1 min read

A shed

"The Life and Adventure of Shed Number XII" is a strange story. Here's the short version:

  1. 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.
  2. Shed number XII is filled with bikes and bike parts. It fantasizes about being a bike all day.
  3. It doesn't like its neighbors, a judgy religious garage and two sheds full of pickled cabbages (I think).
  4. 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.
  5. XII judges the cabbage sheds for being cabbage sheds.
  6. Eventually the owner removes the bikes and turns it into a cabbage shed, to XII's great dismay.
  7. The cabbages, together with sheds 13 and 14, convince XII that being a cabbage shed is great.
  8. 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.
  9. 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.