Spoon's Story

Written by Anakin McFly

Chapter One: There IS a Spoon!

Hi! My name is Kyn, and I'm a spoon. A dinner spoon, and a shiny one too.

I belong to this bald boy whom they call the Spoon Boy, because he always has me with him. When we first met, I thought we would probably just have a normal spoon-human relationship – you know, he uses me to scoop up food to eat and all that kind of stuff – but we didn't. You see, he kept trying to bend me.

I've never been the athletic type. I'm not very flexible, for one, so when my owner grabbed me and tried to make me bend, well, it hurt very badly to say the least. More than once I thought I was going to break for sure, but luckily my metal could take the pressure.

Then all of a sudden one day, my owner decided to try a new approach.

"There is no spoon," he murmured under his breath, staring at me in a scary sort of way. It's one thing to feel human fingers clamping forcefully down on you and trying to make you bend, but it's another thing altogether to be repeatedly told you don't exist. That one statement, 'there is no spoon', stuck in my head and nearly drove me to tears. I had thought we were going to be friends, but here he was, denying me so firmly. What did he mean, 'there is no spoon'? I was here, wasn't I? Didn't he care for me any more?

"There IS a spoon!" I felt like yelling... but then, in the middle of my existential dilemma, I felt myself start to bend. Really bend, as in enough to put the best human gymnast to shame.

And it wasn't just one direction, but all over until I felt dizzy. I was bending and twisting and turning like crazy and I nearly threw up metal ions, but somehow I held on, my handle securely in the grasp of my owner's hand.

My owner watched me intently as he manipulated my movements with his mind... and then he smiled at me.

He had never done that before. Until that day, his face had always held the same expression of concentration, frustration, and sometimes anger or violence as he tried to bodily separate my scoop from my handle in his unsuccessful bending attempts.

But today, he smiled.

I smiled back as he returned me to my normal position. We were good friends now.

I relayed my experience over the SIMS (Spoon Instant Messaging System) that night. Sure, there were the usual sceptics who were of the opinion that spoons can only bend when heated up to really high temperature, but there were others that believed.

Days passed. Now and then my owner would pick me up and make me bend without touching me, like he did that day. Now and then he would smile, and I would smile back. Never again for a long while did he utter that hateful phrase, 'there is no spoon'. I thought that perhaps he once again acknowledged my presence, but as it turned out later, I was wrong. He'd just been repeating it in his mind.

I learnt this one morning when my owner was sitting in the Oracle's apartment and making me bend all over again. This new guy walked in. I had never seen him before, so I asked who he was over the SIMS. One of the spoons who lived in his house said his name was Thomas A. Anderson. I asked what the 'A' stood for. The other spoon told me to mind my own business and besides, his owner rarely used his real name. He preferred to go by the name Neo.

Tommy walked over to my owner and watched him bending me.

"Hi Tommy!" I greeted. He didn't reply. Git.

"Hi Neo!" I tried instead. No reply either, so I sulked. Tommy picked me up and stared at me. I bet he was trying to make me bend, but he couldn't. Hah. Served him right for being rude.

My owner was watching him and finally decided to intervene. "Do not try and bend the spoon. That is impossible."

He'd learnt, you see, after the hundreds of fruitless attempts trying to do just that.

"Instead only try to realise the truth," he continued.

"Do or do not, there is no try," I silently quoted. Yoda from Star Wars said that. I heard about the movie over the SIMS.

"What truth?" Tommy asked.

My owner looked at him... and then he said it. "There is no spoon."

My heart shattered into a million pieces at the words. How could he? After all we'd been through together, how could he just deny me like that?

It was as much as I could do to hold back the metallic tears that threatened to flow out any moment. I thought my owner liked me... all this while he didn't even think I existed?

"There is no spoon?" Tommy repeated.

"There IS!" I wanted to shout. "There IS a spoon! ME! I'm the spoon! Stop denying it!"

I couldn't take it any more. I existed, I did! There WAS a spoon... there was... there was... I broke down and cried, barely noticing as somehow, Tommy managed to bend me.

