A shed
"The Life and Adventure of Shed Number XII" is a strange story. Here's the short version:
- There's a pile of planks that became a shed. It's painted with a roman numeral XII unlike the other sheds with Arabic numerals (sheds 13 and 14). It becomes self-aware and has vague memories of being a pile of planks.
- Shed number XII is filled with bikes and bike parts. It fantasizes about being a bike all day.
- It doesn't like its neighbors, a judgy religious garage and two sheds full of pickled cabbages (I think).
- The garage says being a garage is the purpose of life and all other things have to just pretend better or worse to be garages. Something like that. XII points out he wants to be a bike. XII and the garage fight. Then the garage gets torn down.
- XII judges the cabbage sheds for being cabbage sheds.
- Eventually the owner removes the bikes and turns it into a cabbage shed, to XII's great dismay.
- The cabbages, together with sheds 13 and 14, convince XII that being a cabbage shed is great.
- Eventually there's a break where XII finds a hoop hanging up in itself and remembers wanting to be a bike. XII fights the cabbage barrel inside it, as well as the other sheds. XII sets itself on fire using a wire inside itself, then concentrates its "essence" into a ceiling board. The sheds all catch fire. XII explodes. Shit happens.
- XII becomes a bicycle made out of planks and terrorizes the owner that filled it with cabbages by flying around the owner menacingly, in clear defiance of what a bunch of boards assembled into the shape of a bike should do.
I liked it. It kind of makes sense and has a theme. The descriptions are great. But also: It's a story about a red shed that turns into a bike at the end.