Soon Enough They Would All Drown
A horse emerged from the woods, sleepwalking through the fog, its eyes literally closed. The hooves of the sleepwalking horse were long and yellow and curled like the toes of elf shoes.
There was lightning in the blue windows of a tree house, where scientists were hunched in the dark over their secrets, boiling the world down to a fluorescent ochre dust. Great shocks of thunder boomed in the sky beyond the fog and shook the treetops. Birds, concussed by the thunder, fell from the trees like dull-thudding fruit, landing on their backs.
Seven men sat huddled and miserable in a trench that was slowly filling with water. The words one of the men was trying to read to comfort his trenchmates bled on the page and were carried away by the rain.
Every story, it seemed, was either forgotten or in the process of being forgotten. One of the men tried in vain to recall the lyrics to a single Bob Dylan song and, thwarted in this attempt, eventually settled for a few tentative fragments of a nursery rhyme.
Soon enough, they knew, they would all drown.
The men took turns trying to remember and describe their mothers’ smiles.
From somewhere above them, an amplified and vaguely familiar voice stumbled again and again through the alphabet.
Once Upon a Time, etc.
I spent much of my early life looking for fables and can remember the days when the spring woods would be full of them. If you climbed back up into the bluffs above the Bitterroot creek and nosed around under rocks and in the shady areas beneath the stands of big oaks, you’d find fables growing wild by the dozen and burrowed in the roots beneath the trees.
Some afternoons, after the sun had faded beyond the rolling hills to the west, I’d hike back home with a burlap bag full of fables. My boots would be caked with mud, my back would be aching, and I’d be exhausted from all the sun and fresh air, but I couldn’t wait to empty that bag on my kitchen floor so I could look over my recent acquisitions.
I once lugged home a bag full of squirming trolls. On other occasions, I pulled from my sack a turtle with wings like a dragonfly, and a tiny pirate ship full of mice. Yet another time, I found a stooped and tiny man with flowing white hair and a long beard. Fairies were nesting in his beard. The old man was both a fable and a repository of fables. He sat at my kitchen table and told me the story of a giant who once upon a time went about with the moon in a pack on his back. On windy days in a meadow full of wild flowers, he would fly the moon like a kite.
One late afternoon, the old man related to me in his squeaky little voice, as the sun set and darkness descended, a hawk was perched at the edge of a long valley, admiring the spectacle of the giant’s luminous kite hovering above the meadow. The bright object, the hawk thought, made such a nice addition to the night sky.
As it sat there taking in this quiet scene, the hawk saw an arrow suddenly strike the giant squarely in his chest. He toppled straight backward, and then the hawk witnessed the giant’s huge feet rising momentarily like a seesaw before disappearing again into the tall grass and flowers. And as the giant fell, he lost his grip on his kite’s tether and the moon drifted skyward, growing ever smaller as it rose, until it had assumed its now-familiar place in the heavens. With its keen and beady eyes, the old man told me, the hawk also saw a cat (wearing a little red felt hat and in possession of a bow and a quiver of arrows) dash off into the dark woods at the edge of the meadow.
I always inspected and interrogated the fables I brought back with me from the woods, and I also unfailingly released them before I retired for the evening. Some of the fables I found in those days would leave me dazzled and mulling for days and even weeks. They changed me, and changed the way I looked at the world and my place in it. They made me want to live to an old age.
As I grew older, though, it became harder and harder for me to get back there to my old fable-hunting grounds. My life was crowded with work and other responsibilities and obligations. When I did manage to get away to the bluff country, I found that the fables were increasingly difficult to find, and eventually they seemed to disappear entirely. Again and again I returned home empty-handed and numb with disappointment.
I have since read that fables have become almost completely extinct in America, or have been reduced to little more than grim little lessons, morals without the magic. It is my understanding, however, that patches of fables still survive in parts of Latin and South America, in obscure corners of Eastern Europe, and in small pockets of Africa and the Middle East, and I hope to one day venture to some of these places in search of that old lost magic of my youth.
Jinnistan
A retired railroad brakeman named Eliot Show was cleaning his barbecue grill one afternoon when he inadvertently spilled a bucket of ashes and loosed a swarm of jinn on the neighborhood.
A cleric who was later summoned for advice on dealing with the infestation informed the neighborhood council that jinn had long been disposed to nest in ashes, and if undiscovered for even a relatively brief period were known to be rapid and promiscuous breeders.
The jinn took up residence in a neighborhood park, christened their encampment Jinnistan, and launched a relentless assault on surrounding streets and homes with rocks and flaming arrows.
Initially, however, whenever the jinn strayed from the park they confined their mischief to stealing wash from clotheslines, pilfering meat from local butchers and markets, and disrupting domestic life in small but nonetheless unsettling ways: spilling milk, rearranging furniture, scrambling television reception, and knocking on windows in the night. As their numbers grew, however, and as attempts to appease and relocate them failed, they became more brazen.
Many of them used their shape-shifting powers to assume human form, and, disguised as residents of the community, seduced and impregnated women, bilked elderly citizens of their life savings, sold insurance, and ran for city office.
After the jinn became increasingly more aggressive and began to steal babies, the city attempted to eradicate them by repeated aerial bombardments of the park with salt.
Shortly after the Mayor announced in the local paper that this offensive had been a complete success, the entire city was consumed by a tremendous conflagration, and a jinn civilization, larger than any previously seen on earth, rose from the ashes.
A Pond Full of Wonders
Out there in the country where I grew up there was once a pond that was said to be full of wonders.
It was a brackish pond, and the country around it was rough country, made difficult by stones, boulders, and prickly scrub brush. There was a lot of what I think you’d call rubble as well, or perhaps detritus. There was also a lot of junk left over from the lives of the people who used to live out there and had long since fled.
