Margaret Atwood - The Tent

Oh for heavens’ sakes, said Henny Penny, who was loading groceries into her four-wheel-drive supervan. Chicken Little, this is a public place. You’re making a nuisance of yourself.

But the sky is falling! said Chicken Little. I’m sounding the alarm.

You sounded the exact same alarm last year, said Henny Penny, and the sky is still in place. Last time I looked, she added, with heavy irony.

“The sky is falling” is a metaphor, said Chicken Little huffily. It’s true that the sky really is falling, but the falling of the sky represents all sorts of other things that are falling as well. Falling down, and falling apart. You should wake up!

Go home, have a beer, do some meditation, said Henny Penny. Whatever. You’ll feel better tomorrow.

But the next day came and Chicken Little did not feel better. He dropped in on his old friend Turkey Lurkey, who taught at an institution of higher learning.

The sky is falling, said Chicken Little.

That’s one analysis, said Turkey Lurkey. But there’s data to show it isn’t the sky that’s falling. It’s the earth that’s rising. The rising of the earth is simply displacing the sky. It’s due to natural geocyclical causes and is not the result of human activity, and therefore there is nothing we can do about it.

I don’t see that it makes a blind bit of difference whether the earth is rising or the sky is falling, said Chicken Little, as the end result in either case will be that we are minus a sky.

That is a simple-minded view, said Turkey Lurkey, with offensive condescension.

Chicken Little slammed Turkey Lurkey’s office door, causing Turkey Lurkey’s corkboard decorated with clever newspaper cartoons to fall onto the floor. Then he took himself off to Goosey Loosey, his old roommate, who was now the editor of a major newspaper.

The sky is falling, said Chicken Little. It’s your duty to write an editorial about it!

If you’d said, “The stock market is falling,” that would be news, said Goosey Loosey. Granted the sky is falling, in parts. We’re not unaware of it, but the experts are working on it. They’ll have a fix very soon. Meanwhile, no need to trigger a panic.

Chicken Little went away, disconsolate. He took refuge in a bar. He had a few drinks.

Drowning your sorrows? said the bartender, whose name was Skunky Punky.

The sky is falling, said Chicken Little.

They all say that, said Skunky Punky. The bitch not treating you right? So get a different chick, if you want my opinion. Play some golf. Work off some energy. Do you good.

Golf greens have toxic chemicals on them that will give you cancer of the gonads, said Chicken Little.

What sort of bullshit tree-hugging crapola you giving me? said Skunky Punky, who was tired of his job and wanted to pick a fight.

Excuse me, said Ducky Lucky, who’d been eavesdropping. I couldn’t help overhearing. I’m the president of a lobby group dedicated to solving the very same sky-oriented deficiencies that appear to be disturbing you. It’s not something you can take on alone. Together we can make a difference! Got your chequebook handy?

Chicken Little rejected this kind offer of assistance. He formed a group of his own, called tsif—an acronym for The Sky Is Falling, as he had to explain carefully to journalists, at first. He launched a Web site. Soon he had a dedicated pack of disciples. They were mostly woodchucks and muskrats, but who cared? They picketed political gatherings. They blocked highways. They disrupted summit conferences. They carried big signs: Take Back the Sky! No Sky, No Pie, No Sweet Bye and Bye! The Sky’s Our Limit!

This is getting serious, said Hoggy Groggy, who was head of a large development company that sold retirement-home properties in the sky. He himself lived in a bunker designed to protect him from the large chunks of sky that were now falling at random intervals and in unpredictable locations.

He called in Foxy Loxy. Foxy Loxy moved in the shadow world. He did nasty things for a price, and was a devotee of zero accountability. Guy’s gotta put food on the table, was his motto. Not that he bothered much with tables. As far as he was concerned they were a frill.

This Chicken What’s-his-name twerp is making a dent, Hoggy Groggy told Foxy Loxy. He’s giving me a headache. He’s against progress. You should put him out of his misery.

I eat guys like that for breakfast, said Foxy Loxy. It’s the best method. There’s no mess except maybe a couple of feathers, and they never find the body. What’ll you pay me?

The sky’s the limit, said Hoggy Groggy.

And so it was.

They cloned the Thylacine. They got some DNA out of a bone and they emptied the nucleus out of the egg of a Tasmanian devil and they put the Thylacine bone DNA into the egg, and it grew, and they implanted it, and it didn’t work, and they did it again, and it didn’t work, and they did it again, again, again, and they tried it a little differently, and they tweaked it this way and that, and finally they cloned the Thylacine. Out it came, the baby Thylacine, and they nurtured it tenderly and with great interest and there it was, running around with stripes on, frantic, as in the only remaining film of it, where it runs and paces and utters silent yelps because the film is a silent film, and it stops to gaze into the camera with an expression both poignant and severe. It was a Thylacine all right, or it looked like one, or it looked like our idea of one, because it was an animal no one still alive had ever actually seen. Anyway, what they got was close enough. Why quibble?

This event made the headlines, of course it did, and they named the Thylacine Trugannini, a name you see on restaurant menus in that part of the world, as a gesture of respect perhaps, or a way of selling something, or a commemoration, as on tombstones. Anyway, they named it Trugannini, after the last fully Aboriginal inhabitant of that island, who was raped, or that is the story, whose sisters were killed, or that is the story, whose mother was killed, whose husband was killed in front of her eyes, whose father died of grief, who lived in solitude, solitude of a kind that would kill most people, whose bones were dug up and put on display for a hundred years, against her will, but she was dead so what will did she have, what right do the dead have to a will, they are dead after all, they are not present except in bone form, in a glass case, for people to stare at. Like the Thylacine bones, the ones that were stared at for years, the ones they raided for the DNA to make the Thylacine clone.

Crowds visited. A documentary was made. Prizes were awarded. Then what happened? The Thylacine disappeared. It vanished. One day it was there, in solitude, in singleness, in its cage, or rather its large tastefully landscaped compound, running round and around as if looking for something, and then it was gone. It didn’t die of solitude, however. It was sold. A bent scientist retired to Bermuda on the proceeds. A very rich person with refined tastes ate the Thylacine. He ate it in the form of a ragout. He had a yen for the unique, he wanted to be the only person ever to eat a Thylacine. It did not taste very good, despite the care taken in the preparation of it—well, there were no recipes—but it tasted very expensive, and the man who ate it wrote in his secret diary that it was good enough value for the money.