All the animals and plants started flattening out like soggy pancakes, and no one could do a thing about it. The rich people noticed it first, when the fruit-bearing trees and rose bushes in their pleasure gardens began to sink and widen at the bases. They fired their illegally hired landscaping people but it didn’t help. Next it was the race horses, whose ankles thickened while their backs thinned until they couldn’t race. That’s where we get that old saying “easy as saddling a racehorce,” to describe an activity that seems straightforward but is actually impossible. The foodstuffs began to be affected as well. Everything tasted the same as before, except it was all the shape and consistency of a soggy pancake, causing no end of trouble for the food packagers and distributors, as well as for small children, who had been use to identifying disgusting food by its shape.

I don’t even want to talk about the housepets. It got to where you couldn’t tell a gerbil from a chihuaha; they were all just furry amoebas sliding around the house, and you tried not to step on them. People worried that humans would be next, since many of them had been sagging and thickening for a number of years. Fortunately, however, their rates of sagging and thickening did not increase. It seems they had built up some sort of tolerance or immune response. Scientists applied for multi-million dollar grants to study the phenomena, but when they came out with their results ten years later, the people had already voted to put a pancake on the flag. “Moot!” they cried. “Moot, moot, moot!”

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