the Purpose and the Porpoise

Animals are funny. I want to find out why. I also want to indulge my up-till-now secret desire to write short stories.

Rather complex in character for a porpoise, Stewarth hated himself. Part of the problem was that he hated the world. Animals, vegetables, and minerals in general couldn't tell him apart from dolphins. Stewarth hated dolphins, too.

"Look at the midget dolphin," the others would say.

"But I'm not a freaking dolphin," our man would say. "I'm an entirely different species."

Stewarth also had a secret desire to fly. He had wings, of a sort; he only wanted to change the medium of his environment, from liquid to gas. Of course, he didn't tell this to the others. He hated them. This is the story of how Stewarth gained the ability to fly, but put it to bad use in plotting for the genocide of dolphins everywhere.

Our hero was lazily following a tasty school of fish. He had already eaten, but wanted more (the glutton). The school of fish surprised Stewarth by leaving the ocean and swimming up one of the rivers that emptied in the area. Stewarth followed them for some time in the murky river water.

Suddenly he got his short snout caught in some weeds, and by the time he had freed himself, he had lost sight of the fish. He swam ahead a few meters and ran smack dab into a school of piranha.

With the vicious fish nipping at his triangular dorsal fin, Stewarth swam for his life in the opposite direction. As the feisty little carnivores got eye level with him, he knew he had to do something drastic. With a graceful upward motion, he was suddenly above the surface of the water.

His nose rammed directly into the side of a bridge. It was a covered wooden bridge, the type you see in coffee table books about Vermont. But this was no ordinary bridge. The guardian squirrel of this very peculiar bridge saw the porpoise's distress, and decided to intervene...