Lumi - Little Parables (samples)

The Third Bench

The courthouse in that town had two benches in the hall outside the courtroom. Everyone knew what they were for.

The first was for the accused. You sat there before your name was called and did the math: what you did, what it cost, what you owed.

The second was for whoever kept the list. Who took more than they gave. Who slipped past it. You sat there so nothing went unnoticed, least of all you.

A woman kept the list for years. She was fair. She was exact. Ask her about anyone and she could give you the date and the amount.

Then the list grew long enough to include her, and she did not cross her own name out. She just sat down on the second bench and kept the case open. Mornings, mostly. The way you do.

One day she looked down the hall and saw a bench she had never noticed. It faced the window, out toward the field where something she wanted had once almost happened.

Nobody was on trial there. There was no list. Missing a thing does not need a verdict.

She sat down. The case went quiet. Not closed. Quiet.

She could still tell you the date and the amount. She just stopped charging herself interest.

The Well That Would Not Drink

In a dry country a well gave water to everyone who came, and was proud of never saying no.

The seasons went by. The water sank lower. Still it gave, because a well gives, and giving is not a thing you stop to question.

One afternoon a girl came not to draw but to pour. She tipped her own small jug into the dark.

"What are you doing?"

"Giving back."

"A well gives," it said. "A well does not take."

"I know," she said. "So this is the only way I get to love you back."

The well had spent its whole life afraid of its own bottom. It had never once thought that a bottom is only a floor, and a floor is the thing that holds water.

That summer the well did not run dry, though it gave as freely as ever. The town never knew why. The well never told them about the girl, or that it had finally been given one mouthful back, and had quietly felt the floor under it.

The Man with the Temple Inside

A man carried a temple inside him. Not a small one. Stone steps, a courtyard, lamps burning in every room. In every room, someone seated, listening: a god, a saint, an ancestor, a teacher long dead.

So he was never alone. When a question came, he walked the halls. The ancestor in the west room knew about money. The saint in the niche knew about love. The god at the top of the steps knew grief. He came back out with an answer for everything.

One evening a stranger knocked.

He opened the door already talking. "What do you need?"

"How are you?" the stranger said.

The man stopped. Nobody had ever asked him that from outside. He went quiet the way a house goes quiet after the last guest leaves. He looked down the long hall of himself, at the seated figures. Every one had an answer for every question he ever brought them.

None of them had ever asked him a thing.

The stranger waited. The stranger did not fill the silence.

The man reached down the hall for the voice that always answered. The hall was quiet.

So he said the true thing, the one none of the rooms had a shelf for.

"I don't know how I am."

The stranger nodded, stayed, and didn't ask him to pick it back up.