The Story of O – an original story by Donald Jose David Zepeda.

Once there was the letter O.  It was not the letter A, and it was not the letter H.  It was the letter O. Sometimes I think it would try to be the letter P.  In a word like “porch”, for instance, I would often see this o scootch behind the P and then push it to the right, so that the word would become “oprch”.  But even if the O was a P, “pprch” wouldn’t make much more sense, would it?  The O was careless, and reckless, and not at all interested in avoiding potential stumbling blocks in reader comprehension.  I’ve seen this letter O approach the word “apple”, take the first P by its leg there, and swing it around a few times before tossing it into a garbage heap.  Then it’d move into the vacant spot to create “aople”. 

This was a troublesome O, and the letters gathered together one day at council to decide what to do about it.

“It’s just an anomaly,” the representative for the Ts said.  “I’ve only seen two documented cases of this O’s troublemaking so far.” 

“Two is too many,” the representative for the Ps said, understandably concerned about what had happened and what could happen to its constituents. 

“Could we just graft a leg onto the O?” the representative for the Qs asked.

All present turned to the representative for the Os. “We could try this,” it said.  “That would be acceptable to me,” said the representative for the Ps, whose primary concern, as with most letters, was reader comprehension. “We can accept him into the fold and deal with this internally, then”. 

Bothersome O

Later that night, a delegate for the representatives for the Os came to this bothersome O’s house and knocked on the door.  The O inside answered.

“Hello?” it said, opening the door.

The delegate was holding a leg. “Is it alright if we graft this onto you?”

“What for?” asked the O who answered the door.

The delegate thought carefully and answered slowly: “The other letters think you look more like an O than a P,” they said.

“Outrageous!” said the O in the doorway.

“I know,” said the delegate, putting a hand on the other O’s shoulder, “but if you graft this on, then there will be no doubt about it.”

“There should be no doubt about it already!”

“There should be, true, but there is,” said the delegate, shrugging its shoulders. “Please let us graft this on so that everyone can be happy”.

“I will speak with the other letters about this at council tomorrow,” said the O of the household there. “Good night.”

The Council

The next day the O who’d been visited in the night was in front of the council members, holding the leg that the delegate had left at his house.

“What is the meaning of this?” it asked.

“The delegate should have explained it to you,” the representative of the Ps said, disappointed to see the O still looking so O-like.

“You know I’m not an O!” said the O.

“Then why do you live in the O district?” asked the representative of the P’s.

“Cheap rent,” said the O.

“Why are you in words constantly put in a place where Os belong, and not where Ps should be?”

“Writer’s error,” said the O.

“The writer puts all the other letters in the right place, except for you?”

“Yes”

The representative for the Ps let out a sigh. “Well, try attaching the leg to yourself and see if that fixes the problem”

“I shouldn’t have to change because of the faults of others!” the O complained.

“If you do not,” said the P’s representative, ‘we will have to use force to keep you where we think you belong”.

“This is tyranny!” the O said, throwing the leg down on the ground.

“These are your options,” said the representative for the Ps. “What will you do?”

The troublemaking O stormed out of the council meeting without another word.  Two armed guards – a big, burly D and a fit, athletic R – awaited him outside.

“Off to work with you then,” said the D.

They escorted the O to his next worksite. He was to be the first O in “bongo”. The B and the N held him tightly in place.  The word looked like “bongo” now.  The G and second O moved closer, but now “bongo” was so tightly packed that it disrupted the flow of the piece.

“Why can’t you just play along?!” shouted the second O.  The D guard came up behind the uncooperative O and bonked it in the head.  It passed out cold, falling flat on its face. And thus “bongo” became “b_ngo”. Then the fallen O was dragged away, and a new, more cooperative O took its place.

Grafted

When the trouble-making O awoke, it found itself on a hospital bed.  It felt its side.  Someone had grafted the leg onto it. It tried pulling it off, gritting its teeth as it did so. It was on tight, though.  They’d done a pretty good job.

Tears streamed down the O’s face.  It remembered growing up with its grandfather – who had been a P, in the P district.

“No matter what they say,” the grandfather had always told it, ”You are a P and you’re perfect just the way you are.”

