Fable 6

EVIL EDITOR AND THE THREE LITTLE MOLES

Once upon a time there were three little moles who were very much afraid of a certain Evil Editor. You see, he had read their manuscripts and criticized them so harshly that they ran away and hid in a burrow and cried and cried and cried. When the other moles found out about this, they vowed to attack Evil Editor every time he stepped outdoors; and indeed they did so.
Evil Editor was furious and vowed to blow their houses down and tear them limb from limb.

They knew that they’d need a safe place to hide, but they couldn’t agree on what would give them the most security. The first little mole was called Parse, and she knew that punctuation was essential to the structure of a piece of writing, so she built her house out of punctuation marks:

But when Evil Editor came along he said, “Pah! Any fool can learn to punctuate!” And he huffed and he puffed and he blew the house down.

But Parse managed to escape, and she ran to take shelter with her sister Prose. Now Prose knew that words were the building blocks of writing, so she had built her house of words:

But Evil Editor took one look, snarled “Faugh! Your spelling leaves a lot to be desired!” and huffed and puffed and blew the house down. Parse and Prose, terrified, fled to the house of their sister Purpose. Now Purpose, who thought of her work in terms of the whole, had built an ordinary house of bricks and mortar, with a pretty white porch and a nice slate roof. As her sisters huddled behind the furniture, Purpose calmly made tea and baked cookies.

Evil Editor stopped and stared. “Pfui! This looks too easy—there must be a trick to it.” He walked around the house a few times, then chortled. “Ha! I’ll fool ‘em yet! I’m going in through the chimney!”

He climbed up the side of the pretty white porch and onto the nice slate roof, and wriggled into the chimney. And down he dropped—right into the jaws of Purpose’s pet weredingo, Plot, who gobbled him up.

MORAL: It’s nice to be good at punctuation and vocabulary, and you really need a purpose—but you’d better have a Plot in reserve.

--Tal