This month’s theme:
Turtle Power

May 23 was World Turtle Day, which helps bring attention to our shelled chelonian friends. Visit www.WorldTurtleDay.org to learn more.

“The Tortoise and the Hare Redux”
Fable
By David M. Fitzpatrick

One day, the Hare challenged the Tortoise to another race. But he’d learned his lesson the first time around.

“I’ll not nap this time,” the Hare told the Tortoise. “I’ll run until I cross the finish line and celebrate while you plod along.”

“All right,” the Tortoise said.

The next morning, the Tortoise and the Hare were at the starting line while all the other woodland animals lined up to cheer them on. Well, they were cheering on the Tortoise, who they wanted to win to put the arrogant Hare in his place, but they knew how this one would turn out.

They were ready as the Squirrel stood between them, holding the starting pistol.

“Ready…” the Squirrel said. “Set…”

He fired the starting pistol and the Hare took off—but was soon stunned to see the Tortoise fly past him. That’s when the Hare realized that the Tortoise was wearing roller skates and being towed on a rope by the Eagle. The Tortoise crossed the finish line and was declared the winner again.

“Foul!” the Hare cried. “This race was to be based on our own abilities! Having the Eagle help you was not fair!”

“The race would not have been fair otherwise,” the Tortoise said. “You are clearly the fastest, so without help I could never win—unless you nap again, of course.”

The woodland animals laughed and cheered, and the Hare grew angry. “I demand that we race again!” he said. And this time you cannot use wheels or have help from other animals. This race must be on our own natural abilities!”

So the Tortoise agreed, and the next day they were back at the starting line. The Squirrel got between them with the starting pistol.

“Ready…” the Squirrel said. “Set…”

And he fired the starting pistol, and the Hare took off running. But his glee was short-lived, for suddenly the Tortoise flew by him—flapping his powerful… wings?

The tortoise flew over the finish line, and everyone cheered, and the Hare was angry again. “How is it that you have wings?” he cried.

“The sly Fox is a wizard, and last night he cast a spell on me to give me wings,” the Tortoise said. “They are mine, so I won based on my natural abilities alone.”

“No fair!” the Hare cried, stomping his big foot on the ground as the animals laughed. “Turtles don’t naturally have wings. There is no magic allowed! I demand that you have the Fox undo his spell, and that we race again!”

So the Tortoise once again agreed, and the next day they gathered at the starting line. The Tortoise no longer had wings.

“No help this time,” the Hare said as the Squirrel stood between them. “And no magic.”

“No help,” the Tortoise agreed, “and no magic.”

“Ready…” said the Squirrel. “Set…”

He fired the starting pistol again, and the Hare took off, putting on every bit of power and speed that he had. There was no way that he would lose again!

But he looked over his shoulder just in time to see the Tortoise running like no one had ever seen a Tortoise run before. The shelled wonder blew past the Hare and on to the finish line to deafening cheers.

“How did you do that?” the Hare cried out. “There is no way a Tortoise could run that fast without help or magic!”

“I used neither,” the Tortoise said. “The wise Owl advised me to use a mix of natural herbs from the forest, and their chemical compounds gave me great speed.”

The Hare was beside himself. “No, no, no, no, no!” he cried, stomping his big foot with every word. “You must use nothing! No help, no magic, no herbs. I demand another race! And I demand that you do NOTHING at all to alter who you are, and that you race merely as the Tortoise!”

So the Tortoise agreed, and the next day they met at the starting line again. But the Hare had been stewing over this all night long, and before the Squirrel could step between them, he leaned in to the Tortoise and grabbed the reptile’s neck in his strong rabbit paw.

“Listen to me, you little bastard,” the Hare snarled to him, and all the other woodland creatures sucked in their breaths in shock, “I will win today. If I think you’re using anything to help you, I’m going to kill you. Do you understand me? I will win this race, and if I don’t, I’m going to rip your fucking head off and eat you in a soup tonight!”

The Tortoise gulped through the tight grip and nodded with fear in his eyes as he trembled in his shell.

“In fact,” the Hare added with buck-toothed leer, “you have pissed me off a lot this week, so I just might eat your sorry ass anyway. It all depends on how I feel… after I’ve WON!”

The woodland creatures were silent as the Hare released the terrified Tortoise and got into his starting position. The Squirrel looked just as terrified as he took his place between them and pointed the starting pistol into the air.

