A dog found a bone near the butcher's shop one afternoon.
It was a good bone - large, with some meat still on it. He picked it up carefully and trotted away before anyone could take it from him. He was going to find a quiet spot and eat it in peace.
His route home took him across a narrow wooden bridge over the river.
Halfway across he looked down.
There in the water was another dog - and that dog had a bone too. A bone that looked, if anything, slightly larger than his own.
The dog on the bridge stared at the dog in the water. The dog in the water stared back.
He wanted that bone.
He opened his mouth to grab it.
His own bone hit the water and sank immediately. The other dog vanished at the same moment - because the other dog had always been his own reflection, and the bone in the water had always been his own bone, seen from above.
He stood on the bridge for a while looking at the river.
Then he went home.
What he had was real. What he saw in the water was not. But for one moment the thing he imagined someone else had seemed more valuable than the thing he was already carrying.
It almost always does.
