Eeyor

I woke up to a reminder that even the clouds have better plans. No balloons. No cake. No pennant flags. Just me and the faint smell of mildew. So I put one hoof in front of the other and headed down the hill, or up the hill, hoping to find, I don’t know, a sign. Maybe a semi-decent apple core left behind by a squirrel. It was quiet, like the universe was holding its breath but not for me.

Past the crumpled fence and through the field of grumpy daisies, I wandered into something different. People. Hundreds of them. In wings and fur and sequins and nothing at all, twirling in the dirt, beating drums like they were hungry. At first, I figured it was a protest. Maybe against gravity, the wind. Or Mondays. Then someone handed me a daisy crown, said “Chappy Birthday, Eeyore,” and ran off stumbling. I stood there wondering. And wondered some more. Maybe this was somebody else’s life. Maybe I too was hungry.

It all had the logic of a fuzzy dream. A man on stilts was whispering to a goat in French. A child covered in glitter asked me if I was an accountant. I said no. She said, “Cool,” and plucked a daisy from my crown. No one asked me to explain myself. No one told me to cheer up or what time it was. They just let me be—ears drooping, tail dragging. And for a moment, I felt like I hadn’t been misplaced, but invited. Everybody danced, ate, and napped and got their drums wet with sweat. They build things just to take them apart. Even I, with my gray fur, wasn’t asked to improve. They liked me anyway. Maybe even because my tail was unbrushed.

By sunset, I had a balloon tied to my tail and someone painted a star on my forehead. A man offered me flan shaped like a squirrel. I declined. I heard a sneeze. Maybe I forgot to leave. Maybe next year I’ll forget again. I’ll wake up thinking no one remembered. And I’ll walk up the hill or sideways, following the chappy drumming. The dancing, the sandwiches dripping jam, the unreasonable kindness of it all. And I’ll go. Tail loose, ears low, walking slowly toward exactly where I’m supposed to be.

And as the sun slunk low, bending the sky like an overripe fruit, days added rings to many calendars, the air itself hummed something slurred, something not quite ours, a thing already slipping through cracks, toward some long-forgotten or never born, a flitterflufferwhizzling drift of time that seemed to hum and die all at once.

Forty years passed like a riddle no one needed to understand. The city grew taller with newer distractions, but still, the drumming returned—steady as heartbeats or rainfall. They called it Centenial Eeyore, though most people thought Eeyore was a metaphor or a forest deity. I walked back one last time, bones creaking like floorboards. They gave me space beneath an old tree. Someone offered me a dandelion. I nodded and lay down in the grass. The sun blinked once, then again. A woman in a giraffe costume murmured my name backwards. 

Later, someone swore they saw me yawn. Others said I turned into a stump—plain and uncarved. No plaque. No slogan. Just a stubby little monument that bees adored and children sat on without knowing why. Around me, the festival drifted sideways. A marching band floated six inches off the ground. Time forgot itself and danced away into thin breeze. The park smelled like sand and bark. I may have closed my eyes, or maybe I opened them in a new direction. Either way, I wasn’t sad. I wasn’t anything. I was a stump, a mound of leaves or the pause between songs. No one rang a bell because nothing had ended—only softened into something less bothered by shape.

A forest fall to seed, to birds that eat, to sing a field of trees.