Allegory

The children had washed up on the ring-shaped island. It was a pretty island, which one of the kids called ‘blue’, probably because he confused ‘blue’ and ‘green’. They grew hungry, having been accustomed to having their pablum carried by spoon to their gullets for them at regular intervals. They made do for a spell eating the tough, fibrous plants of the island’s western slope, though they bitched and moaned about it. A buncha weeks later they ventured to the eastern slope of the island and came upon a swath of sweet and tender-soft plant, new to them, which satiated their desires and propitiously served to solve the problem of how to fuel their return to the west now that they were east. Soon they were wearing a path back and forth from the one side of the island to the other to consume the plant in great numbers. They found when they returned to the west that they had a great need to defecate. The children felt pleased, if a little discontent with their contentedness, which is normal, something even a dumb kid knows. Weeks passed and the island began to fill with their feces; at the same time, the sweet eastern plant went from grazed to overgrazed. The children squabbled anew and gnawed, butts aloft and teeth at dirt level, at the remaining exposed stems of the eastern plant. They discovered they could no longer tolerate the fibrous western plants and came back to sit in the denuded eastern side and cried and cried among the remaining barren stalks, mixing tears with feces, until they expired.

And no one ever knew.