“Ready…” the Squirrel said, his voice quavering. “Set…”

And the starting pistol fired, but the Hare didn’t take off. He was too busy toppling over sideways, a hole blown clean through his head. The Squirrel looked stunned, even as the other woodland creatures were dead silent.

The Tortoise held the smoking gun that he had snatched from the Squirrel’s paw.

“Being an arrogant bully is one thing,” he said to the crowd. “Threatening to kill me and eat me is something else entirely.”

“Young-Adult Freakish Martial-Arts Tortoises”
Comic Book
By David M. Fitzpatrick

“So these four baby tortoises, right, they’re flushed down the toilet and end up in the sewers, where they mutate into intelligent humanoid tortoises.”

“Yeah, but… things don’t mutate in the sewers, dude. The sewers are full of piss and shit, but they don’t mutate one animal into intelligent humanoid versions of themselves.”

“Yeah, but this is a COMIC BOOK, man! We can do anything, and ignoring basic common sense is allowed. So they’re raised by a mutated intelligent humanoid rat to become ninjas. How cool is that?”

“Wait, I’m lost. So everything in the sewers apparently mutates into intelligent humanoids. So why don’t all rats and flushed goldfish do that? And what happens to, you know, sewer workers?”

“We just ignore that. It’s a COMIC BOOK, man! We just mutate things when we want to! So these four freak tortoises grow up training as ninjas, and they’re named after famous artists. There’s Bardi, who uses a bo staff; Urbino, who uses two sais; Da Vinci, who uses two katanas; and Simoni, who uses nunchucks.”

“I’m confused, dude. If they’re ninjas, wouldn’t they all learn how to use all of those weapons?”

“Those are just their favorites. COMIC BOOK, man!”

“Right, I keep forgetting that.”

“We can’t lose, man. I mean, you take tortoises, which are slow, and turn them into ninjas—people will love it. And we make them teenagers, so kids will relate to them. They’ll love pizza and make cool pop-culture references.”

“Okay, dude, I like the overall premise, but… maybe inject some reality into them. You know, instead of flushed into the sewers, they’re creations of some mad geneticist. And they pack all the usual ninja weapons and use them all, because, you know, why would any dude choose two sais over two katanas? I could see one katana and one sai, but…”

“You’re not looking at the big picture, man. Outlandish is cool.”

“Oh, yeah, I totally get that, but we can still try to do outlandish that makes some sort of common sense.”

“Common sense? Why would we want to do that? Our audience isn’t THAT sophisticated, man. They’ll eat this shit up. I mean, the world fell in love with a superhero who got spider powers after being bitten by a radioactive spider.”

“Yeah, but that’s scientifically stupid. Maybe some day someone will make a movie and change it to a genetically altered spider…”

“And the big blue schoolboy with the S on his chest… really, he’s from another planet but looks just like humans? And if his kind gets all those powers under a yellow sun, why wouldn’t everyone on his planet relocate to planets with yellow suns?”

“Well, okay, I guess. There’s no point in trying to get this to make any kind of sense when we can just be as dumb as all the others.”

“Oh, no way, man… we will be MUCH DUMBER. The dumber something is, the more people love it. Plus… it’s TORTOISES, man. People will love this.”

“You think so?”

“Sure! There’s no thinking involved, here. Come on—this is a COMIC BOOK!”

“Turtles All the Way Down”
Dystopian Present
By David M. Fitzpatrick

The turtle plodded along with the world on its back. It was an inflatable globe of the Earth that James and Billy had glued to its shell.

“So some religions believe that the world is like this—carried on a giant turtle’s back,” James, the teenager said. “Some say that it’s actually on four elephants, and they’re standing on a giant turtle’s back.”

“So what’s the turtle stand on?” Billy said. He was just ten.

“Well, there’s an amusing anecdote that a lady once argued that it was standing on a larger turtle, and it upon a larger turtle, and so on. When she was asked what was at the bottom of the stack, she said, ‘It’s turtles all the way down.’”

Billy looked perplexed. “That’s ridiculous! How could anyone believe something that silly?”

“People will believe anything if they want to,” James said, and the turtle with the inflatable globe was almost to the edge of the lawn, so he leaped up and ran to get it. He picked it up, spun it about, set it down, and headed back to his young friend. The turtle plodded back across the lawn toward them. “Think about it: You believed in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy until just a couple of years ago.”