"Then you'll see that it is not the spoon that bends, it is only yourself," my owner added, before Tommy was called up to see the Oracle.

I didn't care. It all didn't matter any more.

It was the worst day of my life.

Chapter Two: Into the Real World

I spent the next few weeks feeling miserable. Now and then, my owner would pick me up, make me bend and smile at me, but I never smiled back any more. I knew the truth now, and there was nothing he could do to change that.

Some of the other spoons on the SIMS sympathised with me. One of them belonged to Tommy. His name was Dake, and he was a dinner spoon with a criss-cross pattern on his handle. He told me that he knew how bad his owner could be at times. Dake still had some dried oatmeal on his scoop because Tommy hadn't washed him properly the last time. I felt sorry for Dake. No spoon should be allowed to live in such unhygenic conditions for so long.

Dake told me stuff about Tommy's private life, like how he spent night after night playing Minesweeper as the computer ran searches for something called the Matrix. Tommy had never finished an expert level Minesweeper game before, and Dake found that very funny. The rest of Tommy's cutlery found it funny too, and they were always laughing at him.

Then one night, strange things happened to Tommy's computer when he was sleeping after about a hundred unsuccessful attempts to finish a Minesweeper expert level game. Green words appeared on the screen and told him to wake up. So he woke up. The words said some other stuff too, but the part Dake remembered most was when it told Tommy to follow the white rabbit.

Dake was scared of rabbits. All spoons are scared of them, because of what happened some time last year. A spoon, Nia, was left lying on a field when her owners forgot to take her with them after their picnic. After a while, a wild rabbit came up to her and sniffed her. Nia was terrified, but she couldn't do anything. Then the rabbit peed on her, and poor Nia was scarred for life. She never got back to her owners, too, and was left on the grass covered with rabbit urine until the day she went mad. No one can bear to talk about her any more.

Anyway, Dake said that some days after the green words appeared on the computer screen, Tommy left and never returned again. He thought that I was probably the last spoon to have seen him, but apparently an old spoon who lived under a carpet in Lafayette Hotel said she had spotted him that morning. She'd tried to tell him that his cutlery all missed him deeply, mainly because they couldn't laugh at his Minesweeper skills – or lack of them – any more, but Tommy hadn't replied. None of his friends had said anything either. Humans. They're all the same.

Days passed. And then I was spoonnapped.

It was Morpheus who did it. I saw him sometimes whenever he came to bring people to see the Oracle. I like the Oracle. She treats all her cutlery very well, especially the spoons. They're always kept clean and shiny.

Morpheus said something to my owner about testing out a new theory he had, then he took me and stuck me into his pocket. I freaked out. It was dark in there. When Morpheus took me out again, we were in this huge, scary-looking smelting place. And then he put me over a furnace! I screamed, but he didn't stop. The heat was killing me! My handle started to go soft and funny, when Morpheus suddenly poured some red liquid over me. It kinda dissolved into my melted handle, I think. I'm not sure, because that was about when I fainted.

The next thing I saw when I regained consciousness was a bunch of humans around some weird-looking equipment. I was fully solid again, which was good. I checked with the other spoons over the SIMS to see if they knew where I was. The old spoon who lived under the carpet in Lafayette Hotel said she could see me from where she was.

I didn't know why Morpheus would be bringing me here. There was this mirror thing nearby that suddenly started to look like the Stargate from the movie Stargate. One of my friends had seen his owner watching it, and had shown me pictures over the SIMS.

The mirror was getting gooey. It was gross, but it was even worse when Morpheus suddenly stuck my handle into it.

I screamed. The black gooey stuff was spreading all over me! I screamed again as I was totally covered, when suddenly I found myself in this red coloured pod thing.

I felt strangely different. I also felt like I was drowning, which was strange, because I'd been underwater many times before when I was being washed and it felt nothing like this. Then I looked down and saw myself.

I was human.

I fainted.

To Be Continued...

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