"The Need for Measurements"

 

"So you just go around, tagging sewer covers with labels saying how wide they are?" I asked the tunnel gnome.

"Kind of," he answered, removing his goggles. "Well, all right, as a matter of fact, yes." It was odd to watch him work, just because the aerosol can he carried was half as tall as he was. He used both nubby hands to hoist it back into his satchel. "It's a much more useful task than it sounds like when you say it that way," he told me. "Along the busiest travel routes, it's helpful for a gnome to know where he can fit. Almost like your bridges, when you have signs posted to inform everyone how high the underpass is so you know which trolls can go there and which can't."

"Gotcha," I told him. Then I blinked. "Wait, did you say 'trolls' or 'trucks?'" I asked. But he had already lifted the heavy metal lid and slipped away.

"The Wind and the Sign"

 

"You've got to be kidding me," the wind said with a laugh as it read the sign that had been placed on the corner.

Like a tyrant emperor riding through the lands to survey all he called his, the wind returned throughout the following seasons to torment the metal sign, battering it until it rocked on its post and hurling dirt at its face. The sign remained where it had been stood, even as, with the years, it acquired pocks of rust along its edges and its paint began to fade.

"Don't you have anything else to say?" the wind demanded once, while it beat dents into the sign during a vicious storm.

But the sign never offered the wind another word. Even on the day the wind finally brought it down, crashing onto the road with the brittle clang of old metal, all the sign had to say was what it had been saying since the day they met:

"Stop."