Friendship Talking Television

One day, Herbert was taking his pet dog for a walk. They were going to play fetch.

"FETCH!" bellowed Herbert, tossing a rusty metal pie plate for the dog to run after.

The dog didn't fetch the metal frizbee. In fact, the dog didn't move at all. It just sat there on the grass. Completely immobile.

Herbert bent down to examine his dog, and realized that it was, in fact, not a dog at all. It was a television set.

"NOT AGAIN!" he said exasperatedly. "That's the eighth time I've accidentally bought an electrical appliance instead of an animal!" He thought, with some embarrassment, of the cat he'd owned for eight years before realizing that it was actually a microwave oven. He then thought of the time he'd bought a cell phone, thinking it was a hamster. He also thought of the only time he ever actually bought a real animal. It was a parrot. He thought it was a TV remote.

"you're not a real dog," he said to the television. It didn't respond. He turned it on, and watched the news.

A news reporter was showing a beautiful Brazilian rainforest getting ripped down to make room for a parking lot.

Herbert changed the channel, and watched two wrestlers smearing vaseline over each other's semi-nude bodies. Herbert was disturbed by this, so he ran over the TV with a bulldozer.

Then he went home to his flower garden.

HIS flower garden was made of concrete flowers instead of real ones. After all, concrete flowers last forever, and they don't come with any of the tiresome burdens of being...you know...alive.

Herbert poured battery acid on the concrete flowers. Then he went in to the bathroom, smeared green paint on the mirror, and screamed at his own reflection, releasing his agony. Then he passed out.

Upstairs, his mother was gazing morosely out the window. Clouds were drifting overhead. Giant, white, shape-shifting blobs. "They look like single celled organisms" she said out loud. And what if they were? What if there were really giant bacteria drifting around in the sky?

"What if I'M a microbe?" she said, "What if humans are just tiny specks, living infinitessimally small, short lives under a massive microscope that is the sky?" She thought of this for a few more moments, and looked down at a highway, imagining the cars to be paramecium, busily and blindly moving towards nowhere in particular until they managed to reproduce before disintigrating completely.

She sighed.

Then she shrugged and closed the curtains.