There was a contest. The contest had rules.

There were only two entries into the contest. Both of the entries were good. They were oh, so, so good. Both of the authors are winners. They are winners in life, and they are winners in the contest.

This contest was a wild success. There will be another. Soon.

Once upon a time, there was a writer. He decided to write a short story for a literary contest. This was a contest for everyone. The contest was hosted by a Literary Extravaganza Web-site. It was a writing contest. It was a writing contest to be played by its readers. The site's 'Letters from Readers' section stated that there are not any readers, but the author doesn't waste time with details. The rules for this contest were simple and three:

A) Write a fable, or a fairy tale, or morality tale sort of thing that features animals as characters.

B) Included in the story must be an illicit love affair between two characters, which is to be followed, at some point, by their brutal deaths, as to show the devastating effects of illicit love affairs. Also included in the story must be a car with a flat tire.

C) There should be a moral of the story, and the author should include the moral of the story, and it should be simply stated in one line, at the end of the story. Note: the moral of the story can not be about the devastating effects of illicit love affairs.

And so, the writer started writing:

There was a rabbit. The story must be 500 to 700 hundred words in length.

The rules failed to say whether the fable must be 500 to 700 hundred words in length including or excluding the one-line moral at the end.

The author then realized that technically, the contest stated that the story must be 500 to 700 hundred words in length. This is the equivalent to 50,000 to 70,000 words. So the author decided to simply write the story in 532 words, including the one-line moral at the end.

The rabbit was driving. The story must be e-mailed to support@eastjordanmarket.com and it must have the subject line: "contest fable".

The rabbit picked up an attractive amoeba hitchhiker. The authors must include their full name and their phone number.

The rabbit hit a nail in the road. His tire popped. He pulled over. He opened the trunk to retrieve the tire kit. He fixed the tire. He got back in the car. He saw the amoeba participating in a simple act of self-love, which was causing him to asexually reproduce all over the dashboard. All of the sudden, the author identified a problem with his plot so far, the contest stated that included in the story must be an illicit love affair between two characters, not between two daughter cells of the same character. So the author interrupted the development of this inferior to replace the amoeba character with a python. When the rabbit got into the car after repairing the flat tire, he was instantly enamored to the python and started caressing his neck. The python responded by humping the rabbit's leg, python unhinging his jaw, and swallowing the rabbit whole. Unfortunately for the python, the rabbit was still grasping the tire iron, and subsequently slit the length of the snake's esophagus. Both animals died. Oh. And the entries must be submitted by 11:59 PM on November 20, 2 000.

Moral: Sometimes it just doesn't work out.

Once upon a time, a turtle lived in a man-made ecosystem in the courtyard of the Hilton Hotel and Suites in Tucson, Arizona. Her name was Beatrice, and she was born into the ecosystem.

Another turtle lived in the selfsame ecosystem, and his name was Louis. Louis was not born there, but was bred in a basement in south central Kansas, purchased by the Hilton Hotel and Suites of Tucson and transported to the Hilton ecosystem some 26 days after his birth. He would have found himself in the Hilton ecosystem 25 days after his birth, but the vehicle that transported him there suffered a flat tire near the bustling metropolis of Gallup, New Mexico, delaying his arrival by a full twelve hours. Not that Louis knew. His view of the trunk remained constant, even if the progress of the car did not.

Louis and Beatrice had a few very important things in common. First, they had both lived horrifically mundane lives. Second, the boredom of their days had inspired each of them to teach themselves to read. Third, both Beatrice and Louis had an acute appreciation for irony.

When Beatrice and Louis finally met, it was a happy day. Neither had met another literate turtle before, much less a turtle with a grasp of irony. They became fast friends, and laughed about lots of things in their days together, like the irony of having evolved into hard-shelled creatures in order to ward off enemies when they lived in an ecosystem where the only real threat they encountered daily were the coins thrown ostensibly as wishes - but usually aimed at the head of innocent creatures such as themselves. They called each other "Bebop" and "Rocksteady" (henchmen of Shredder, archenemy of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, who are veritable icons in turtle pop culture) because they thought it was ironic. And it was.

Beatrice soon loved Louis more than she loved irony. She hoped more than anything that he would feel the same passion for her, and that they could spend the rest of their days making jokes that no other turtles would understand. She knew that she and Louis would be mocked for their monogamous commitment to each other, since turtle culture is very pro-procreation, but she didn't care. She loved Louis, and that was all that mattered.

Indeed, Louis did harbor a reciprocal love for Beatrice, but alas, he had read a story during his formative days that had changed his life forever. It was called "The Tortoise and the Hare," and it had a moral: Slow and steady wins the race. Louis had thought it a good moral and had tried to apply it ever since. He chewed slow and steady, he swam slow and steady, he even bit small children who were guests of the Hilton in a slow and steady fashion. This was the approach he took in his relationship with Beatrice, too.

Beatrice didn't know that Louis was trying to be slow and steady in revealing the passions of his heart; she thought he didn't love her. Then she was tragically killed in a mishap involving a sledge hammer, nitrous oxide, and a seventh grade science experiment gone terribly wrong.

Louis, needless to say, was sad and lonely when Beatrice died. He tried to console himself by reading a lot and thinking about irony, which somehow wasn't nearly as clever or funny without her. He was so depressed, he started reading Moby Dick, because it seemed even more slow and pathetic than his life in the Hilton ecosystem. And it was. In fact, this "quintessential epic of American literature," as someone had bombastically called it on the back cover, was so dull that it killed Louis. He was literally bored to death.

Literate amphibians rarely find true happiness; seventh graders and nitrous oxide are a dangerous combination; and love often ends in brutal death. None of these brilliant truisms are the point of the story. The point was recorded by the kind soul who found the cold, lifeless body of Louis and put it in its place of eternal rest. The epitaph on the wooden stake read:

Never read stories with morals.

LETTERS FROM READERS