The following are two brief stories both about Truth but very different in content and form.

The first is a 55-word story called The Search by Robert Tompkins included in World’s Shortest Stories Of Love And Death.

It describes the Pyrrhic victory of a man who searches for the truth...and finds it.

The second tale is a Jewish teaching story entitled The Naked Truth.

It is about our need to dress up Truth in story in order to accept it.

These stories are vivid and memorable metaphors of Truth that stay with us long after we've read them. 

They leave a sour aftertaste that gets sweeter until they make you smile.


Alberico Collina


THE SEARCH by Robert Tompkins


Finally, in this remote village, his quest ended.

There, by the fire, sat Truth.

Never had he seen an older, uglier woman.

“Are you Truth?”

The wizened, wrinkled hag nodded.

“What message can I take from you to the world?” he pleaded.

She replied, spitting into the fire. “Tell them I am young and beautiful.”




THE NAKED TRUTH (Old Jewish Teaching Story)

"Truth, naked and cold, had been turned away from every door in the village. Her nakedness frightened the people. When Parable found her she was huddled in a corner, shivering and hungry. Taking pity on her, Parable gathered her up and took her home. There, she dressed Truth in story, warmed her and sent her out again. Clothed in story, Truth knocked again at the doors and was readily welcomed into the villagers’ houses. They invited her to eat at their tables and warm herself by their fires."

Suicide Cat

It all started because of suicide cat; a black cat with a red collar that always waited for me when I returned from work. As soon as it saw me, it would dart out in front of my car, and I had to brake to avoid running it over. It had been doing this every evening for the previous two weeks. It hadn’t done this to anybody else, just to me, and I was wondering if it had something to do with my car. One night, I decided to put an end to it. No, I did not kill it, though I have to say that the thought had crossed my mind.

That evening, I drove inside the parking lot, when, as usual, it lunged forward. I slammed on the brakes and stopped inches away from its tail. I jumped down and grabbed the cat by the collar. The collar came off in my hand, and I saw it had a Velcro fastener. I looked for a telephone number or an address, but there were none. However, at one end of the collar was a USB key, and I thought it must have been the latest fashion for cat owners.

When I got home, I took out my old laptop. The last thing I wanted was to catch a computer virus. The odd thing was that there was no text file inside, just a picture. It was the photo of a farm with a Roman Amphitheatre in the background. I knew where the Amphitheatre was, but I had never noticed the farm. I decided to take the cat there the next day.

The following morning, I arrived with the cat at the farm. The farmer came out of his house to greet me when he heard the car approaching. I told him I had found a picture of his farm in the cat’s USB collar. He didn’t seem to know anything about it, but smiled politely. He thanked me for the cat, and told me it had been a gift, and he had been sad, when the cat had disappeared. As a sign of gratitude, he gave me a dozen eggs and shook my hand. I remember noticing that he had a ring in the shape of a snake eating its tail; the symbol for infinity. Also, his hand was smooth and manicured, which I found peculiar. As I drove away, I turned to see him holding on to his cat, waving goodbye to me.

I would have forgotten all about it if it hadn’t been for the eggs. I was a receptionist at a local hospital and I’d grown tired of the local cafeteria, so I sometimes brought my own lunch. And that day I had decided to bring a couple of boiled eggs, the ones the farmer had given to me the day earlier.

I was alone in the break room. I had peeled the first egg, and I had cut it in half. As the two halves fell away from the knife, I noticed something dark in one half. I couldn’t believe it. Embedded in the centre of the hardened yoke was a metal nut! A tiny six-sided nut, the type that screws onto bolts. I stared at the egg, turning it this way and that, but for the life of me I couldn’t understand how it could have gotten inside the egg. I had peeled the shell. I had cut the egg in half. How did it get inside?

I knew that Alfredo, a friend who worked as a radiologist in the hospital, was in the cafeteria having lunch, so I called him on his mobile.

“Alfredo, I need a favour. Can you X-ray an egg for me? I’ll make it worth your while.” I said.

“Are you kidding?” He asked.

“No, I’m deadly serious. There’s an aperitif and a pizza with your name written on them if you do this X-ray for me. Meet you in the X-ray room in five.” I replied.

The X-rays of the second egg confirmed it. There was a metal nut in that one too. I thanked Alfredo, asked a colleague to cover for me at the front desk, and headed to my car with the X-rays.

When I got to the farm, there was a fire engine there. Firemen were maneuvering hoses to douse a fierce fire. Four firemen were lifting a body bag into an ambulance. There was a charred hand sticking out of it, and I recognized the farmer’s snake ring. With the corner of my eye, I spotted the suicide cat; it jumped into my arms, and rested its head against my chest. I could feel it was shivering. Its collar had gone.

A fireman shouted to get out of his way and to take the cat with me. I walked back to my car and turned to look at the fire still raging. There was nothing left to do. I put the cat in the car. Before reaching home, I stopped at the side of the road, where I crushed the last boiled egg underfoot, and burned the X-ray. I called Alfredo and told him to burn any copies of the X-ray and not to mention it to anybody. He told me he didn’t know what I was talking about. I smiled; I knew I could trust Alfredo.

When I got home, I cracked open all the eggs and flushed the metal nuts I had found inside them down the toilet. It was then I noticed that the cat had become stuck to the fridge door like a magnet. From then on, I took pity on this creature, and decided to share my flat with it.

The cat never ate anything and never expelled anything. It only drank like a fish but never peed. It recharged in the sun. It never got old. It always chased mice but never killed them; it just scared the living daylights out of them. No dog ever got near it. Suicide cat had no smell and dogs, and all other animals, feared this above all else. They knew.

