Anila Angin | Scribbles for the Soul

Two Tales of Obedience

2011-08-21T15:58:44Z

Woman with Apple and Snake by Jocelyne Coupaud

“The rules are quite simple then: obey your boss, be respectful, work hard, do not question authority or, god forbid, argue and debate,” commanded the Director of Organization Preservation at the end of her briefing.

The interns stirred restlessly. “But why do we have to obey our boss?” asked the girl, her eyes flashing rebellion.

“Exactly! Why do we have to follow rules? What if they’re stupid?” asked the boy christened Mean Bean by the other interns.

The third intern said nothing. He was bent with great absorption over a game of balls lobbed at a series of indignantly squawking birds on his phone.

The Director was momentarily derailed by this unexpected resistance. “That’s just the way the organization is preserved,” she replied feebly.

“But why does the organization need to be preserved?” asked Mean Bean.

“Follow the rules and the path will clear itself for you,” said the Director grandly, hoping that the line was vague enough to impress the recalcitrant youths into defeated silence.

“You haven’t told us yet why the system needs to be preserved,” repeated Mean Bean, persistent as a housefly. “The only things I remember that need preserving are Egyptian mummies and jams. It’s to prevent decay to dead things. Is our organization decomposing?”

If Mean Bean had indeed been a housefly, the Director would have loved to bring a fly swatter down hard over his bean-shaped head. As it was, she contented herself with a repressed gurgle of rage.

She cast a plaintive glance at the Chairman, who had been observing the briefing with impassive silence. He nodded. It was a general nod and she couldn’t tell if it was meant to encourage her, or if it was in appreciation of Mean Bean’s remarks. She decided that it had to be the former. “When at a loss, tell a story,” the Chairman had once instructed. The Director clung affectionately to the theory that everything her boss said was the absolute truth. Accordingly, a story at this juncture seemed like a brilliant if desperate attempt to fend off a further barrage of questions from this brood of ill-bred interns.

“How would you like me to tell you a story?” asked the Director in the sweetest voice she could muster.

The interns greeted her proposal with no more interest than a school of fish who had been offered a recital of the Penal Code.

“There once was a very good girl who did everything right,” began the Director hastily, taking the interns’ lack of opposition as a mark of approval. “She was beyond reproach in all aspects of her behaviour. She was obedient, kind and respectful, and by virtue of having followed all the rules carefully laid out by her teachers, she topped her class every year. This clever girl soon won every scholarship available, and when she graduated, she was offered the plummiest job in the country.”

“I knew it!” shouted Mean Bean. “Plums become prunes when preserved. I told you all our jobs have to do with death and decay.”

The Director glared frostily at the offending boy. Then she resumed, “Once again, our heroine proved herself to be a marvellous worker. She worked twice as hard and fast as everyone else, and she was always unfailing polite and respectful, carrying out her duties with the same obedient industry that won her all those scholarships.”

“Sycophantic minion,” muttered the rebellious girl under her breath.

The Director did not hear the girl’s remark, or perhaps she chose not to. “Before long, she was offered a promotion, and within ten years, the girl had been promoted twenty times. She earned a great deal more money each time she was promoted, and with all that wealth, she could afford several very nice large houses, much to the envy of her less hardworking compatriots.”

“Did she marry?” asked the boy who had been playing with his phone.

“Um, no, I don’t think so. She was possibly too busy to marry,” stuttered the Director.

“So why did she need so many houses if she was an old maid living by herself?” pursued the boy.

“I was going to ask that too. What a stupid story,” said Mean Bean very certainly.

“That was a deplorably dull story!” declared the rebellious girl.

“You sound like you could use some help,” said the Chairman suddenly.

To be criticised for adopting the Chairman’s favourite tactic was too much for the Director. She flumped into the nearest chair with an expression of abject gloom.

“Why don’t you tell us a story then?” asked the phone boy.

“Yes, tell us a story,” chorused the others like a challenge.

“Once upon a time, there lived a very good girl called Sandy,” began the Chairman.

The phone boy bent his head over his game of squawking birds again. The other interns regarded the Chairman with disappointment. It seemed like every story the bosses were capable of telling was unimaginative in the extreme.

“She was born seemingly with an inherent love for following the rules. She did everything she was asked to do, slept at the right time, never wailed unnecessarily as a baby, ate her greens like candy, did her homework, was always on time, always respectful and always top of her class.”

“Was she beautiful too?” asked the rebellious girl with disgust.

“Not exactly. She was a rather scrawny, severely short-sighted child – from all those hours bent over her books.”

The interns relaxed. An ugly and obedient child they could live with. It seemed like a just price to pay for such an unnatural abundance of goodness.

“Because she loved rules so much, Sandy was always made the class prefect. When she started working, her obedience and discipline did not go unnoticed. Sandy was rewarded with one promotion after another, until she rose to the rank of President of her company.”

Mean Bean sighed very audibly at this point.

“Now the King had a policy of opening his royal gardens to Presidents,” continued the Chairman unperturbed. “He felt that a breath of fresh air would do the Presidents good, so that they could lead their companies better and make the country richer. You can imagine therefore that Sandy was most excited about her first visit to the gardens, which the hoi polloi were never afforded the privilege of feasting their eyes on. That is, unless they happened to be the gardener or the gamekeeper or a sweeper.”

“What was so special about the King’s gardens?” asked the rebellious girl.

“It was said to have curative properties,” replied the Chairman. “Whoever walked in there came out changed. There was just one rule that everyone who entered the gardens had to follow, and that was to stay on the path at all times.”

“Why?” demanded Mean Bean.

“That was exactly what Sandy asked of the keeper, who first presented the information to her. He only answered darkly that there were strange beasts that wandered in sometimes.”

