Bewildering Stories welcomes...

Wells Teague

Wells has a degree in Music from Texas Tech University. He’s published literary fiction in various magazines and journals and includes two children’s books in his personal bibliography.

Wells describes “A Reasonable Life” as the result of a dream:

One night in 1973 I dreamed a complete story about a great white boar playing in the spray of a barrier island... In this story the boar was imbued with the innocence of a human child and seemed to belong to a pampered and selfish man who had built a mansion that looked out to the open sea straight into the face of an inevitable hurricane. In the dream I felt an incipient tragedy among the boar and the master, his wife, their baby, and the villagers.

“Pampered” the narrator certainly is; one could even say “spoiled rotten.” He enjoys mundane pleasures, especially hard liquor in quantities that do his liver no good whatsoever, but it would be an exaggeration to call him a sensualist.

Rather, the has his priorities backwards. His first duty is to his wife and child, not to himself and his pet. His second duty is to his community. And thirdly, to his pet boar.

He does the boar no favors by treating the wild animal as a tame one and lavishing on it the attention he expects from his wife. And while the villagers’ fear may be irrational, he has to grant that they have a point.

What does sacrificing the boar mean? Will his owner learn something about himself from the experience?

Wells Teague’s bio sketch can be found here.

Welcome to Bewildering Stories, Wells. We hope to hear from you again soon and often!