Billy flushed red with embarrassment. “I was just a little kid then!”

“Right—you were younger and you weren’t as smart as you are now. You got older and learned to think, and you came to the conclusion that Santa Claus wasn’t real. And why?”

Billy thought on it. “Because anyone with a brain can see that Santa makes no sense. He couldn’t possibly visit every child in the world in one night. He couldn’t make all the toys, and there as no such things as elves. And reindeer can’t fly, and Santa couldn’t fit down a chimney, and all of that.”

“Right!” James said, clapping him on the back as the turtle, with the globe wobbling back and forth on its shell, neared them. “You learned how to think critically. Critical-thinking skills are the tools that you’ll use for the rest of your life to determine what makes sense and what doesn’t.”

The turtle began to angle away to pass them, but James snatched it and held it up. The inflatable Earth, bigger than a softball but smaller than a volleyball, seemed positively gigantic on the back of the little turtle. The turtle’s legs kept moving in mid-air as it tried to walk.

“We should get to the science fair with Myrtle,” James said. “I tell you, Billy, this demonstration is going to be a hit. What a great way to show the importance of critical thinking.”

“How will you present it?” Billy asked, excited, as he came to his feet to follow the older boy toward the school beyond.

“I’ll talk about silly religions that believe outlandish things like a turtle balancing the world on its back,” James said. “Part of what we must always do is teach people how to discern between silly religions like that, and the real religion of Jesus Christ.”

“But James,” Billy said, tugging at the teenager’s sleeve until he stopped and faced him, “how do we know that Christianity is right? I mean… if we think about it like we think about Santa Claus and the world on a turtle’s back, lots of the stuff in the Bible… well, it seems kind of… silly. Virgin births and the Resurrection and the world being six thousand years old and all that.”

James smiled. “Not when you realize that the Bible is the perfect word of God,” he said. “It isn’t some heretic text. It isn’t ridiculous stories passed down orally. The Bible is divinely inspired by God. That’s how we know to have faith in it, even when it seems strange.”

He turned to head for the school. Billy stared after him for several long moments, watching the turtle James carried waggling its feet crazily, its inflatable globe of Earth jiggling about.

Something just didn’t sit well with Billy. He knew he’d have to think on it.

He hurried after James, who was much older and wiser, and caught up with him and his world turtle.

“Turtle Apocalypse”
Zombie
By David M. Fitzpatrick

The turtle hurried across the sand toward the sea. “Hurried” was a relative word; he couldn’t move very fast, but he was making good time for a turtle. It had been startled by the snarling sounds that were approaching.

He plodded as fast as he could. He was almost to the surf when the growling behind caught up with it, and suddenly hands reached down and grabbed him. The turtle waved his legs frantically as he was lifted high off the ground. Then, on instinct, he retracted his head into its shell and scrunched his legs up tight as well.

“Gaaahhhrrr!” the rotting zombie roared, and opened its bloody, drooling mouth wide. It bit down on its meal, but its teeth impacted the shell and did not penetrate.

The zombie tried again, with the same results. It growled and snapped its teeth repeatedly, biting and chomping, but it couldn’t dent the turtle’s protective carapace.

“Yurrrrgh!” it growled, as if in frustration.

And then a gunshot pierced the air, and the slug blew through the zombie’s head. The zombie’s legs buckled and it went down. The turtle landed upside down in the sand.

From further up the beach, a small band of men and women approached. The leader held his handgun, which was still smoking.

“Looks like this one couldn’t get into that poor little turtle,” one woman said.

The turtle had begun waving his legs, trying to find purchase so as to right himself. His head poked out.

The leader holstered his weapon and went to the squirming turtle. He crouched, picked it up, and looked at the reptile.

“Well, we saved you from the undead,” he said, “but now you’re about to be dinner for the living.”

“Kind of ironic,” the woman said. “Before the apocalypse, humans did enough damage to all sorts of animals like this turtle. Now it escaped a zombie, only for us to eat it.”

“Yep,” said the leader as he set the turtle on the ground and drew his hunting knife. “I guess humans suck no matter what—and no matter when—as far as this little guy is concerned.”

David M. Fitzpatrick is a fiction writer in Maine, USA. His many short stories have appeared in print magazines and anthologies around the world. He writes for a newspaper, writes fiction, edits anthologies, and teaches creative writing. Visit him at www.fitz42.net/writer to learn more.