The interns were beginning to enjoy the story. Even the third boy had ceased his tender ministrations of his phone.

“Sandy commenced her walk and enjoyed the many fantastic sights along the path. There was a tree that kept changing its colours before her eyes as if it couldn’t decide whether it was spring or autumn; fountains that appeared like magic and danced to invisible music; and flocks of rare animals who grazed peaceably in the surrounding fields. At all times, no matter how great the temptation to explore afield, Sandy stuck rigidly to the path. As she walked, she congratulated herself, ‘If I had not been promoted to President, I would not be walking here today enjoying these sights.’ And she smiled with the self-satisfied air of the virtuous.

“Finally, at the furthest reaches of the King’s gardens, where she had just turned around to make her way back, Sandy found an unexpected obstacle sitting in the middle of her path. Upon closer inspection, she saw that it was a viper. If she moved back on the path, she would be trapped by the wall that marked the boundaries of the King’s garden. The only way back to the entrance was past the viper. The alternative was to step off the path and skirt around the viper. But the garden to her side was fenced with coarse bushes, and the thought of breaking a rule was more loathsome to Sandy than walking past a viper. Trembling a little, Sandy thought, ‘If only I hadn’t been promoted, I would be safe in the office now working on my next presentation.’

“Then she remembered a golden adage that had been taught to her when she was just an intern at her company: Follow the rules and the path will clear itself for you. Of course! How silly of her, she thought, here was her chance to prove the sanctity of the rules she held so dear. As long as she abided by them, even nature would yield to her like the sea parting for Moses.

“Taking heart, Sandy pressed forward on the path, bravely expecting the viper to slither away into the bushes. The viper marked her approach and took fright. It did the only thing it knew best how to do under duress. In the open jaws of the viper, Sandy saw too late the sting of death that awaited her. No one heard her cry as she fell, except the snake and the trees.”

“An excellent story!” declared the girl intern, miraculously shorn of the rebellion that had marked her earlier speech.

“The best story ever,” agreed Mean Bean emphatically.

“What kind of story was that?” asked the Director, scandalised. “You’ve given them all the wrong sorts of ideas about the job now.”

“At least I was honest,” said the Chairman as he rose to leave, the interns following with alacrity in his wake.

The Director of Systems Preservation has been promoted to the post of Chairwoman, but she hasn’t been invited to tour the King’s gardens yet. Neither does she have any intention of accepting if she is.

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The Troll Who Became a Boy

2011-07-24T16:21:04Z

Childhood Phantasy by Tom Swift

There was once a beautiful countess who gave birth to a boy who was unfortunately endowed like a troll. The count, convinced that his wife had mated with a goblin, retired mournfully to his study, where he buried himself for years in his books, refusing to see his wife and his son.

So the countess was left with the thankless task of raising their only child. Each day, she sat with her ugly baby, shining on him the way the sun warms a weed. She didn’t allow anyone else near him, perhaps because she didn’t want the servants to talk.

The baby, having no one else to look at but his beautiful mother, grew up believing that only goddesses paced the earth. And as he basked in the light of his mother’s loveliness, a strange thing began to happen. His features grew softer, more human, and in time to come, he became positively princely and charming, with curls that danced when he bobbed in bed.

Only then did the countess introduce her son to the rest of the world, and to his father. The count, astonished by the transformation of his son from troll to boy, remarked, “Was your mother’s beauty so great then, that in drinking of it daily, you had no choice but to reflect her back like a mirror?”

The boy pondered a while, then replied, “No, it was because in her eyes, I saw a love so deep, it showed me where my beauty was hidden. Like a bucket dropped into the well of my ugliness, what she drew up was the clearest of water, blooming with petals in the sunlight of her presence…”

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Foreign Tongues

2011-07-10T03:55:50Z

Image by John Krzesinski

When she spoke, what came out sounded like English. But in the jungle of my mind, I heard the wild cry of a bird, strange and foreign.

“I want those bright round things hanging on the tree,” she cried, circling the dense green hungrily.

“I would like to pick cherries off this tree,” I said, strolling through the woods, craning my neck eagerly at the luscious fruit.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she cawed.

“Neither do I. I will climb the cherry tree. I am hungry.”

“I am hungry too. I will grab the bright stuff.”

“What bright stuff?

“You know, the bright stuff.”

I climbed the tree, and she swooped down from her nest.

Somewhere in the middle, we met, and realised we were reaching for the same fruit.

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The Elephant Circus

2011-06-26T15:11:15Z

When Oli the elephant was just a baby, a circus trainer stole her from her mother.

The man’s face was square and blank like an empty box. “He cannot have any feelings,” thought Oli as he tied her to a shiny metal stake driven into the heart of the earth.

“His soul is numb,” she thought as he cracked a whip against her tender hide.

Enraged (she had a fine fighting spirit, child though she was), Oli fretted and tugged at the rope that chained her ankle to that ugly metal. She honked and scolded the circus trainer eloquently, but he wasn’t clever enough to understand her language.

She was a prisoner, a creature of the circus trainer’s.

Each day, he barked at her to perform simple actions: stand up, sit down, turn left, turn right, sit down, squat.

“Good Oli. Just do what I say and there will be no trouble.”

“Silly man, you are as bland and mindless as wallpaper,” retorted Oli. But she did as he said anyway.

He didn’t understand her, even though she was expected to understand him.

The circus trainer pulled out a bunch of leaves like a magician producing rabbits from a hat. He introduced them to her trunk like a peace offering. A reward for blind obedience.

The leaves were dry and sour, unlike the leaves she had once torn fresh from shrubs when she was still a baby, and had wandered freely with her herd. Still, she swallowed the trainer’s food hungrily.