The O that now looked closer to a P (an O with a leg on it?) laid its head down against the pillow.  Two more guards entered its room – a G and a K.

“You’re looking good, P” said the G.

The . . now P? dug its head further into the pillow.  The G and K together lifted it up and brought it to its next worksite. The new P was to be the head letter in “potato”. Feeling depressed, the now-P rolled onto his head and the word became “dotato”. The guards looked at each other and shook their heads.

Council Redux

The next day at council –

“This is abysmal,” said the representative for the Vs.

“Unheard of,” said the representative for the Ls.

“What can we do now?” asked the representative for the Ms.

“We pray,” said the representative for the Os.

And so they all put their hands together and prayed.

A light shone from the ceiling and their resurrected prophet crashed through it, descending slowly down from above.

“What’s up?” it asked.

“Can you make our new P happy, so that it will do its job correctly?”

“No,” said the prophet.  It floated slowly back up through the new hole in the ceiling. The light faded the further from the building that it got.

“Darn!” said the representative for the Os. “I thought that would work.”

The letter representatives put their heads together and tried to come up with a new plan.

“Let’s just kill it,” said the representative for the As.

“That seems a bit harsh,” said the representative for the Qs.

The As representative shrugged.

“Let’s put it on welfare,” said the representative for the Us.

“Why should we give it a free ride for being disobedient?” asked the F’s representative. “Soon you’ll see other letters causing trouble to get out of work.”

“But that’s the thing,” said the K’s representative. “most letters do want to work. This one just has a disability or something,”

“Why don’t we just not employ it –  but not give it welfare, either?” asked the Ps representative.

“So let it starve to death?” asked the representative for the Cs.

“It might not starve to death,” said the representative for the Ws. “We could try this approach and see what happens.”

“And step in with welfare if it looks like it’ll be needed?” asked the Us representative.

“Or just let it die,” said the As representative.

“Let’s figure it out as and if need be,” said the rep for the Ws. “I expect from the makeup of this council that it will be welfare given, if need be. But we will not tell it that”.  The rep for the Ws folded its hands. They looked around at the other representatives in the room.  Most of them were nodding, but not all. “So are we willing to give this plan a shot?” it asked.

Enough of them said “sure” or “aye” for it to be approved.

No Justice, No Oeace!

Not too long later, a couple of enforcement officers approached the word “dlanning” – an R and a T.

“P,” said the R officer.  The now-P fell onto its side. ”You’re dismissed from duty,” the R said. “Go home.”

And so the now-P went home to its place In the O district, where good housing policy had kept the rents cheaper. And it laid in bed, and it slept.  And it slept, and it slept. Eventually it began wasting away. It one day became so thin that it looked like an “I” with a little bump on top.

The council had forgotten about the now-P, now that it wasn’t causing trouble anymore.  The representatives there all handled other affairs and all seemed fine as far as they and their constituents were aware.  The representative for the As remembered, but didn’t feel it necessary to tell anyone. 

So one day the now-P died – the one that used to look like an “O”– who was the adopted grandchild of an unmistakable P.  Why didn’t it have more friends? I dunno.  Its troublesomeness must have bothered the other letters too much.  It would often lash out at letters that tried to get too close– until eventually, its defense mechanisms had thoroughly worked to allow it to live in a world of its own, where no one else could tell it no and be happy themselves.

Reading the obituaries, the Us representative gasped in shock, only now remembering about this letter.  It decided to handle the now-P’s funeral, feeling guilty about having forgotten.  They invited the other representatives to come out for it, and the neighborhoods of the Os and the Ps and anyone that it might have worked with.  Despite the outreach, few letters came. Most of them were too busy and either didn’t know or didn’t like this now-dead letter much anyway.

After the service, the representative for the Us placed a rose in front of the dead now-Ps grave.  On the tombstone it read – “O”, and below that it read “Rest in Oeace”. The Us representative had asked for that representation and that message itself.

“I’m sorry I failed you, O,” the representative for the Us said, pronouncing the O like a P.  It put its hand on the P’s grave. “Rest in Oeace.”