Here and there you’d still encounter a weathered hut on stilts, and there were a bunch of ragged sheep wandering around in the rubble, most of them gone feral. I can tell you that a feral sheep is something to be avoided.
There wasn’t much else to recommend the community, such as it was, and it was a brutal place to be a child. There were only a handful of kids in those days, every one of us an accident born to people who were old enough to be our grandparents.
The men who remained had once been fishermen, before their lake evaporated from all the poisons pumped in there by the old munitions factory. The lake was long gone by the time I was a child, and the old fishermen would occasionally emerge from their homes and wobble along the lousy roads on bicycles. Most of the old men had long, flowing white beards.
I do still remember the pond, though, and as I said, this pond had once allegedly been full of wondrous things; teeming with wonders, was what we were always told: mermaids—a whole extended family or tribe of mermaids—and some sort of mutant creation that was said to be a cross between a dragon and a sea serpent. Pond dragons, these creatures were called by the locals.
The fishermen, bored by the loss of their livelihood, jigged every last one of those pond dragons out of the brackish pond and hauled them along the roads to be gutted and strung from clotheslines and rusty flagpoles.
I never saw any of the pond dragons alive, but I do still have a vague memory of the mermaids. Old women used to go to the pond to throw stale bread and popcorn to the mermaids, which would flop up onto the ragged shore and fight among themselves for the offerings. Most of them I recall—or perhaps recall hearing—were horribly obese.
The idle fishermen, having exhausted the pond’s supply of dragons and grown bored from their spartan and solitary existence, turned their attention to capturing the mermaids and began to trap, net, and wrestle them from the pond. I believe, if I’m not mistaken, that these randy old bachelors made bathtub pets of most of the remaining mermaids.
The pond, like the lake before it, eventually dried up completely, and the government sent in soldiers and heavy equipment one morning to enforce the long-ago-ordered evacuation of the land. Those of us who remained were loaded into trucks with our belongings and carted away to a relocation camp in the desert of Nevada.
I escaped from that camp some years ago, but not before hearing the rumor that one of the original mermaids from that old brackish pond of my youth is now on display in a traveling carnival somewhere down south.
The International Repository of Regrets
Since he lost his job as an aviation mechanic in the late 1980s, Riggs has been a clerk at the International Repository of Regrets. He hasn’t had a good night’s sleep in almost ten years.
The repository, housed in a World War II-era train depot, is a vast place of bad light and spooky, institutional acoustics. Even in the middle of the night—especially in the middle of the night—it is always crowded, and the mood there is generally sour and joyless. The crowd is polyglottal, often dizzyingly so.
Some of the people who stand in the long lines are dead, shuffling in place in stepped-down shoes, often clutching photographs to their breasts. Many of the waiting have grown hoarse from a lifetime of rehearsing and fine-tuning their regrets. For the most part, they throw their cigarette butts and the wrappers from the vending machines on the scarred concrete floor. The International Repository of Regrets is now little but a purely bureaucratic facility, and offers nothing in the way of dispensation, absolution, or second chances. Even as a repository it has long since surrendered any claims of utility.
These days, whatever regrets are unburdened there are merely scribbled haphazardly in the margins of ancient, crowded ledgers, wherever there is room. All attempts at maintaining accurate chronological records have been abandoned.
They will soon enough run out of room entirely, at which point the clerks in their teller’s cages will be forced to simply sit and listen, reduced to the role of secular priests, mostly disinterested and concerned not at all with salvation.
By now, Riggs had heard it all before. All of it, from the truly criminal to the almost unpardonably banal.
Even so, these latter confessions were the things that continued to haunt him, revealing as they did the cumulative, lingering damage that could result from even the smallest childhood disappointments. For instance, there was, in the wee hours of one long night, the old woman who had stood in line for days to tell Riggs of the heartbreak she had suffered owing to the fact that allergies had made it impossible for her to ever hug a dog. Or the younger man, now dead, who was grief stricken over his lifelong inability to throw a baseball to his father’s satisfaction.
Riggs had also encountered individuals—there had been several—whose chief regret in life was one particularly bad haircut.
And so, so, so many people had stood before Riggs and poured out their regret over elaborately planned surprise parties that had been disastrous or poorly attended.
Most distressing and unsurprisingly, though, love—love lost and faithless love and love gone wrong—continued to be the reason the overwhelming majority of the broken and beleaguered clientele made the difficult pilgrimage to the International Repository of Regrets.
The Day the World Ended
The day the world ended, God sat quietly alone in a huge room, alternately dozing off and turning the pages of a fat scrapbook. God could remember everything, and this no doubt saddened Him.
Far below Him there were, here and there, people floating in boats and still—many of them, anyway—praying. There were also a number of people, those who had spent years planning and waiting for the end of the world, holed up in places where the water and the destruction had not yet arrived. Some of them were high up on mountains or hidden away in caves deep in the earth. Like the people in the boats, these others were given additional time to pray and puzzle over the position in which they found themselves.
It was more and more difficult for any of these survivors to think of this additional time as any kind of blessing; nonetheless, the most desperate—and they were all, of course, desperate—prayed in their terror for survival. They still wanted to live.
The purest among them prayed for forgiveness.
One man, alone in a valley deep in the mountains somewhere, managed to live in ignorance, and then denial, for a number of days. When he finally realized the seriousness of what had occurred, the man ventured out into the valley, where there were still patches of bright flowers and green grass. And there in the middle of this valley the man eased a kite up into what was left of the sky.
Seeing this—the man in the high grass, staring up with a smile of unmistakable joy at his ragged kite rattling in the wind—God’s heart stirred.
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