Dolores Dump has five toes. When she was seven years old she figured that out. You see in Dontthinkville every person is taught from a young age that they have four plus one toes. The president of Dontthinkville hated the number five so everything was fashioned in a way that the number five was overlooked. No child ever turned five. They were four for two years instead. No family had five children. They had four plus one child. In theory it is the same thing, but it is very inefficient for progress. In the course of Dontthinkville history 12 million ink cartridges had been wasted on printing ‘plus one’ after four on all the labels and in all the stories involving the theory of five. Eventually after five had been removed from the system a long time people had gotten very used to it and had begun to believe that such a myth as five was only a stupid story. Humans are very easy to trick. The were programmed that way, so true things could come to them and un program them, instead of them reasoning to the point of truth. People were accustomed to inefficiency, so what they were accustomed to became efficiency.

One Day Dolores was sitting by a pile of compressed banana peels looking at her toes. She would count them,” One, Two, Three, Four, Four plus One....Well that is strange isn’t it,” she said to herself. It seemed odd that there was not an exact name for that number between four and six. It had so many names that sometimes it just got very confusing. Some people called it four plus one, others called it six minus one while other still called it twelve minus seven. There was always three words for this small number while all the one through nine numbers had one word. Dolores was so baffled that she did not even notice the dump truck dumping a pile of smelly compost by her head. Compost was the thing she hated the most. After thinking for a long time and seeking out an honest answer for her question, Dolores went inside to the info machine to see if it had an answer. The info machine was her own little secret; her father would have got very angry if he had discovered that she had one. An old thinker outcast had given it to her one day on his way to the gallows. Dolores’ father always brought her to the hangings of thinkers just so she would see what thinking got you into. When her father wasn’t looking she reached out her hand to the condemned thinker, he looked at her eyes and saw that she was a thinker too. So he reached into his pocket and threw her a little book. Dolores caught it and hid it in her jacket. The book was called ‘Truth and everything it involves”. Dolores hid it under her mattress when she got home, because it is the first place people usually suspect something to be so therefore it becomes the last place they look. Dolores was smart like that. In the middle of the night when everyone was sleeping Dolores took the book out from under her mattress and began to read it. It said all types of fantastical things that she had always been taught were completely improbable and impossible. Such as, the existence of a Supreme Being ruling over all. Another thing that children in Dontthinkville are taught to believe is that they were not spiritual beings, just animals with some pretty neat survival tools. That is why everyone in Dontthinkville is a vegetarian, because eating a deer would be like eating your sister...sort of. Sometimes it was a little more complicated than that. In the book Dolores learned about a perfect world and a perfect God and that the only way to know him was by having your head and heart and eyes opened up to him so you could see him, know him, and experience him. She found out a very odd thing that she had not known before, people programmed themselves blind so God could choose some to un-program. Because people were blind they had to figure out something that explained there existence, because God had not programmed that need to know out of them. People were so confused, the book said, that they thought that they knew everything. They thought they were too smart for such a thing as God and eradicated him out of society just as they had done with the number five. It was too easy of an explanation everyone realized because no one being could really be ruler and creator of everything. They were too strong for that and had an absolute sense of controlling themselves.
Dolores opened the book on this perplexing afternoon and noticed that the chapters of the books went, 1,2,3,4,5,6,.... All the numbers were familiar except for that strange looking one existing between four and six. It did not look like anything she had ever seen. Judging by its placement in the numerical order of things she figured that it must be the shortened symbol for 4 1 or 6-1. But what was it called? Maybe fone (four and one combined) or sone ( six and one combined). This theory proved a bad one because so many things added or subtracted together made this number, and two plus two sounded nothing like four. Dolores decided that if she started at the beginning of the book she would eventually come across the name for the symbol, 5. She found it’s placement tense in the very first chapter of the book, at least she assumed that it was the placement tense of the number because it was right after the placement tense of four and right before the placement tense of six. It said,” On the fifth day,” Dolores said it over and over to herself,” Fifth, fifth, fifth. What a wonderful sound, so much better than before sixth and after fourth,” She read the book till she came to a passage where it talked about a man who live five hundred and eighty-three years. She said to herself,” I recognize all those words but the five. That is curious......I wonder, I wonder! Yes, five sounds very much like fifth. Well there is my answer, I do think that fifth is the placement tense of five and five is the name of the symbol,5, the number between four and six! Gee wiz! I feel like a wiz right now.”
Dolores was glowing with her sense of wiziness. Thinking was not such a bad thing after all and she would continue to do it...secretly, at least she would try. The rest of the day Dolores repeated the word five in her head over and over again so she would not forget. She wondered if other people would like to know about the existence of five, because it would save a lot of time if they did. So she told her best friend, Rizzy Rat, about it. Rizzy looked at her like she was an ant or something then threw a handful of sand in her face and laughed a deep, annoying mocking type of laugh, “ Who told you that stupid story! Ancient people used to believe in five until President Buppudee discovered how unnecessary it was. And such a weight to progress.” Rizzy was supposedly very smart and had read very many history books about such matters. Something that was not Dolores but seemed to have inhabited her at the moment told her that Rizzy was not so smart as she seemed. She was as dumb as she didn’t seem. The something taught Dolores a very valuable truth (the reality with ‘facts’ in Dontthinkville is that truth are lies and lies are truth. Such as five being an obstacle to progress.)
The truth Dolores learned is that the majority people in their original programmed state are generally not what they seem but what they don’t seem. Most people seem good with the occasional mess-up or no mess- up, but really what they are is a giant bad thing that is not able to do a good thing, because black does not barf out white. She also learned that though President Buppudee had tried to get rid of five he had only managed to give it a various set of other titles that still meant the same thing. People lived in their allusion that five did not exist yet everything they did that equaled at some point the amount represented by five verified the existence of something continually there. Maybe it was the same with the ‘Book of True things”. People lived with a blind side to it, but it still conducted the way they lived. She wondered if anything was really in our control, even the thoughts she was not supposed to be thinking. She thought for a little while longer acknowledging distinctions that would still be there without them ever being acknowledged.

Dolores saw her father coming towards the sandbox with his true thought detector and a threatening paper shredder, just the size for a little girl, so she put her true thoughts away and played as if she were Rizzy who knew everything there was to know about the theory of nothing.