Peking Pieces

2000 Mythsteries and Other Pithy Shorts #25

Once beyond the time when you and I were born, the boomings kept coming on and a crowded country named after dishes went into crazed crackdown.

The rulers, already born and before they knew what was waiting in the closet, in an effort to chink the breach passed decrees to the masses that a man and a woman could have but one name bearer.

Lo! Those otherbodies then began newly programmed breeding about the time the foreseers learned to tell the coming-parents which sex their parts had spawned.

Peoples at that age, before they olded and needed compassion, found femmes to be of little useage and with the bodies' ingrown wisdom they turned to deleting skirt wearers and thus produced merely brawn even though each unit could be three -- one man, one woman and a single moppet.

Forsooth! Time and tides didn't wait for them to sharp up. One day the rulers beheld a widespread overage of the three-leggeds. But by then it was sorely late.

And so it came to pass, the dish nation died out even though the three-leggeds did practice unproductive procreation among themselves.

And that's how it was when farseers became doomed by their own shortsight.