Stick Man
Dray is slumped at the edge of his desk, doodling. It’s Saturday again. Another business studies class. 4 low level Japanese students talking about their companies in broken English. No matter what he does, it’s always boring. You’d think, you’re the teacher of a class, it’s going to be interesting. You’d think, you’re the teacher, you shouldn’t be the one falling asleep.
But it happens. He spends longer every time, planning, brings in CDs, newspapers, games, but somehow it always comes down to this. Just, dull.
Dray’s eyes creep shut. His classroom has always been too warm. The fan just pumps in hot air from the study room next door. The windows won’t open, fire regulations. Crazy. He fights the urge, but soon enough his head is against the wall and the soft mutter of Japanese accented English sends him to sleep.
The Disgusting Crow
Tycho lay on top of his grassy hillock and waited for the disgusting crow to come for his eyes, feeling downright blue. His friends the tired old turtle and one-eared rabbit tried to pep him up, but it wasn’t taking. Banter was banter, but the disgusting crow was something else entirely. Every time he closed his jewelly eyes he saw its claws of brambly bone and its diamante beak. He remembered how it stank, and how much he hated it.
“I really hate that disgusting crow,” he said sadly. “Maybe I should just let it take my eyes.”
“It won’t settle for your eyes,” warned the turtle, barely poking its wizened head out of its crusted shell. “Even you can see that.”
“I don’t know,” reasoned Tycho. “Seems to me, eyes are enough for anyone.”
“Normally I’d agree with you,” said the turtle, “but today I won`t.”
“Hmm,” pondered Tycho, “thanks a lot.”
Image from here.
Sir Clowdishley and the Sea
His name was Sir Clowdishley. He was once a royalty man, an astronomer to the king. He surveyed great kingdoms of heaven and charted the progress of the stars. He named whole galaxies after his two children and wife, but his family were now all dead, outlived by their celestial counterparts, lost to the sea.
He stalked the ocean, walking the shores of England’s beaches, from Land’s End in the north to John O’Groats in the south. He lived off tubers and seaweed, jellyfish he found rotting on the sand, husks of old cod half-desiccated in the salty winds. He was emaciated, where once stood a proud and hefty figure. He slumped along the coastline, ragged and draggle-haired, hefting his hundredweight chain like a penance behind him, picking his next sortie with the utmost care.
Sir Clowdishley warred with the sea. He battered it with his chain. He lashed it endlessly, striking foam from its ragged edge and beating the surging tides with all his strength.
Image by Caspar David Friedrich.
Sky Painter
The Sky Painter lived on the mountain and painted the sky. He painted it blue for blue skies, and white and grey for clouds. At night he painted it black, with white for all the stars. When the sun rose he dashed its arcing yellow lines across the heavens, and as it sank he brushed it orange and gold over the horizon.
He knew he had to paint the sky. If he didn’t paint the sky, who would? Nobody would. He knew that. So he stayed, and he painted the sky.
He lived on the mountaintop alone. Sometimes it was cold, and all he had were his brushes and some rags left from his once bright raiment. He had been a king once, somewhere. He had a crown, now cast to the floor and grown through with grass and creeping ivy. Juniper bushes grew up around his feet and between his toes.
He never moved. He only painted the sky.
And he was lonely.
Image from here.
Alegria’s Hair
The first time Tarragon Ray saw the giant Alegria, he was a baby. He was lying in his father’s arms, staring goggle-eyed up at the clouds and the big blue sky. He could hear the comforting crack of his father’s whip, and the low braying of their humpback pony as it strained against its hauliers. He could feel the joggle of their Sheckler’s wagon over the ramshackle red dust road, and the gentle motion of his father around him.
“She’s a big girl,” said his father, but Tarragon didn’t understand. He saw his father’s face leaning over him, smiling, and he smiled back. “They say, when she dances, the earth quakes for miles around.”
Tarragon made googling noises. Then he saw Alegria. He saw her hand, batting and patting at the whuffs of cloud in the sky. He thought it was his father’s hand, but when he reached out to touch it, he couldn’t. So he watched it. He watched it balling up clouds, shaping them into elephants, stringing them across the sky.
As they drew closer he watched the hand stretch up into an arm, then into a shoulder, then into a neck, and then he saw the hair.
He clapped his hands in his blankets. He wrinkled his toes like monkey feet with happiness. It was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen. It was like the sun, a brilliant spray of golden shine effervescing around a giant weathered face.
He saw the great chain of stolen wagons and rooftops across her naked chest, braided together in bent metal and warped oak, a giant necklace barely covering her vast pendulous breasts. He watched as she moved, shingles and chocks of wood falling free, rattling down her great earthen belly, wide as the Helakios amphitheatre and tanned as brown as the dirt, to rest in the folds of her thick sailcloth skirt. He saw her vast haunches, the cliff-top buckled beneath her feet, the behemoth staff be her side.
Most of all though, he saw her hair. He watched it for as long as he could. When they passed out of sight, he cried quietly into his blanket, and didn’t know why.
Image from here.
Mandragora’s Laws
It was a bright spring morning when Mandragora came upon the sweet little cottage with the two dead bodies hanging from its eaves.
“What’s all this then?” he asked his skulls, rattling out behind him on their 100 leather tethers.
“Looks like a violation,” they called, bobbing and jostling to see. “A clear violation. Bodies from the eaves, what else could that be?”
Mandragora walked over and studied the bodies. One was a man and he had his skin intact, though one of his legs was gone, and the other was a woman but it wasn’t easy to tell because all her skin had been removed. Mandragora poked the man’s blotchy pink flesh.
“Was I not clear last time? I posted the laws all over.”
“Yes yes,” nodded the skulls, “you were very clear. No cannibals and no human-skinning.”
Image from here.
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