(Short Stories With Long Titles)

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If An Aardvark And A Komodo Dragon Were Actually To Decide To Engage In Combat, It Almost Certainly Would Not Go Like This, But, Then, Maybe It Would As There Are Many Things About The Natural World We Do Not Yet Understand.

 An aardvark and a komodo dragon ran into each other one day, an unlikely prospect as one of them lives in its region, and another lives in its own region, and it does not seem as though those regions would overlap.  Do not expect, though, more specifics than that about which region each lived in, for what good would it do to tell you that the aardvark roams the savannahs of the southern African continent (if that is what it does, and where it does it, also unlikely, as aardvarks do not seem the type to roam, but more the type to stroll leisurely, or perhaps stand and ruminate for lengthy periods of time)? What good would it do? It is not central to the story, whereas the fact that these two happened to meet, at all, is, in fact, central to the story, as it led to a battle to the death, as so often meetings do.

Here is how they met, these two previously-unknown-to-each-other now-mortal-enemies.

aardvark was standing in line outside a coffeeshop when komodo dragon happened by.  It may surprise you that neither aardvark nor komodo dragon has a name, not even a first name, not even a nickname, but then, that is the way of the animal world.  They know how to tell each other apart, animals do, without the use of names.  Their languages do not work the way ours do, involving many more scents and bodily motions than we would ever utilize to communicate, even subconsciously, and they live in cultures where the individual is not as important, as, say, survival, and so they rarely worry about individuality because they are so often worried about survival.

That is true of many animals, if not all, excluding the "human animal" as we like to style ourselves.  We worry very little about survival and worry a great deal about who is on television that night, and so we have the time to devise names and then shorten those names and then make puns on those names.  You will never see a group of salamanders, for example, sitting around calling each other "Gary Larry Bobarry Banana Fana Fo Farry."

They don't go in for that.

When aardvark saw komodo dragon he did not immediately react and that might have been enough to make komodo dragon react in return, for who can tell how these things start?

"I would like to eat you," komodo dragon told aardvark, suddenly, and it should be noted that they did not speak english.  This is a translation, and a loose one at that, but the essence is being conveyed.

"I should like you to not," answered aardvark back, firmly, and he moved forward in the line for his coffee.

"Then we are at an impasse," komodo dragon reasoned, and aardvark nodded, a little.

If An Aardvark And A Komodo Dragon ...Where stories live. Discover now