Oli dreamt of the grasslands she roamed when she was free. Her heart wandered the savannah, munching thoughtfully on grass that burst with the bright flavours of the earth. Most of all, she dreamt of her mother, whom she missed more than anyone else. Every night, Oli rocked herself to sleep, weeping bitterly at her fate.

As Oli grew up, she learnt to accept the rope that kept her to the stake. She found out quickly that obedience was rewarded with food, that mastering new tricks meant that her short rope would be replaced with a longer rope.

In time to come, she learnt to measure her freedom by the length of the rope that chained her.

And so began the conversion of her wild dreams into the robotic rhythms demanded by the circus trainer:

Stand up, sit down, walk in a circle.
Where are we going?
Don’t you know that a circle goes nowhere?
Yes sir.
Good Oli. Eat your leaves.

Oli wasn’t the only elephant in the circus of course. There were others like her, performers in the circus, whose greatest pride was to do as the circus trainer commanded.

It even became a source of not-so-friendly competition among the elephants to learn as many new tricks as possible, all in the hope of getting more food, a longer rope, or best of all, to be the star of the circus with a cage of your own and no rope. To be a star was the highest aspiration of their lives.

Soon, unbidden, the elephants were learning to paint, to draw, to juggle, to roll backwards, to contort themselves, to do all sorts of things to entertain people. Their ropes grew longer and the elephants were content.

The circus became very rich as people flocked to see the amazing elephants. The circus trainer upgraded to a new mansion.

But still, the elephants remained tied to their stakes, eating sour leaves from his hand. Then again, they had forgotten the true taste of leaves plucked fresh from trees. Sour had become the new sweet for them.

As the elephants grew bigger, the metal stakes were replaced with wood. And as they grew to adulthood, the wooden stakes were replaced with pegs.

But by then, the elephants were so used to their ropes that they never thought to test their strength against the little pegs. They lived for the trainer’s sour leaves, for his commands and the ever lengthening rope. They took pleasure in comparing the lengths of their respective ropes, as a measure of their success in life.

One day, a new baby elephant was brought in to the circus. She was placed in the pen beside Oli.

As with all new elephants, she kicked and trumpeted as Oli once did. As with all new elephants, she was not strong enough for the metal stake she was tied to.

Oli felt sorry for the baby elephant. When night came and the circus people had retired to their mansions, she heard the baby crying. With a dull ache, Oli remembered her own motherless days of pining.

“Where do you come from?” asked Oli.

“From the rolling plains of Africa,” replied the baby elephant.

“So did I, once upon a time,” said Oli wistfully.

“Yesterday, I was free. I walked with my mama, we bathed, we ate, we drank from wide rivers and we inspected the stars at night. My tribe… they had such grand dreams for me,” her voice broke off, trembling.

Oli sighed. When was the last time she had dreamt of such a life?

“I want my mama!” wailed the baby suddenly.

“Poor child, I will be a mother to you.”

“Then come to me and warm me as my mama did.”

Oli shook her head. “I can’t. I am stuck. I am tied with a rope as you are.”

The baby elephant looked up in surprise. “But you’re only tied to a peg, and you are big and strong like my mama! She could lift entire trees. Why would a peg hold you back?”

Oli had never considered this possibility before. It seemed so outrageous. All her life, she had been trained to obey the rope. All her life, she had tried to break free, only to be held back by that damnable object driven into the earth.

She caught herself just then. “All her life?”

No, that couldn’t be right. When was the last time she had tried to escape?

With a pang of excitement, Oli realised she must have been still a child when she last tried to break away from the metal stake. Why did she give up? What made her stop struggling against her rope?

It was the circus trainer, she remembered now. He had rewarded her with a generous bunch of bananas that day in return for obeying his commands. As a bonus, he had replaced her rope with a longer one. She felt a swelling pride in her, as if she had done something remarkably clever, when all she had achieved was to follow him like a robot: left right squat sit stand.

“Good Oli. Obedient girl.”

From then on, nothing mattered to her except his leaves and his long ropes. With a deep sigh, she realised that was the day her dreams had died.

“Come on,” urged the baby elephant, her voice more urgent now. “You are free! Just get up and go.”

Oli got up and obeyed. She had obeyed the circus trainer for so long. It wouldn’t hurt to obey a baby elephant now.

Aiming a tentative kick at the peg, she was astonished when it crumbled like a biscuit. She rushed over to the baby elephant and hugged it.

“Now help me with my rope please,” said the baby elephant.

Oli sawed the rope with her tusks. It snapped. She couldn’t believe how easy it was. The song of the savannah was singing in her soul.

“Let’s get the other elephants,” said Oli.

They rushed to Bumpo, a heavy male elephant who lived near Oli.

“You’re free!” shouted Oli, unable to contain her joy.

“What do you mean?” asked Bumpo, narrowing his eyes suspiciously.

“You’re only tied to a peg,” explained Oli patiently. “Just tug at it and you’re free to leave the circus.”

“Am I really?” asked Bumpo, clearly astonished.

“Yes, just do as I say. We can return to the savannah after this. We don’t have to obey the commands of the circus trainer any more.”

“But why would I want to leave the circus?” asked Bumpo.

This time, it was Oli’s turn to be surprised.

“But why not?”

“I have worked so hard to learn new tricks. Someone in the audience the other day said that my painting looked like an early Picasso. And I heard that I might be promoted to the post of circus star when Bofant dies.” He nodded grimly in the direction of Bofant’s cage.

“So you don’t want to leave? You are content with a life of sour leaves and long ropes rather than the wild dreams of the savannah?”

Bumpo nodded sadly. “I have been a circus animal for so long. I don’t know if I will survive in the wild.”

Oli left with the baby elephant. “Let’s try Bofant then,” she said.

