Kristin E. Andersen's Word Studio

The Normal People of Yed

All the people in the village of Yed were very normal. The baker baked. The candlestickmaker made candlesticks. The tinker tinkered. The shoemaker made – what else? – shoes. Everybody in Yed did just what you’d expect normal people to do.

And the people of Yed liked it that way.

Then one day a woman came to Yed. She moved into an old house on the edge of town with her husband Shem and their dog Bluk.

Right away the people of Yed noticed there was something different about this woman.

For one thing, she had strange habits.

She wandered the streets of Yed with a wild look in her eyes. She wandered at all hours of the day or night, with no rhyme or reason to her schedule. Sometimes you’d hear her talking to herself. Or laughing. That was the worst. What normal person laughed out loud? To HERSELF?

Sometimes she would just stand in the village square, staring at the sky. She would stand there a very long time. What normal person stood around like that?

Sometimes she would disappear for days on end. Strange noises bubbled up from her old house on the edge of town – cackles and footsteps creaking the floor boards late at night and long sighs and the occasional “That’s it!”

That just wasn’t normal.

Everyone in Yed thought so.

“Poor Shem. Poor Bluk,” the people of Yed would say. “How can they go on?”

Wherever Shem and Bluk went – to the market or the post office or Ye Olde Coffee Shoppe for a grande latte – people would look at them and shake their heads sadly.

“Man and dog – so normal,” they said. “But the woman!”

“She’s from the lunatic fringe,” some people said.

“She’s not like us,” they said.

The people of Yed didn’t like that. It made them nervous. So, one day they decided they had to do something about her.

They gathered themselves together and somebody gave a speech and somebody else handed out pitch forks and torches – because that’s how any normal, self-respecting village deals with someone like her. Anyway, that’s what it says to do in the manual.*

They all marched down to the edge of town and demanded to speak with the lady of the house.

“Hey lady!” they said. “What’s going on in there?”

Shem came to the door.

“Please,” he told them. “She says come back tomorrow. It’s not done yet.”

And he said the same thing the next night and the next and the next. Every night the same excuse, “It’s not done yet.”

Well, as you might imagine, the people of Yed didn’t like this either. It took a lot of time to get a mob together and being normal people they all had work to do. But everyone was dying to know what “it” was, so they kept coming back.

Finally, after many nights the woman herself came to the door.

“Here it is,” she said. Her hair was a wreck. Her clothes were rumpled. But she was beaming from ear to ear.

Normal? I think not.

When the people of Yed saw it, they were speechless.

They stared at the woman and they stared at it. They demanded to know what it was and what it meant.

“That’s the beauty of it,” she said. “It’s whatever you want it to be.” And she seemed really extraordinarily happy about it.

Which was just infuriating to the people of Yed. It made no sense to them, no sense at all.

“You can’t wear it,” they said.

“You can’t eat it,” they said.

“What good is it?” they demanded to know.

The woman had no answer. She just smiled.

This made some people so angry they shouted mean names at her.

“You’re not normal, you know that?” someone shouted. Which is about the worst thing you could say to someone in the village of Yed.

Other people were so mad about it they threatened to burn the place down.

But the woman just kept smiling.

This was not how things were supposed to go, according to the village manual.* Any normal person would change their ways when faced with an angry mob and a threat like that.

But the woman showed no signs of changing herself for them. Despite all their anger, she was still smiling.

The people of Yed didn’t know what to do then. But then someone noticed it was time for normal people to be in bed.

So, they went home.

They shut their doors and closed their curtains. They got into bed and turned out the lights just like they always did. They went to sleep. In the morning, they got up and went to work just like they always had. Only –

Only, there was something about the woman’s smile they couldn’t forget.

And life in the village of Yed went back to normal.

Well, almost.

And the people of Yed like it that way.

THE END

*It Takes a Village to Raise a Rabble: Village Management for Idiots by Plotkin, Plotkin and Wise, LLC.