Lo, said the wolf, I do not expect you to understand any of what I say as you listen to my story. He raised his eyes to the blue vault of the skies. But once you are grown, he said, you will understand and remember.

A 365 word tale. Understand it or nay, this is how I wrote it, said the wolf.

oOo

And thus shall I focus on life when eighty, and dwell on the ridiculous actions of the past, when I was a mere calf at forty: old enough to know better, young enough to alter the future ... at forty the adult that I craved to be, reminiscing on when I was a mere twenty year old; young and fresh; planning my life, dreaming of what was yet to be, hoping against hope that the one at age forty will have known of what should be, and the one at age eighty will have understood and appreciated the foibles of youth, accepted their frivolities and grown to a maturity that causes them to smile at the twenty, shake a wizened head at the forty and accept the future as the adventure that it is.

Thus did I gain the forty, and looked at the eighty with trepidation and the twenty with envy.

For the twenty failed in what it had to do. The year before, the twenty knew that it had to perform to keep the future as a glowing ember. That the future was a dream of hope. It told the magical number that it would be the beginning, the alpha, the start of all that would create a life of perfection.

It never happened. Twenty was as lax as twenty-five, thirty, and every year thereafter.

Forty looked at history and accepted it as a weakness. Forty said that the thirties were wrong. A place of regression. So much work needed to be done if the damage was not to be permanent. Forties were strong and real and the twenties looked at it with satisfaction. You did well, it said, and the forties were good.

When the eighties, all grey and balding, peered back on what had been, it smiled .... knowing that nothing any of the decades had done was fitting or just. For this is the curse of the young, it acknowledged, and now that wisdom is nigh, the youth has gone.

Holding its trembling left hand in its right, eighties smiled wistfully as the dark engulfed it and drew it into another world: one in which it was a child again.

Yes!

oOo