, pausing only long enough to rustle a branch, or to leave stones skittering behind her. When the chinchillas, obviously out of their element, began to look all around them in alarm, Melinda leaped, with a prodigious thump, high into the air.

Later practitioners of the buninja arts would call what she did then, "death from above". Her work done, melinda licked her ear. Her sister stepped away from the chinchilla she had disposed of in the chaos of the fray, and invited her back for a cup of mint tea. Melinda and her sister enjoyed a beautiful banana pie.