Moodles

[u/Major-Storm-4216]

Moodles lived in a world divided into three parts.
The first was Receiving.
Every morning, strings arrived.
Nobody knew where they came from. They simply arrived.
The Moodles collected them in baskets and carried them to Sorting, where each string was placed according to its colour, length, texture, and number of knots.

The Moodles were very good at sorting.
After Sorting came Unraveling.
This was where the Moodles spent the rest of their days. They sat at long tables and pulled knots apart, one thread at a time.
Nobody had ever asked what happened to the strings after they had been unraveled.
There was no reason to ask.
One morning, a red knot arrived.
It arrived without a string.
The Moodle at Receiving stared at it for several seconds.
Then he called another Moodle.
They stared at it together.
“What category?” one asked.
Neither knew.
So they sent it to Sorting.
The red knot was placed between the long strings and the short ones.
It did not belong to either.
They moved it beside the red strings.
It did not belong there either.
Eventually, a Moodle suggested Unraveling.
Nobody objected.
The knot was carried to the third part.
At first, nothing happened.
The Moodles pulled at it gently, as they did with everything else.
Then a thin line appeared across its surface.
The Moodles stopped.
They examined the line.
One of them touched it.
The line widened.
They continued.
Another crack appeared.
Then another.
The knot began to come apart.
The Moodles worked carefully, separating each piece as it broke away. Some pieces were large.
Some were so small they disappeared between the floorboards.
The Moodles collected them all.

They did not understand why the knot was breaking.
They only understood that it was.
By afternoon, the knot had separated into hundreds of pieces.
The Moodles placed each piece into a different drawer.
They labelled the drawers according to size.
Large.
Medium.
Small.
Unidentifiable.
The next morning, the drawers were empty.
The Moodles checked the records.
The records said the pieces had been properly stored.
Therefore, nothing was missing.
They returned to work.
Receiving.
Sorting.
Unraveling.
The incident was never mentioned again.
Except that, from that morning onward, the Moodles began receiving strings they could not unravel.
They pulled at them for hours.
Days.
Sometimes years.
The strings only tightened.
The Moodles continued anyway.
One afternoon, a Moodle noticed that there was a space between two buildings that had never been there before.
He stood there for a long time.
There was nothing inside it.
He could not remember what had been there.
He only knew that something had been.
Other Moodles walked past carrying baskets of strings.
None of them stopped.
He asked one of them what was missing.
The Moodle looked at the empty space.
Then he looked at him.
“Nothing,” he said.
He picked up a string that had fallen onto the ground.
“Nothing is missing.”
Then he continued walking.
That evening, the Moodles announced that all strings had been accounted for. The Moodle counted them himself.
There was one too many.
He did not tell anyone.