They went to Bofant’s cage and peered at him through the darkness.

“Bofant, are you still awake?”

Bofant stirred and stumbled sleepily to the bars of his cage. “What is it?”

“You are a free animal. We were tied to a peg all this while. Let’s run away to the savannah!”

Bofant shook his head sadly. “I knew about the peg, Oli, but I let myself be put in a cage with no rope. I wanted so badly to be a star…”

“But why?” asked Oli thunderstruck. “You mean you willingly gave up your freedom for stardom?”

“How could I resist? I heard some people say that my drawings were like those of the Old Masters. They were talking about auctioning my art for millions.”

“Was it worth it?” piped up the baby elephant.

“No child,” replied Bofant. “Run away while you still can. Elephants were meant to roam free, not to entertain humans.”

“But Bofant, can’t you join us? You can escape from your cage.”

Bofant shook his head again. “No. When I wasn’t a star, all I had was a rope tied to a peg. But now that I am a star, I am too valuable to the circus master. I have no rope, but I have a gilded cage with a padlock.”

Oli lifted her trunk and twisted the lock. The metal snapped like a twig.

“There! You are free now!” she said triumphantly.

Bofant stared in horror as the cage door swung open, soft as butter sliding into the night.

“But I don’t want to leave,” he said.

“Why not?” asked the baby elephant impatiently. Dawn was fast approaching and she wanted to make her escape soon.

“The higher you go in the human world, the harder it is to step back into the uncertainties of the wild. I am old. Perhaps it is better for me to live out my days in this cage, feted like a king.”

“A king in prison, waiting to be replaced by Bumpo,” said Oli disdainfully.

“We cannot wait any longer,” cried the baby elephant. “We must run soon. The savannah calls!”

“Let’s go then,” agreed Oli. The pair turned and fled, guided by the baby elephant who knew which way the plains lay.

They were about to cross the boundaries of the circus when they heard the thunderous clatter of elephant feet behind them.

“Wait! Wait for us!” panted Bofant and Bumpo.

Oli and the baby elephant turned in surprise. “Bofant! Bumpo! We thought you weren’t coming?”

“We changed our minds,” they said sheepishly. “We still remember the carefree days of our childhood. The savannah calls…”

The four elephants laughed and walked into the sunrise, ripe as a plum, bursting with sweetness over the savannah that spread before them – wide and wild like an unchartered map of home.

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Child’s Play

2011-05-20T14:28:40Z

Woman with Raised Hand by Mark Schaver

My aunt Fazzle was coming to tea today.

The event inspired great excitement in the family, for aunt Fazzle had lived abroad for many years, during which time she had become a Very Important Person in the world, or so the grownups informed me with a great deal of self-congratulatory pride, as though they had been personally responsible for her success.

Aunt Fazzle was a very busy person, I was warned. I mustn’t bother her too much even though she had expressly come to see me, her nephew who was as yet unborn and unconceived when she left, and whose caterpillar-like growth she had only witnessed digitally through photographs, lovingly shared with her on Facebook for the last six years.

And now she was returned to us, this storied aunt, if only for a short while. She was in transit on a business trip, my mother gravely informed me. She would soon jet off again to her Very Important World of meetings. To all this talk, I nodded dumbly, not quite knowing what to make of it.

The doorbell rang and my mother scurried to open the door. I had imagined my aunt to be a tall, beaky woman like my father, but the apparition that presented itself next to him was short and round and ridiculously decorated in miles of pink gauze. She was like a great pink puffball.

“And this is Jemmy,” they were saying, thrusting me reluctantly at my pink aunt.

We regarded each other suspiciously.

“Lovely to meet you after so long,” trilled aunt Fazzle.

“Lovely to meet you too,” I replied obediently, as instructed by my parents.

“What a sweet child!” exclaimed aunt Fazzle insincerely. She proceeded to frown at her watch. “Now I’m afraid I only have 30 minutes to spare. I have to run to a meeting after this.”

I couldn’t imagine that giant puffball running to a meeting. Rolling and bobbing perhaps, but running didn’t suit her round, befrocked legs, I thought.

We were installed accordingly at the formal dining table (normally, we ate at the kitchen counter) – I in the place of honour beside aunt Fazzle, and the rest of the family scattered around us like fungi. It did not matter that I was too short for the dining table and that the esteemed Fazzled elbow was generally poking my mouth, making the consumption of cake and tea a precarious operation at best. It was a privilege to be in such close proximity to the great Fazzle and I fancied that the family envied me my position.

“How have you all been these past few years? How time has flown! Like a sparrow isn’t it? Here one moment, gone the next. And all this while, it’s just been busy busy busy work for me,” declared aunt Fazzle with a dramatic sigh.

The family chorused their regret at time’s passage.

“And Jemmy is all grown up. Such a big boy now,” added aunt Fazzle, poking experimentally at my ribcage as she spoke.

“Ouch,” I said.

“Don’t be rude, Jemmy,” said my mother anxiously, darting a furtive, apologetic look in the direction of the puffball.

“Oh, don’t worry about it,” said Fazzle airily. “I’m so sorry if I hurt you, Jemmy,” said my aunt, sounding not in the least contrite.

And so they carried on, exchanging such pleasantries that avoided saying anything remotely meaningful.

I seized the first opportunity to slip from the table, when they were deeply engrossed in their dull conversation. I was too short for anyone to notice that I had disappeared.

I retreated to my play room and opened my colouring book. There was an outline of a large, bland girl sitting on a sofa, emptily waiting to be filled with colour.

I thought the girl could use some purple in her face and green in her hair. After all, if aunt Fazzle was pink like an over-boiled prawn, why couldn’t other people be purple?

