A Thought in the Shape of a Story by Etgar Keret

This is a story about people who once lived on the moon. Nowadays, there’s no one up there, but up until just a few years ago, the place was mobbed. The people on the moon thought they were very special, because they could think their thoughts in any shape they wanted. In the shape of a pot, or a table, even in the shape of flared pants. So people on the moon could bring their girlfriend an original present, like an I-love-you thought in the shape of a coffee mug or an I’ll-always-be-true thought in the shape of a vase.

It was very impressive, all those shaped thoughts, except that as time passed, the people on the moon came to a kind of agreement about how every thought should look. A mother-love thought should always be shaped like a curtain, while a father-love thought was shaped like an ashtray, so that it didn’t matter what house you walked into, you could always guess what thoughts in what shape would be waiting there arranged on the tea trolley in the living room.

Of all the people on the moon, there was one who shaped his thoughts differently. He was a young guy, a little strange, and most of the time he was troubled by existential, more or less irritating, questions. The main thought going through his mind was the kind that believes every person has at least one unique thought resembling only itself and him. A thought with color and volume and content which only that person could have.

This guy’s dream was to build a spaceship, sail around space in it, and collect all the unique thoughts. He didn’t go to social events, he hardly went out at all, he spent all his time building the spaceship. He built the engine in the shape of a thought of wonder, and the steering system in the shape of a thought of pure logic, and that was only the beginning. He added lots of other sophisticated thoughts that would help him navigate and survive in outer space, but his neighbors, who watched him while he worked, saw that he was constantly making mistakes. Because only someone who really had no idea could create a thought of curiosity in the shape of an engine, when it was absolutely clear that a thought like that had to look like a microscope. Not to mention that a thought of pure logic, unless you want it to look tacky, has to be shaped like a shelf. They tried to explain but he wouldn’t listen. His desire to find all the true thoughts in the universe went beyond the bounds of good taste, not to mention sanity.

One night, when the guy was sleeping, a few of his neighbors on the moon got together and, because they felt sorry for him, they broke the nearly completed spaceship down into the various thoughts he’d used to make it, and rearranged them. When the young guy got up in the morning, he found shelves, vases, thermoses, and microscopes where his spaceship had been. The whole pile was covered with a thought of sorrow—in the shape of an embroidered tablecloth—about his beloved dog who’d died.

The young guy was not at all happy about the surprise. And instead of saying thank you, he went crazy, started carrying on and breaking things. The people on the moon watched him, stunned. They really did not like that sort of behavior. The moon, as you know, is a planet with very little gravitational force. And the smaller a planet’s gravitational force is, the more dependent it is on discipline and order, because it takes only a little push for objects to lose their equilibrium. And if everyone who felt even slightly bitter started carrying on, it would end in disaster. Finally, when they saw that the guy wasn’t about to calm down, they had no choice but to think of a way to stop him. So they thought one thought of loneliness that was about three-by-three, and put him inside it, a thought the size of a cell with a very low ceiling. And every time he accidentally touched one of the sides, he felt a kind of cold blast that reminded him of his solitude.

It was in that cell that he thought a last thought of despair in the shape of a rope, tied a noose, and hanged himself. The people on the moon were so excited about the idea of a rope of despair with a noose on one end that they immediately thought despair thoughts of their own and wound them around their necks. And that’s how all the people on the moon became extinct, leaving behind only that cell of loneliness. But after a hundred years of space storms, that collapsed too.

When the first spaceship reached the moon, the astronauts couldn’t find anyone around. All they found was a million craters. At first, the astronauts thought those craters were ancient graves of people who had once lived on the moon. Only on closer inspection did they discover that those craters were merely thoughts about nothing.

Etgar Keret (Hebrew: אֶתְגָּר קֶרֶת‎, born August 20, 1967) is an Israeli writer known for his short stories, graphic novels, and scriptwriting for film and television.

website