The Ugly Duckling by Hans Christian Andersen This month's story appears in the English Network Collection of Short Stories.
The Ugly Duckling by Hans Christian Andersen This month's story appears in the English Network Collection of Short Stories.
Once there was a man who sat around all day and did nothing. One day he was sitting outside and a bird came and perched on the fence next to him. The bird asked the man, "Why do you always sit around all day and do nothing?" The man replied, "I'm a failure. I mess up everything I try to do. So, since I can't do anything right, I don't do anything at all."
The bird asked, "If there was something you knew you couldn't fail at, would you be willing to give it a try?"
As a child, Merma once walked upon earth's greenest fields. She experienced the summer grass beneath her feet and wore shoes that carried her over rocky terrain. She stubbed her toes and skinned her knees yet neither did she escape the pain of those wounds than she did the pain of a broken heart as an adult.
She lost her love to as much greed as any man could acquire, greed for luxury , greed for temporary pleasure and greed through self absorbed advancement. Love no longer had value to him, her time meant little and her heart was no longer enough to offer him happiness.
Hush! Hush! Hush! Come closer to me. Look into my eyes!
I always was a fascinating creature, tender, sensitive, and grateful. I was wise and I was noble. And I am so flexible in the writhing of my graceful body that it will afford you joy to watch my easy dance. Now I shall coil up into a ring, flash my scales dimly, wind myself around tenderly and clasp my steel body in my gentle, cold embraces. One in many! One in many!
Over the past two months I have been writing a Christmas story. It is about Santa Claus and the remarkable sequence of events that befell a young girl living on the edge of the rainforest in Palawan, a tropical island where I live.
Of course, for such an apparently far fetched story, it was important to check out the facts. That was easy to do here in Palawan, but how could I interview somebody quite so famous as Santa Claus, who lived far away in a land where I would freeze to death as soon as I got off the airplane?
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[1959] He hid in the woods, watching his father and sister, what they were doing. So we heard that, that is. Most of us felt, and all of us gossiped, he was up to no good. Here he lived an estranged life, hidden in the thick of the deep, like a recluse.
At times it was said, you could smell his cooking of venison, or spot him driving his 1952-pickup to town, dilapidated. His one room shack remained on the 1400-acers his father owned, and there he lived quietly, out of sight and out of the minds of the people in town, except for the intermit conversations, and gossip.