I picked up my crayons and enthusiastically applied myself to my masterpiece. The girl’s face I endowed with a marvellous shade of puce, as if she might be congested with rage. Her hair was green like grass, and I coloured it standing up, like a row of exclamation marks. Altogether, she made a most attractive picture of bucolic indignation.

Aunt Fazzle came in to the play room at that moment.

“Oh there you are!” she exclaimed delightedly. “I just have 5 minutes left, so I thought I’d see what you’re up to.” She came up and inspected my artwork. A frown marred her forehead where Botox had failed to penetrate, and her mouth worked agitatedly like a trumpet-player’s. “This isn’t right! There’s no such thing as a purple-faced girl or green-haired human. You should have coloured her skin beige and her hair black!” Little specks of foam dotted the sides of her trumpet mouth.

But people turn purple when they are angry, I thought. In fact, your face is remarkably close to purple right now. I kept my thoughts to myself and watched silently as she flipped the page and picked up the beige crayon.

“See, this is how you colour people,” she instructed. She started colouring in the picture of a boy playing with a grasshopper. Beige for his face, black for his hair. All the colours were orderly, proper, except for the riot of pink on her gauze dress.

I felt bored and wandered off, leaving her to her own devices.

Outside, my mother caught hold of me. “Where’s your aunt?” she demanded. “She’s going to be late for her meeting.”

“She’s in the room playing with my crayons,” I replied.

“Don’t be silly Jemmy,” said my father. “Your aunt has no time to play.” He marched grimly to the play room and flung open the door.

The puffball was bent earnestly over my colouring book. I was astonished to see that she had finished colouring the boy and the grasshopper and had proceeded to attack the rest of the pages in the book. As she worked, she whispered furiously, like a malevolent chant, “Beige skin, black hair, beige skin, black hair.”

“Fazzle, what are you doing with Jemmy’s colouring book?” asked my father. “You’ll be late for your meeting!”

“What’s that? Beige skin black hair. Beige skin black hair. I need to finish this first,” she panted.

We watched her curiously, her brows knotted with concentration, her tongue protruding with the effort of colouring. Suddenly, she uttered a triumphant yell, and she waved the colouring book above her head like a vanquished enemy. “Done!” she cried. “All done in beige and black!”

She gathered her short legs and her miles of pink garment and bobbed happily out of the room.

“I’ll get you a new colouring book,” my father whispered to me.

As I watched their figures fade into the car porch, I saw the ghost of a child in my aunt’s little round figure. And in my father’s stiff back, I saw the ghost of my future, an adult whose world had been neatly ordered into beige and black, and nothing else.

Ed note: When I was 5 (or thereabouts), I drew a girl sitting on a couch and coloured her face purple. And yes, I gave her green hair and the couch was a bright orange. My art teacher and my family laughed at my masterpiece, of which I was so proud, and that effectively ended my art career. Is there a lesson in here? Perhaps. But I’ll leave that to the reader’s imagination…

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Moon Triptych

2011-05-08T16:14:24Z

Sea of Tranquility by Ian Burt

When night arrived, all the people of Soluna would have long since scrambled to bed. There they would lie in a tomb-like sleep until the sun returned, and had grown hot enough to melt the sternest chocolate.

It wasn’t indolence that kept this village in bed for so long, but a gripping fear of the Night, which their elders had terrorised them into believing was a beast of fierce proportions, dark and grim, though what would happen to them exactly if they witnessed the Night, the elders didn’t say.

Among the villagers was a young man who questioned the purported ghastliness of the Night, and he resolved to stay up one day to see this mystery with his own eyes.

That evening, he only pretended to swallow the pill which the elders doled out daily to induce slumber in the villagers. Night came, and he marvelled at the velvety blackness that swallowed his room like a monster.

Perhaps the elders are right, he thought. They are trying to protect us from this strange dark beast.

Despite his misgivings, he left the safety of his bed. He peered fearfully at the darkness that lay behind his bedroom door, as if it might contain a legion of demons. But when he placed one uncertain foot out of his door and it failed to be consumed by a hungry monster, he grew bolder and sallied out of his house.

Once outside, he was struck by the brilliancy of the night sky. The stars hung in heavy clusters, like jewelled grapes, and the moon was a smile, a curved, seductive smile that could only belong to God. He stared and stared in wonder. So this was the moon he had read about in books! He resolved to tell the villagers that their fear had been foolish, that the night was only the absence of the sun, and that God chose the night to smile benevolently at the sleeping world. Why wouldn’t anyone wish to see the face of God, even if it was confined to her lips?

So the villagers refused their pills as well and stayed up the next night to look at the moon, then the next, and the next. Each day, God’s smile grew fatter and thicker, until it became positively round, like a large luminous pancake.

At first, they argued with each other. If the moon was a smile, how did it grow so plump? Then someone suggested that the moon was God’s face revealed in parts, like the unveiling of a coy maiden.

This idea pleased everyone, and that was how the villagers came to measure the natural rhythms of their bodies and their crops by the revelation of God’s face, radiant and forgiving in the dark sky.

II.

A few thousand years later, two astronauts from earth set foot on the moon for the first time, and it was discovered that the moon was walkable and touchable. An inanimate lump of rock that could be measured with a ruler, with altimeters, barometers, thermometers and other newfangled instruments.

The moon had lost her mysticism.

No longer the smile of God, she was reduced to a shattered pile of statistics, of interest to no one but a few nerdy scientists and their students.

III.

Then there were the seven dancing princesses who flew to the moon. (This was another thousand years after the astronauts had landed on the moon.)

Every night, pulled by the moon’s gravity, they levitated from their beds and joined the Moon People in their revelries. The Moon People had lived on the moon far longer than humans had inhabited the earth, but they revealed themselves only to kindred souls who shared their love for dancing.

