A talkative tortoise yearns for the distant lake and the sky itself; a simple plan works, until words insist on falling. This version lingers on the physics of pride.
Summer lowered the water until the mud remembered what it had been before it was wet. Two geese visited the shrinking pond and spoke of a lake so wide the wind got lost on it. The tortoise felt travel burn behind his shell. “Take me,” he begged, “I am heavier than your thoughts, but lighter than your promises.” The geese offered a plan as old as lift: bite this stick in the middle while we carry the ends; do not open your mouth. The tortoise agreed with great eloquence. They rose together—an ungainly constellation stitching a line across the afternoon.
Below, creatures pointed. The tortoise wished to explain the engineering, to correct their estimates, to wave. He shifted the story in his mouth and the stick wobbled. A fox shouted, “Look at that foolishness—birds doing a tortoise’s work!” The tortoise, who had learned many lessons but not yet the one he needed, prepared a rebuttal. Pride leans forward just a little before it falls. He opened his mouth to improve the moment and discovered again that gravity has no ear for rhetoric. He fell. The wind wrote briefly on his shell; the ground signed its name.
The geese circled, mourned, and then flew on because there was still a lake somewhere that needed their reflections to feel complete. In the next season, tortoise hatchlings listened to their elders’ retelling. The moral was not “do not speak” but “choose when words serve the height you seek.” The sky remains available to mouths that can also be hands.
