Microfiction: Of Dogs and Pigs

25 Word Microfiction: The Guilty Dogs

The poor are condemned to suffering while the affluent are favored and governmentally protected. Why kill the innocent just because the guilty are the rich?


50 Word Microfiction: The Two Pigs

A woman found abandoned piglets and raised them as her own children. When they were to be slaughtered, they saved themselves with wise revelations about love: it was better to die happy and loved than to live miserably in fear. They were not killed, and the King rewarded their wisdom.

Pig and Dog: Happy Together (Barkpost, link)

Bibliography: Twenty Jataka Tales, by Noor Inayat (link)

Note: I used this week's class sources, one story from each half of Inayat's Jataka tales. The first is about a king's leather chariot straps: they were left out in the rain one night, so when they were nice and soft the palace dogs decided to chew them up. The king knew only that dogs did it, so he ordered all the dogs in the city to be killed, but not the palace dogs. The chief of the city dogs figures out the culprits lived within the palace, and went to the king, appealing for the punishment of those who were actually guilty and about to be overlooked, instead of the death of hundreds of innocents (seven hundred, to be exact.) The 25 word story sums up the spirit of the story, if not the tale itself, and reads a little bit like an anti-capitalism slogan. Honestly, I kept coming up a few words short (because the motto is fairly simple) so I had to do a decent amount of word-shuffling and embellishing.

For the second, I used the 50 word format and was able to tell more of the actual story. The older pig was able to sweet-talk their way out of being slaughtered simply by saying poetic things about "letting love envelope you and ease your suffering," and the King brought them into his castle and gave them jewels and perfume. The older pig also became the official settler of disputes in the kingdom, and they lived happily in the palace until the king died. This one was much easier to write because of the added leeway of a higher word count. This one I wrote up as the words came to me and only had to revise once, as opposed to the many revisions of the first story. I really like the microfiction format in general, because instead of telling a whole story you have to really think about...almost, how not to tell a story, but still get the point across.