What rough beast, his time stretching out, slouches toward the Jungle Clearing to be bored? It is a fuzzy four-footed marsupial, name of bub. He sighs. He scuffs his paws in the dirt and absently kicks a rock.

"If only Something Would Happen", he says to himself at long last, "this stultifying ennui would pass". But alas, it fails to pass. Just about everything remotely interesting instantly and undramatically fails to happen, all at once.

"Sometimes", sez the caribou, in a rare verbal moment, "You have to make your own excitement." Then the caribou wanders off, having Said His Piece.

The bored one, usually quick to pick up on a new idea, just sighs. The words sink in slowly, very slowly. He laments his boredom again. "I wish there was something to DO", he says.

A long pause ensues as the wombat carefully lists to himself each exciting thing which is not happening precisely now. "What this jungle really needs", he says, thumping fist against paw, "is a spectacle. Something to watch, something to spark the collective imagination of the animals."

But this particular resident of the jungle knows only too well that way out here in the dark forest, the circus rarely comes to town.

Lying back with his forepaws laced behind his head, the wombat thinks about the circus and watches the jungle canopy absently.

Next