The Caterpillar's Bad Luck

In a small town in northeast Kansas, in a maple tree, there lived a caterpillar. He was not one of those cute fuzzy caterpillars, but rather was an ugly, hairless, green thing. But this was nothing to be ashamed of because all of his brethren living in this tree were also ugly, hairless, green things. These caterpillars spent the whole day eating the wonderfully sweet maple leaves. They also fell out of the tree a lot. Not on purpose, of course. They just lost their grip a lot, is all. But they would crawl back up the tree and resume eating. No biggie.

But one day, our caterpillar fell and landed, not on the ground, but on a person who happened to be walking under the branches at that moment.

"Oh great," the caterpillar said in disgust, "now what?" He was a bit of a complainer.

The person he landed on continued walking, oblivious to this new presence on his shoulder. He walked for several blocks, with the caterpillar watching his tree (and therefore, his food) shrink in the distance, until it was out of sight.

"Cripes! I haven't eaten in ten minutes!" he thought. "I'm going to starve!"

Finally, the person entered a building. It was the town library.

"What?!" said Caterpillar. "There are no trees in here! I tell you, if I didn't have bad luck, I'd have no luck at all." The person he was riding pulled some books from the shelves and then sat at a table to read. "Now's my chance to escape," thought Caterpillar, and he crawled down the man's arm and onto the table.

"Ew! A worm!" shouted the man, and he then slammed a heavy book down on our unlucky friend.

The next to last thing to go through the caterpillar's head was, "I'm not a worm, I'm a caterpillar!" and the last thing to go through his head was his guts.

THE END