The Story: Blame and Shame

A fable usually ends with a finger pointed. This one refuses the finger. The road is flooded, the light is the color of a held breath, and every creature has already chosen a place: the cat on the chair, the dog at the log, the frog above the truck, the duck in the water as if the water were a throne.

The cat sat on a chair in a hat. The dog on a log with a frog, by the water in the fog. The rhyme is old on purpose. It lets the picture be strange without asking the viewer to solve it. A top hat does not make a cat a gentleman. A chair in the flood does not make a throne. It makes a perch. Each animal is doing the only thing it knows, and the fog does not correct them.

Then the trouble. The chicken kept licking the duck till both ran out of luck, and a black and white firetruck arrived, and the police were called in. Even a kindness, repeated past its welcome, can bring the authorities. The truck is not the villain. It is the world arriving with its lights on, too late to understand the game and early enough to name it an incident. The painting lets the truck sit small behind the frog. The official story is never the largest thing in the picture.

Nobody is the same, it seems. Each has a name and a game. Some are cool, some are lame. But that is ok. No need for blame and shame. This is the turn that makes the work a Painted Poem and not a cartoon. Difference is not a charge. A name is not a verdict. A game is not a sin. The duck is not ashamed of the water. The cat is not ashamed of the hat. The frog is not ashamed of taking the high seat. The fog covers them equally.

Blame and Shame is the first work in Fables in the Fog. It keeps the nursery music and spends it on a grown mercy. Look at them long enough and the lesson is not who was wrong. The lesson is that a life can be odd, interrupted, and still not owe anyone an apology.

Collection:  Fables in the Fog