The princesses were light on their feet, and they danced each night till dawn, when they would sink back to the earth and fall, exhausted, into their beds.

One day, they failed to return. They had chosen to stay forever with the Moon People. The world mourned their loss, for they were considered the most eligible princesses around. But the princesses’ joy caused the moon to glow brighter than usual, and the world looked at the moon with new eyes.

Each night, the people would stare at the moon and see the smile of God which had been so irresistible to the princesses, and then they were glad for them, that they could now dance forever on the surface of the moon, on the face of God.

Ed note: I’m back from the moon for now, and as usual, having too many ideas and not being able to create stories for all of them, I chose to write this when I gazed at the moon last night. Also, for those of you waiting for the weekly chapter installment of The Little Dreamer, I’m trying to decide on new directions for the book, but I’ll be back with more once my mind is made up!

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Chilean Rain

2011-04-24T11:02:29Z

Photo by Alessandro Casagrande

The rain can be a benison, really.

All summer, our bodies have gone through the illusion of perpetual motion, constantly transported from one place to the next, walking, running, trekking. By car, by plane, by boat, we wandered like lost children from San Francisco to Singapore to Malaysia to north India. A mad dash again and we found ourselves in Los Angeles, then Chile.

In Kashmir, we paid homage to the glaciers, from whose slopes I nearly plunged to my death.

A few weeks later in Chile, we are once again on the hunt for ice.

The glaciers are receding like a hairline. I looked at the frozen lake, half filled with icebergs, those whitewashed cathedrals of some snow king.

On the other side of the lake, the ice sits delicately on the water like a shroud of white light, a graveyard of floating ice flats. If one desired to walk across a body of water like Jesus, this was the fraud’s way to do it. You could walk on the ice and it would shatter into a million pieces, blue as lapis lazuli, skinning the green waters of the fjord…

The rains came soon after, and we fled north to Pucon, wishing for warmer climes. I was dreaming light and fire, of agni that resides in the snowy deeps of volcanoes, and in our hearth when we choose to light one. It was strange that my dreams were so bright when reality was so grey.

In Pucon, we were pelted with tiny hailstones, but it didn’t matter because finally, we have come home.

Here, our puppet-like frenzy of motion has come to a standstill, has found solace in a wooden cabaña over Lago Villarica. We came, we saw, we fell in love. Nursing our cold by the fire, we thanked the heavens that it was raining so that we could stay at home and do nothing.

Nothing. What a frightening word to the traveller who must move on. Cramming, cramming ourselves with sights and sounds, yet still not really knowing what we look for.

Yes, all is beauty around us, but we have drunk too deep of beauty and are suffering a hangover. The lake district, mercifully blasted with rain and whipping winds, so cold at times that the rain falls as snow, would force us to stay at home, in our lovely cabaña, so lovely that we want to buy it from the resort management.

In our wooden sanctuary, the past is so easily forgotten. Who cares what we did yesterday, or the day before? Who cares if we forget the name of yesterday’s townlakeriverorvolcano? What matters is that which lies before us. And that presentness is what never changes, what follows us every day.

So then, this is life. Beautiful, blissful life. All summer, hopping from one insanely lovely place to another, living the beauty, distilling it into our very beings till it became liquid light, only to realize that what we were looking for wasn’t outside. It wasn’t what we could see with our eyes, what could be photographed or filmed that mattered.

Instead, it took the rain and the sleet to mask the beauty of the lake district, to hide it from our prying tourist eyes, to drive us indoors and realize that the journey wasn’t just about movement, about rushing from one beautiful spot to the next.

It was also about doing nothing, about staying indoors and spoiling ourselves, meditating by the stone hearth of our living room as we stared at the crackling flames, listening to the luxurious sounds of everything from Chopin to Claude Challe as the wind drove the rain in horizontal splatters against our floor-to-ceiling windows.

It was about eating home cooked dinners of swordfish fettuccine with wheat rolls and freshly grated carrots. Then falling asleep to the thunderous music of the elements.

The rain is a benison indeed. The rain, the rain, the stillness within.

Ed note: A non-fiction piece for once, in part because I will be travelling this week, so there will be no new posts next weekend. Be well. Be still.

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The Child, the Fishmonger and the Princess

2011-04-23T10:17:15Z

There was a fishmonger who was attempting to scale snappers while minding her small son whose chief occupation was to keep up a lugubrious wailing by her side.

The fishmonger was considerably irritated, and digging around in her apron pocket, found a lollipop that she gladly flung at him as a kind of saccharine pacifier.

The boy took it and finally fell silent.

Poor boy, thought the child. All he wanted was his mother’s love and attention, even if just for a second. And now, he will grow up believing sugar to be a substitute for love, a cheap anesthetic for the lolly-shaped emptiness in him, where love should be…

What an altogether rude and peculiar city this is, she thought. Everyone seems to struggle so hard to live, and to what end? So they can be richer than other people? So as to fall sick and hasten their deaths?

She wondered if they were happy, but did not think so. At least, the faces around her were grim and smileless. Most people looked absorbed in their own world, which seemed to displease them. She decided to quicken her steps and try to leave Algondiz behind her as soon as she could. She liked neither the jostling crowds nor the grumpy merchants very much.

Just then, she heard a long, haughty trumpet blast. This was followed by a powerful voice crying, “Make way, make way for Her Royal Highness, the Princess of Algondiz!”

Immediately, as though a spell of silence had been cast over the city, everyone around her scurried to the side of the road like terrified rabbits and knelt in obeisance, heads bowed meekly, patiently waiting for the Princess and her retinue to come by. Gone were the scuffles, the pushing, the cantankerous squabbles, the grimaces, the gripes about money. The child was amazed to look around and see instead neat rows of people crouched like praying mantises, their limbs and faces arranged in attitudes of pious devotion, as though waiting to offer supplications to an approaching god.

