The One Molecule Thick Boxer Shorts

By Dan Bondroff

There once was a man who lived in a small town in the middle of a country called the United States of America. This man was meticulous and clean. Everything he owned was is in perfect order, cleaned and organized on a regular basis.

This man particularly loved keeping his laundry in order. He separated his colors from his whites, his delicates from his every day clothes, and sheets and towels from everything else. Everything was washed on the proper cycle, at the proper temperature, and hung dry on lines that were in perfect parallel rows in his backyard. This saved the man lots of money over the course of his life. He was able to live many decades with the same four outfits.

One particular piece of clothing that lasted an incredibly long time was his favorite pair of purple boxer shorts. He wore these for many many years, and always kept them cleaned and folded neatly in a drawer when they were not in use. Over many years of being worn, the purple boxer shorts picked up large amounts of… shall we say, debris. And over those years, the boxer shorts picked up so much of the man's DNA, that the boxer shorts became sentient. Also during these many years of use, the fabric of the boxer shorts started to break down. The boxer shorts eventually became became just a few molecules thick. This may seem like an incredibly thin pair of boxer shorts, but they were so meticulously taken care of, over many years, that there were no holes anywhere in the fabric.

Of course the boxer shorts couldn't talk. It didn't have a mouth, but it definitely had feelings. It could think about the world and the meaning of his life, and eventually, taught himself to see and hear. The boxers, aka Mr. Purpleshorts, spent many hours on those drying lines, swinging in the sun in the warm breeze, wishing that one day he could be free. Then one day a strong wind came by. Being that he was only a few molecules thick, the wind tore the purple cloth away from the elastic band. And off went Mr. Purpleshorts, into the air, free as a bird.

Mr. Purpleshorts actually had a good wind behind him and got way up into the air. While up in the air he lost a few more molecules from wind erosion, and became a little lighter, and he learned the ability to move around within the wind. Because Mr. Purpleshorts was so thin, he was hard to notice when he flew around throughout cities and towns around the world. He was still purple but was now a translucent purple, and looked more like an odd rectangle cloud than anything else. Mr. Purpleshorts spent years visiting people from all over the planet, learned all the cultures and languages, and its many religions and philosophies. He learned science, math, history and all the wisdom from all of the greatest human minds. This made him very smart, and also a little bit sad. Mr. Purpleshorts had no one to share this with, and he just floated around the world picking up new pieces of knowledge all by himself.

Finally one day, Mr. Purpleshorts got down to only one molecule thick. It was so hard to control movement in the air being only one molecule thick. Any little wind would take him high up into the air, and it took many hours to get back down to interact with people again. On one such day when he was swept up into the atmosphere, he lost too many molecules and was no longer structurally sound. Suddenly there was a very quiet poof. And then Mr. Purpleshorts was no more. Mr. Purpleshorts disintegrated into millions and millions of individual molecules.

Each of these molecules though, was filled with a bit of the knowledge Mr. Purpleshorts had gained over the years. This big collection of molecules got caught up in the jet stream, and they got spread out all over the world, eventually landing on every corner of the planet. These floating molecules were eventually inhaled and exhaled by creatures living on planet earth, giving each of these lucky creatures just a bit more knowledge and understanding than they had previously.

The end.