Cropping the Universe

 

There once was a man who found he could crop his universe the way a photographer might crop a photo, simply cutting out whatever parts he felt didn't properly fit his vision. At first, he cropped large annoyances. He never much cared for Texas, so away it went. The news said North Korea and Iran were a danger to the safety of the world, so he cropped them out of existence as well. China threatened to overtake the United States as an economic powerhouse, so he cropped them. Of course, no nation exists in a vacuum, and soon all the industries that relied on Chinese products began to flounder. Critics raked him over the coals for destabilizing the world economy and demanded he bring these nations back. So he did what he could to improve his world by cropping out his critics. He cropped out those whose politics made him furious or whose views set him on edge. He cropped out the neighbor's dog that treated his front yard like a toilet (though he never put up a fence), and he cropped out the neighbor for good measure. Within a few short years, he had nothing left but his back yard, which overlooked a lake. He found if he cropped out certain trees and light posts, he could imagine he were on some lovely tropical island somewhere. Of course, weeds sprouted up, and it was easier to just crop that section of the yard than to tend to it. When he saw a storm cloud coming, he cropped out that portion of the sky and as the trees started dying from drought, he just cropped them out as well. Soon the entirety of his universe consisted of a single speck of cerulean no larger than a pixel. For a while all was right with his very narrow universe until he grew bored of the color blue.

- Originally mailed to M. Hendry in Davenport, Florida