What a lot of fuss for one person, thought the child. My mother the shaman is considered the most powerful person in our tribe, but however much she is revered and respected, she would never ask anyone to bow to her.

So she remained standing proudly – despite a small voice within her that urged her to do what everyone else was doing – partly because she was unfamiliar with the rules of the city, and partly because she couldn’t walk on even if she wanted to: she was hemmed in by the packed, orderly rows of kneeling people around her. The child felt as though she had accidentally stepped into a mosque at the hour of prayer.

An old man kneeling next to her pulled at her hand urgently and pleaded, “For heaven’s sake child, please kneel! The Princess has an uncertain temper.”

As he spoke, he tugged at her so forcefully – his fear for her lending his aged muscles a supernatural strength – that she was brought to her knees against her will.

“But why do we have to kneel to another human being?” she protested.

Her usual good humour had disappeared with the sullenness of the city folks.

“Psst. Now is not the time to ask questions, child. Just do as we do.”

Then, seeing that the Princess was still some way from approaching, he ventured in hushed tones, “The Princess is out on her daily morning surveillance of the city.”

Because of the slight commotion, she had been pushed to the front of the road where she would have the best view of the approaching entourage. She knelt but didn’t bow her head, and thus had a full view of the Princess as she came along, borne on a luxurious litter piled high with silk cushions, on top of which she reclined, gazing smugly and languidly at the rows of bowed heads. All bowed, that is… except for the child’s.

There she knelt, a curly mop looking up boldly amidst an ocean of obediently bent heads and kneeling knees, sticking out undutifully in the tides of dutiful praying mantis subjects. A curly mop who gazed unabashedly and openly at the Princess, wondering who this woman was who imposed such strange practices on the people.

The Princess’ entourage passed the child at that moment. Their eyes met, as eyes will in one fatal moment.

“Halt!” cried the Princess.

The horses and the sweaty royal guards halted. The sounds of the city, which long ago had fallen silent before the Princess drove by, were replaced now by a silence that was deeper, deadlier. Tense like a coiled spring waiting to unwind like a mad puppet. Silences of this sort were unpredictable, and the child felt the whole city holding its breath in a haze of tense waiting. The worshipful atmosphere had vanished, and in its place, the praying mantis people huddled fearfully like death row criminals awaiting their executioner.

Ed note: This is an excerpt from part 4, chapter 5 of The Little Dreamer (Algondiz), the seventeenth in a series of chapter parts released online over 60 weeks. Click here to read the full chapter for free.

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The Minister of Prudish Procreation and the Macaques

2011-04-17T18:14:33Z

Geopoliticus Child Watching the Birth of the New Man, Salvador Dali

“What shall we do about our falling birth rate?” whined the Minister of Prudish Procreation. “Our country is chock full of citizens who resemble elderly turtles. Their hair is silver and our young are not spawning!”

“Some of the young have silver hair too,” I observed.

“That’s because they are stressed by their inability to find mates!” snapped the Minister.

“Then perhaps we should design a comprehensive suite of initiatives to matchmake our young,” suggested a grovelling minion. “We could bribe them into getting married,” he added fawningly.

“Fantastic! Go write a paper for my approval now,” said the Minister. “What else can we do?”

“Let’s outlaw Unnatural Sex,” I piped up, anxious to score my share of brownie points with the Minister. “A disease of perversity has beset our country. Too many people engage in that frightfully unproductive activity. It threatens to derail our National Plan of expansion and sustainability!” I slapped on the rhetoric, hoping to impress the Minister with my solid understanding of WOG’s KPIs (where WOG wasn’t a type of troll, but was short for Whole Of Government).

“That’s brilliant! Just brilliant,” gushed the Minister of Procreation. “We shall outlaw homosexuality and Unnatural Sex! Artists and writers who depict it in any way shall be hung! Anyone caught indulging in perverse acts shall be detained without trial!”

“Might that be a little harsh?” suggested another minion timidly. Clearly, he did not care much about being promoted.

“We will flag it up to the Cabinet and see what they say,” replied the Minister grimly.

I thought of the Minister, valiantly waving a reverse-rainbow flag, attempting to scale the slippery heights of a cupboard to announce his new policies. I banished the image as soon as it was conceived. To think of one’s Minister in such terms was unpatriotic.

“What about love?” asked a voice, gentle as the music of a reed flute. I peered short-sightedly around the room. The voice belonged to a girl, slight and enchanting as a fairy.

“Love has no relevance to our Procreation Policies. It is not pragmatic enough,” barked the Minister.

The girl stood up. “But it was love that gave birth to us. Love that engenders passions, answers to no one, follows no rules. Love flows freely in the hearts of anyone open to her. Her whims have united male and female, female and female, male and male. When she touches you, you become her slave. How do we control the uncontrollable? We do not choose who we fall in love with.”

“Blasphemy!” shouted the Minister. “Sit down and shut up! Are you saying that Unnatural Sex is as natural as Prudish Procreation?” A strand from his carefully combed hair had fallen across his face, giving him the look of a frazzled peacock.

“Yes,” said the girl. Her lovely face was open, unafraid.

“Guards! Arrest her!” blustered the Minister. Secretly, I felt sorry for the girl, but I did not speak up. My promotion exercise was next week. I cursed my cowardice, but I was born a sycophant – there was nothing I could do.

When the girl had been removed from the room, unprotestingly, as I noticed, the Minister resumed angrily, “Of course we can control procreation! Of course we can manufacture love. And of course we can control those who disagree with our policies,” he nodded in the direction of the door through which the girl had disappeared. “It’s all about covering my ass,” he added under his breath.

