The Well
Trevor Shikaze
Once there was a husband and wife who were so unhappy that the husband's stomach turned inside out, and all he could eat was thin soup. They lived in a woods in the middle of nowhere. The wife, who liked to drink and cry at the kitchen table, said to the husband, "You're sick because you keep your feelings hidden. You need to get in touch with your feelings." She was very in touch with her feelings.
So the husband went into the woods and went to a well he knew about, and he dropped a bucket into the well, and he hauled up a dark slimy creature. He carried the creature back to the house where the wife yelled at him for bringing such a vile and filthy thing inside, so he took it out to the woodshed and made it a nest there. He sat and watched the creature, and somehow the sitting and the watching calmed him. He felt relieved.
The days passed and the husband spent more and more time in the woodshed with the slimy creature. The creature seemed happy at first, content to lie on its back and suck its thumb, but one day the husband walked in and found it slumped on its front.. He touched the creature and it stirred, but he could see it was in a bad way. So he returned to the well and he dropped the bucket down and he pulled up another creature, even darker and slimier than the first.
6