I met Anna, my girlfriend, through suicide cat; it had tried to get itself run over by her. She nearly drove off the road, and I ended up offering her a drink to make up for it. Months later, Anna became my wife and was the only other person to know the truth about suicide cat.

One evening, decades later, while Anna and I were watching a film, the cat fell asleep on her lap as usual but never woke up.


Alberico Collina

DRAW (a 55-word story)


He’d fall asleep everywhere: on the tube, in the pub, in the office, you name it.

One day he stopped.

He’d fallen asleep in a parking lot.

When he woke up, he was lying on the ground.

Someone had drawn an outline of his body.

In chalk.

Somehow, it rang a bell.

A loud one.



Alberico Collina

Modify to Save Words not to Embellish

The opening lines of The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway are deceptively simple. Hemingway is famous for using few adjectives and adverbs, so when he does employ them, it's usually for good reasons.

The boy's parents tell the boy that the old man is "definitely and finally" unlucky. In other words, they are implying that there is no doubt that he is unlucky and that his bad luck is irreversible. I needed fifteen words to explain that. Hemingway needs three. Two adverbs and a conjunction.

The old man's skiff is "empty" because there are no fish. The sail is "patched with flour sacks" because there is no money for a new one. The sail is "furled" because the day is over. And it looks like the flag of "permanent defeat" because no wind blows in it. In all four cases, the adjective modifies the noun by bringing our attention to what is missing. The adjectives give us an immediate visual cue or emotional dimension, which would otherwise need a lengthy description.

Budding writers are often told to eliminate  adjectives and adverbs to achieve a tight and vivid prose. However, skilled writers are able to employ them exactly for that purpose. And there are few writers who do this better than Hemingway. He's in a league of his own.

"He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish. In the first forty days a boy had been with him. But after forty days without a fish the boy’s parents had told him that the old man was now definitely and finally salao, which is the worst form of unlucky, and the boy had gone at their orders in another boat which caught three good fish the first week. It made the boy sad to see the old man come in each day with his skiff empty and he always went down to help him carry either the coiled lines or the gaff and harpoon and the sail that was furled around the mast. The sail was patched with flour sacks and, furled, it looked like the flag of permanent defeat."




Alberico Collina

Starscrapers

The film The Right Stuff based on the book by the same name written by Tom Wolfe has one of the greatest narrated openings ever. It's a movie about the first men in space. And it begins with a myth. A myth that was waiting to be broken. By one man. Chuck Yeager. The first of a long line of pilots, whose heroic exploits fired the imagination of generations. Pilots and astronauts who reached the stars and made us dream. Men who became legends in their lifetime.

"There was a demon that lived in the air. They said whoever challenged him would die. Their controls would freeze up, their planes would buffet wildly, and they would disintegrate. The demon lived at Mach 1 on the meter, seven hundred and fifty miles an hour, where the air could no longer move out of the way. He lived behind a barrier through which they said no man could ever pass. They called it the sound barrier."


Alberico Collina

EASY DOES IT (a 55-word story)


The wind challenged the sun that it could undress a passerby faster than the sun.

The more the wind blew, the colder the man became until he put on a coat.

The sun grew brighter.

Soon, the man began to sweat.

He undressed and dived into the sea.

“Easy does it,” said the sun, smiling.



Alberico Collina

BLACK SAILS

When Theseus returned from slaying the Minotaur, he looked like a madman and he stank of manure. His eyes were wide open as if in shock, and he seemed to be mumbling something, more to himself than to anyone in particular.  His pupils darted from side to side, and his face and clothes were all splattered with blood.

Ariadne took his sword away from him and kissed him. She whispered some soothing words into his ear and took him by the hand into the sea. There, she bathed and scrubbed him clean until his gaze became calm and he stopped talking to himself.

On the beach, Theseus put on an elegant robe before climbing aboard his ship. The celebrations began soon afterwards, as the ship set sail for home. And shortly after losing sight of land, he laid his head on a sack of grain. And as the sun poured its last amber light on his face, Theseus fell asleep. His body was bruised and tired, but his mind was restless. And Ariadne saw his mouth twitch often as nightmares flickered beneath his eyelids.

Ariadne cut a piece of string and tied it to Theseus' wrist, being careful not to wake him up. She sliced another length and fastened it around her own wrist. That string brought his body back to her intact. It guided Theseus out of the labyrinth. And now that his mind was lost in a maze, she realised it was going to take all her strength to keep him sane after what he'd been through. But she was strong. Mentally she was stronger than Theseus but she didn't know it. Not yet.

During the night, a freak gust of wind ripped the sails. The Captain decided to hoist the black sails Aegeus had given him. They had to get moving as soon as possible, since, without sails, the ship would be prey to pirates.  Aegeus, Theseus’ father, had instructed the Captain to return bearing black sails only in case the Minotaur had devoured Theseus. This way, Aegeus would have known his son was dead before the ship landed. And he would not have prepared a hero’s welcome but a son’s funeral.

The crew also knew what the black sails meant. And they were superstitious. They begged the Captain not to hoist them. They said it was equivalent to taunting Death. But the Captain became furious and told them that nobody would see the black sails at night, and they’d take them down in the morning, once the ripped sails were repaired. He also told the crew that he was going to sleep and warned them that if anybody woke him up or took down the black sails, he would disembowel them on the spot, and wear their guts for garters. This was no empty threat. And the crew knew it.

The next morning, Theseus and the Captain were still asleep. But Aegeus wasn’t. He hadn’t slept all night and had sat on a stone on a cliff top, looking out at sea for his son’s return. As the sun rose, he spotted Theseus’ ship grow taller on the horizon. And at the sight of the black sails, grief pushed him over the cliff into that sea that would forever take his name – the Aegean.



Alberico Collina