I scrutinised his ass. It certainly looked well covered in its tailored woollen trousers.

“The meeting is dismissed,” announced the Minister. “I will propose our new policies to the Cabinet tomorrow.”

He turned to me and smiled, that coveted smile every minion hopes to receive from one more powerful than himself. “I will be cutting across the park to visit the President after this. Would you like to walk with me?”

I jumped at the chance to accompany my idol.

We chatted pleasantly about all the policies we had implemented to urge our citizens’ industrial production of brats. We discussed demographics, productivity and rates of replacement for the cogs in the National Apparatus with the enthusiasm of schoolboys swooning over a new specimen of cockroach.

“That was an excellent point you made, Frank, about Unnatural Sex hijacking our national agenda,” said the Minister. “How are we to reproduce ourselves if our population is turning gay? It’s unnatural, highly unnatural!”

I blushed and stammered under the glare of his esteemed praise.

“Whoa, what’s this?” exclaimed the Minister. Our perambulation through the park was arrested by the frolicking emergence of two macaques across our path. They were mating passionately.

We watched them with prurient interest.

Suddenly, the Minister whipped out his phone and started filming the macaques.

“It’s going into my live feed on YouTube,” he whispered. “Hundreds of thousands of people around the world are watching this channel as I speak.”

Out loud, he announced into his phone, “As you can see, these common monkeys, our closest primate brethren, are having quite an exciting time here. We, the citizens of Prudishland, should seek to emulate the natural animal passions of these vigorous young monkeys. Look at Jack as he plants a slobbering kiss on Jane,” he pointed out excitedly.

The macaques pulled apart, taking a break from their amorous labour.

It was then that I noticed something horribly wrong. The Minister didn’t seem to have noticed anything. He was carrying on his commentary in startlingly pornographic detail. “Ah, they are creative, these monkeys! They are trying a new position! Something from the Kama Sutra perhaps? Look! Jack is attempting to mount Jane from behind. Learn from nature, my people! We need to raise the national birth rate.”

I rushed to the Minister and gestured frantically at him to shut up, alternately pointing to my mouth and to the glaringly swollen appendages on both monkeys.

“Do be quiet, Frank,” hissed the Minister. “You’re not thinking of performing fellatio on the monkeys are you?”

Losing my patience, I spoke up. “Sir, with all due respect, the monkeys are not Jack and Jane. They are Jack and John.”

The Minister’s eyes bulged as he saw for the first time what he had refused to see all along. The phone fell from his hands onto the grass where it sat upright, its digital lights blinking indignantly.

“Arrest those monkeys!” he uttered, his voice shaking. “Off with their heads! We need to stage a public execution!”

I made to do as he asked, venturing shyly to the first macaque who had resumed his unabashed pleasuring of his mate, emitting periodic small cries of pain or pleasure, I couldn’t tell which. How was one to arrest a monkey? For that matter, a monkey in the midst of making love to another monkey? I felt faintly profane, knowing I was about to interrupt an intimate act of communion between two animals. Two animals who loved each other, and who happened to be of the same sex. The thought sickened me.

I seized the macaque we called John, and immediately, the two monkeys sprang apart. They squatted on their haunches, grinning lustfully at us. I lunged at Jack but missed, falling flat on my face.

I struggled to get up, and saw that the Minister had made his own attempts at catching John. He too tripped over the nimble macaque and fell to the ground, floundering like a fat, breathless fish.

Before we could rise to our feet, the brutes had jumped onto our backs where they sat like iron sacks. Chittering to themselves, the macaques expertly ripped off our trousers, exposing us to their unnatural desire.

I tried to go to the rescue of the Minister, who was being similarly subjected to the creative act from the Kama Sutra. But the monkeys clung to us like backpacks, and my attempted rescue of the Minister landed me on top of John who was wrapped in an ardent embrace of the Minister’s bare ass. In the mass of writhing bodies, I am embarrassed to admit that a quadruple orgy took place.

The monkeys were kind to us. Distressingly so. The deed done, the Minister sighed with reluctant pleasure. “That was surprisingly good,” he announced. “But let’s keep this to ourselves, shall we?”

Then I saw his phone, perched on the side, watching us smugly. With sickening dread, I noted the pulsing green of the record button, the live feed that had conveyed our unnatural acts to the world.

He saw it the same time as me, the Minister of Prudish Procreation. I read the recognition in his eyes, the gaping maw of the horrors that lay before us.

Beneath me, the Minister’s ass gleamed white in the sun, covered by a monkey we called John, on whose face was the dumb contentment of the beast.

Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

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The Apothecary

2011-04-16T04:09:33Z

She came across an apothecary, surrounded by mysterious coloured jars of medicines and other strange concoctions.

“What’s this for?” she asked, pointing to a red jar labelled Pinkrasure.

“It’s for pinkeye,” announced the apothecary proudly. “You need only apply a few drops on the affected eye, and it will be cured almost instantly.”

The child was suitably impressed. “And what’s this for?” she asked, pointing to a vermilion jar next to it labelled Irritasin.

The apothecary appeared embarrassed. “Well, Pinkrasure comes with some side effects, like eye irritation. Irritasin was formulated to counter the irritation.”

The child pondered this strange revelation. “And does Irritasin also produce side effects of its own?”

“Oh yes!” said the apothecary cheerfully. “Irritasin can cause the cornea to become inflamed. But you have nothing to worry about, because there’s Inflammacalm to soothe any such inflammation that may occur!” he pronounced, pointing to a green jar on the side.

“And does Inflammacalm have any side effects?”

Ed note: This is an excerpt from part 3, chapter 5 of The Little Dreamer (Algondiz), the sixteenth in a series of chapter parts released online over 60 weeks. Click here to read the full chapter for free.

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