Once upon a time on a farm in California, a seed was thrown to the earth by an underpaid immigrant. Soon afterward, water was sprinkled over it and the many seeds surrounding it. Half a day later, the shell of the seed cracked open and a green protrusion emerged. Roots were produced a little while later and by and by a strawberry plant grew. To the uncaring eye, this plant looked exactly like all the others in the vast automatically-irrigated field. But if one had looked closely, one would have noticed that it wasn’t: it was going to be the one to produce Stan.

Stan wasn’t like the other strawberries harvested that year, because he had a face. He also didn’t taste very good, but nobody knew that at the time. With his face came the capacity for thought. And think he did. All the obvious thoughts came to mind: I’m hungry, I’m thirsty, it’s hot out. Along with some deeper ones: Why is my head attached to a plant? Why don’t the other strawberries have faces? What is that spider doing over there?

He hung from the plant for months thinking, but eventually he was harvested: detached from the plant that produced him. He was put on a conveyor belt with thousands of other berries, was washed, and was put into a plastic container. Then darkness.

When he woke up he was still in the container, but there was light all around it. He was close to the edge of the carton, so he could see out. Dozens of pasty looking people were milling around picking things up. Days passed before he felt the container being jostled. A man with a soul-patch, wearing a checkered short-sleeve shirt, brown canvas shorts and sneakers was looking into the container. He took it over to the checkout stand where it was purchased and subsequently put in a backpack. When the container came out of the backpack it was in a kitchen. The man vanished for an hour during which Stan wondered what would become of him. He heard somebody shout far off, “Guys, I bought these great strawberries.”

A group of younger humans walked in and surrounded the container. It was opened and the berries around him were removed. “This one looks kind of weird.” “Who cares? Eat it anyway.” He felt some relatively blunt pieces of enamel surround him and remove his lower half. “Eww, it tastes like sawdust!” He was dropped on the floor where he remained until he was swept into a dustpan and thrown away.

The End

Another day in Fredonia. Cadfaël was sitting in his rabbit hole, bored (and disappointed that Wednesday morning’s carrot hadn’t been good). He decided to go and watch the trains go by. There were two sets of rails each separated by about twenty metres of open field. When a train had finished going by on one rail, he would hop over to the other one to see if there was one coming there. He found himself wondering where the trains were going. He had only ever considered the area immediately surrounding his burrow. He contemplated this for quite a while. He was so deep in thought that he didn’t notice somebody waddling up next to him.

“You must be pretty bored,” he heard in a heavy African accent. Startled, he shifted his body so he could see to his left and saw Adusa.

“I wasn’t bored, yo. I was just…” but he couldn’t determine what he possibly could have been besides bored, so he let his voice fade away. There was a moment of silence and then he remembered what he had been pondering,

“D’ya have any idea where the trains go?” he inquired of his colleague.

“They’re freight trains, the people use them to carry heavy stuff from one place to another.”

“Yeah, but where do they go?”

“I once had dealings with a badger who was acquainted with another badger, who had a distant cousin who spent his whole life following those rails. He never got to the end of them though, he had to return. He said that somewhere off in the distance there are even more trains and their rails all join together in a place called Pencilvein.”

“Strange.”

“Have you ever noticed that when you’re on a train, and you’re watching the ties, up ahead of you they’re still there, but if you stare straight down they seem to disappear?”

“I’ve never been on on a train.”

In that moment Cadfaël understood what he would have to do to end his boredom, he was going to get on train. Nothing could stop him.