For some time my red ball had not availed itself to me; I approached Master Rhino hoping his aged wisdom might know where it was. Master Rhino sat me down in the shady dust beneath the large tree with the green bits. It was cold and dusty, but at least I'd find out where my red ball was. He left me sitting there, spitting in the dust, whilst he took a nap. Upon his return he spoke to me using his mouth: "Child," he said, pitifully unaware that I'd had the fur for many a winter, "your red ball is not a red ball, you just perceive it to be a red ball." And thus the tone was set, and I was doomed to an afternoon of Master Rhino talking at me, with no chance of getting my red ball. I made an attempt to stand up and run away, but while I'd been sitting there and he'd been napping, he'd employed some nefarious counterpart to burrow beneath me and nail my legs to the dust. I was there for the duration unless I passed out or died of blood poisoning - both of which Master Rhino was in the habit of curing if it so benefited him.
"If for the moment we presume that your ball really is a ball, let us say with certainty that your ball is not red." I have learnt from painful experience - tennis racket through the throat painful - that it's far easier to ask Master Rhino questions than sit while he tries to put his questions in your mouth. I asked whether Master Rhino wasn't thinking of my blue ball rather than my red one. He made me eat a handful of dust for that one. "I'm talking about your red ball, not your blue ball. It's neither red nor a ball, but for now we're saying it is a ball, but it's not red. Incidentally, your blue ball is neither blue nor a ball, but that is neither here nor there. ...And your red ball isn't blue, and your blue ball isn't red. And what the fuck..." This was the first time Master Rhino had ever shown weakness, impatience, being riled by questions, by starting two sentences in a row with 'and', or more accurately 'And' because all sentences begin with capital letters, at least they did the last time I looked in my Big Book Of How To Start Sentences. "...is someone your age doing playing with balls?" I answered him as he would have answered himself: by showing him my empty hands - empty save for a few remnants of dust which he made me lick clean, and then he made me dry my spitty hands in the dust, which just made them dusty, so I had to lick them clean, ad nauseum. Just imagine that while all this is going on I'm eating dust, ok?
"Your ball - which isn't really a ball, but we're saying it is - isn't red. You perceive it to be red." Master Rhino was not popular. "Had you been born eyeless, sans eyes, blind, eyeless, sans eyes, blind, eyeless, sans eyes, blind, you would not know of colours, you would have never seen anything. Red would not exist to you. Your ball would not be red. You might differentiate between the two balls by saying your 'rough ball' and your 'smooth ball' or, if you were very sensitive and one ball happened to absorb heat just a little more than the other, your 'hot ball' and your 'cold ball'. You'd also be less good at catching." I explained I had not been born eyeless, sans eyes or blind, and that my balls were equally smooth and warm, at least to the degree of not being noticeably different. I withheld explaining that I was no good at catching my balls anyway in case I needed the big ammunition later on.
"What if, child, you'd been born a bee, or some other animal that sees colours differently to you and me? Would your ball still be red as you recognise it, or would it look completely different? It would be the same ball, but your perception of it would be entirely different, would it not?" I explained to Master Rhino that I was not a bee, nor was I one of these other animals that sees colours differently to him and me. "If a bee doesn't see your ball as being red, but you do, does that mean your ball is red? Surely not. That which is cannot be if two entities rightfully perceive it as being different things." I asked Master Rhino if he was saying that existence must come from within, and if so, what colour did the ball perceive itself as? "You're wrong again, child: if we relied on self-perception to prove existence, balls would not exist, being, as they are, unfurnished with cognisance. In an ideal world that would be true, and balls would have brains, and be able to tell us what colour they perceive themselves to be, and thus force us to bow down to their superior self-knowledge, but as you will learn as you become as old and decayed as I am, this world is far from perfect. Just be content that your ball isn't red, and don't worry about what it is."
I felt I might be able to expedite my ordeal if I spoke. "Red is only red because we call it red. In Spanish, red isn't red, nor in Mexican Spanish, or Argentinean Spanish. In French red isn't red, and if the pattern is to be proved correct, Mexican French and Argentinean French don't call red red. German, Russian, Chinese, Australian, none of these languages call red red. To them my ball is not red. What if everyone else sees colours differently to me? What if what I call green, everyone else calls red? We could perceive the ball as something different, unaware of the difference in what we're seeing, and thus still call it the same thing. Although we'd concur about what it 'is' we'd still disagree, and thus in another way it wouldn't be what we're saying it is."
"Shut up," Master Rhino insisted. "Don't be greedy. We've already proved your ball isn't red. Why continue harping on about it? Now we're going to prove your ball is not a ball." I asked Master Rhino if he was trying to tell me that he'd popped my red ball that wasn't really red. He saw red, but didn't show it as much as he could, opting instead to just stamp on my legs a couple of times before asking me what a ball was. I replied that a ball was another name for a sphere. He continued his bombardment of questions and asked me what a sphere was. I replied that a sphere was a three dimensional shape where every single point of its outer edge was equidistant from the centre. He smiled. "And your ball is a perfect sphere is it?"
"You did pop it, you shitty bastard!" I screamed at him, as I tried to pull the nails either out of my legs or the dust.
"No I didn't," he replied, making sure he wasn't the one using reported speech to make the paragraphs seem longer. He also hammered a couple of fresh nails into my legs just to learn me good. "Your ball, wherever it may be, is unpopped, probably. You would agree, however, that it's not a perfect sphere?" I agreed. I know when I'm beaten. I said it wasn't a perfect sphere, but it was pretty damn spherical. "A near-sphere? You said a ball was a sphere. Therefore your ball is not a ball." I called him a pedant, he called me someone who was about to get a slap, he slapped me. I redefined a ball as being a near-sphere. He said I was cheating. I said I was creating the perception of cheating. He slapped me. He said I had to stick to my first answer. "Not only is your ball not a ball, but no balls exist," he continued. "Spheres - perfect spheres, which by definition are all spheres - don't exist. They can't. Perfection is impossible." He looked at me for a response; none came. He continued continuing: "Can you perceive a sphere? Can you imagine one in your head, your mind, your brain? Think. Can you?" I tried and said I thought I could. He became infuriated because he had wanted me to say that I could (thought I could, could). He pulled the nails out of my legs to ensure painful pumping, and still sure I'd be unable to get up and walk away because my legs smarted like my street smarts. "You can't. You can't imagine a sphere. You can imagine imagining a sphere, but that's just too far away to count as existence, right? Right? It says so somewhere. There. Now, I've proved that your ball is neither red nor a ball. You may go."
"You don't know where my non-red non-ball red ball is then?" I asked.
"No."
This was it. This was the time to stand up, painfully, and be a man. This was to be the defining moment in my life, I could feel it. I stopped eating dust, clenched everything I could to stop the oozing, pumping blood, stopped slouching, looked Master Rhino in the eye and readied myself to ask him the question that every great philosopher dreads. I knew that a little piece of Master Rhino would die when I asked him, and that a little piece of me would have to die too. I breathed in so I wouldn't die and also so I could speak, and asked Master Rhino the question. "What if we're just tiny ants to a world of giants?"
Fin.