prompt: blur, title: why the ocean's near the shore in misc. flash fiction

“Life has a way of hollowing you out, if you’re not careful,” he intoned to a packed auditorium, faces rapt in honest attention, “you needn’t be a scarecrow for that to happen to you too.” Since ceding the Emerald Throne to Princess Ozma, he’d taken up work lecturing in philosophy at the Emerald University (they called it EmU, for short) and was attempting to explicate the concept of metaphor to the assembled intellectuals of Oz. In a land so bright and magical, meanings so carved into the surfaces of things, metaphor was a foreign concept. Still, he was the smartest in the land, if anyone could explain metaphor, it’d be their legendary straw-man.

“You start out feeling like you have it all together but, sooner than later, life has a way of beating that out of you. Humiliations and failures, misunderstandings and rejections. Pretty soon, you’re empty.” He paused and put his arms out as if he once again stood sentinel in the fields. “It’ll take the opportunity to bulk you out with useless filler, puff you back up with waddings that give you form but no will to action. Doubt, gossip, trivialities. Brains replaced with the blur of fears and contradictions until you seem whole from the outside, yet stuck stock in place. Gummed up by someone else’s nonsense, no longer able to decide anything yourself.” He smiled wryly. “I’ve been told in far-off Kansas, they call this crippling affliction… Executive Dysfunction.”

The crowd of lesser learned minds broke into an uproar. It all sounded so hideous, like a witch’s curse. How could such a cruel process exist, in Kansas or Oz or anywhere. Eventually, he calmed them down. “That’s not my point,” he said, “that’s just an example of a metaphor. A thing that is like a thing but not quite the thing, to compare against it, that you may better understand that first thing. When you consider what it was like to be filled-up with straw, you have a different way to understand how life can wear you down and tire you out.” He removed his bifocals and closed up his notes. “We’ll get into this further, next lecture. I don’t want to overwhelm you.”

Later, walking the pastel-green halls of the university, one munchkin of particular perceptiveness stopped him and asked “You really felt like that, didn’t you, sir?” “Hmm?” “Your metaphor. It wasn’t just a metaphor. It was something you experienced.”

The scarecrow smiled. “You’re catching on faster than the others.” “But if you felt like that once, sir,” the munchkin hemmed and hawed a bit, “as I do too, myself, how did you ever get past that feeling and, well, fill yourself back up?”

“Well,” the scarecrow took his time to formulate it best, “I took the longest time paralyzed with self-pity until eventually, a girl came along, like a gale-force wind, to blow all that stuffing out and eventually, through her eyes, I saw me for myself.” “Sounds amazing.” “Oh, it was indeed.”