Thrice Upon a TIme

[I sure wish copying and pasting from the original file to the internet wouldn't screw up the format. I have to fix all the italicized words and it messes up the paragraph indents]

Thrice upon a time there was a child.
The first was by a pond one day, watching ripples form. What caused the ripples he could not tell, so he started throwing pebbles at each he saw.
Thus spent he his time for what could have been hours. He laughed and smiled at himself each time he hit a ripple in its epicenter, but he soon grew curious, for he found each throw prompted a laugh and a smile. He was amazed to find that every pebble he threw hit its mark.
He stopped throwing pebbles to ponder this. He did not remember ever having such good aim in his life. He tried to remember where he could have learned such accuracy.
The second child was walking down the road one day, skipping merrily with excitement. The source of his jubilation was the coins rattling in his pocket, which he planned to spend on a slingshot. Down the dusty dirt road he trotted, singing some tune to himself that he'd heard from his peers. Walking before him were two old men.
These men seemed peculiar to the child, though he couldn't quite tell why. He watched them closely, as they walked side by side. For all the scrutinizing of these two that the child did, he could not tell what was so strange about them.
Soon the child forgot his worries and returned to thoughts of the slingshot that he would soon buy. He skipped along, hopping from one footprint in the dirt to the next. It was following these footprints that the child realized what was so strange about the two men. The child was following the footprints of the man on the left, but the footprints of the man on the right were nowhere to be seen.
The child ran ahead to walk beside the two men, to see if he could find what had come of the footprints to the right. Looking at the dirt he found his answer. While the man on the left walked, leaving his footprints behind him, the man on the right walked, picking up a set of footprints that was already set stretching down the road ahead.
Perplexed, the child interrupted the conversation of the two men and asked, "Excuse me Sir..." then after he had the attention of the man on the right, "Why are your footprints in front of you instead of behind?"
The man on the right laughed heartily. "Because my boy, I am walking backwards."
The child stopped to ponder this, and finally said to himself, "What a puzzling puzzle... Pieces must be missing."
The first boy by the pond, after remembering the second, realized something odd about the ripples in the water. They held a certain strangeness that was similar to the man who'd walked on the right, walking after his footprints instead of before them.
After not throwing pebbles for a time, the boy realized that the ripples had stopped appearing, so he picked up another pebble and took aim at a place far out in the water. Just as the pebble left his hand, a ripple appeared near that spot in the water, and the boy watched in amazement as the pebble arched and fell into the exact epicenter of that ripple, without making a new ripple.
In amazement the boy stared at this, then said to himself, "What a puzzling puzzle... Pieces must be missing."
The third child was speaking to his friend one day. "I just don't understand it." he was saying. "If there were any logic to this world, ripples would form on the outside of ponds and get sucked toward a certain point, and then somebody would come along and throw a pebble at that point and the ripple would be sucked up by it."
His good friend answered him, "That, or our footprints should appear before our eyes just a little ways ahead, then when we step in them they should remain exactly the same."
"Precisely," said the third child. "That's what would happen if there where any logic to this world, but there is no logic to this world."
It was then that the third child heard his own voice from two different times in his memory, saying in harmony, "A puzzling puzzle. Pieces must be missing."