The Village on Horseback: Prose and Verse, 2003-2008

The Coming Upon A Play

If you were to go walking on a certain day, intent on winning the heart of a certain girl, you might invite her to walk with you along the river road. She might consent, and climbing out her tiny window, she would leap down into your arms, and together you would go. But never would you imagine that there by the river, a cast of actors is awaiting the rise of an enormous curtain which no one can see, and that they are waiting for none other than the two last actors, who straggle, many hours away, along some country road. By chance, they resemble you and your love exactly. By chance, you arrive just as the curtain rises.

The Palace

A palace so large that the kingdom itself is but a small part of it. Servants sent to some far corridor are given burials, for we know well that they will not return. Communication is a matter of whispers, which travel like cursed fact. And our hearts are maintained through windows, where courtesans’ soft skin and long lashes are arguments that uphold this life. Everyone has their orders, which must be carried out. These are kept in tiny cylinders hung like pendants from our servile necks. Since we cannot read, we must ask others to read these instructions for us. And often these interpretations change. All in all it is a good way to be, or so I have heard, as beyond the walls of this enthronement there are great doubts like standing trees, and each outlives a man, and each is named for some task we will never be allowed.

A Bird’s Judgment

You have been betrayed. Yes, it’s true. It’s early September in the city where you live and someone has spoken to the authorities. Even now, the chief of police is sitting behind an enormous mahogany desk in the vast ministry, waiting for you to be brought in. All across the city, squads of officers are preparing themselves. Likenesses of your face are being handed out.

It’s true you meant no harm. Also true: there’s no way anyone could know. And yet the real truth remains: someone has given you up. Soon there will be boot-steps on the stairs, a loud knocking at the door. Soon you will be spoken to repeatedly in a loud voice, tied and carried under a policeman’s arm like a parcel to a waiting car.

If only you could make it into the next apartment and beg your life of the widow who lives there, she would hide you, and then how happily and well you would live. But even to stir from your chair is impossible. For the book of your acquaintance has closed on this hundred-hundredth day, and limp clouds are straggling like children across the windowpane. There is no hope. You have been betrayed and the wild exodus of fate from the fated is never-begun and alwaysfinished. The sounds from the street are maddeningly normal. Also, it’s hotter than you like, and you are wearing far too many clothes. As if a bird told a bird a bird’s judgment, the day itself has announced its coming in yellow colors and vague shapes just beyond the edge of sight.

A Visitor

A green sea, huge and fugitive, sits at anchor beneath the roof of your small home. Word of this is general in the village, and neighbors pass by again and again hoping for a glimpse. But your bemusement is like a wellworn knife and you caress it slowly, back turned, as a tiny smile plays against the broom closet, pretending it is a broom, though in truth you know, it is no such weighty thing.

Banditry

In among the foregone on the narrow road that circles and recircles the city of your tongue, the highwayman has gone walking with his next victim. He is handsome and dashing; she is young and petulant. They stop beneath a tree and her long hair falls to the ground. She says, “I am in love with a man, but I fear he is a bandit.” To this the man says nothing, but stands, quietly stroking her hair. A cold breeze rises and he holds her close. Soon in the distance he will see evening riding and know that it is time.

A Lark

By the harbor, a great work has begun. We of this town already think of ourselves differently. Travelers have started to arrive. They say they left their homeland years ago at the news, and have been on the roads for generations. When it is finished this statue will be a portrait-signature upon an uncertain earth, a letter we few shall leave for the crowded centuries that wait inside the hills. And to think, I know the headman, who used to be the town’s mason. I spoke to him, saw him pass in the street just days ago. He was head-to-toe in flat working gray, and could be missed but for the fiendish cast of his eyes. And who but a mad man could make such a statue? A statue of the town in which we live, exact and equal to an inch, yet formed from the hardest stone and rising up out of the water. Already it looms above the town on great marble stilts. I saw myself walking there, or standing as it were, as I once walked, beside a pond with lilies. He saw me, he must have seen me walking there, where I often walked, by that pond where my daughter was drowned. And yes, in the waters of the marble pond, I see he has etched some impression of a face looking up from the depths. He has peopled the houses with scenes from our lives. He has stretched the avenues, and laid them with old parades and angry, roused evenings. In the center square, on which work has just begun, a man is being lynched. But best of all, at the harbor mouth of the statue town, which will come last, he tells me will be built a marble sea in which we all shall be buried, one by one, as years and hours take our hands.

The Bank of Perth

It is rumored to exist in every city, in every human settlement. One has heard, or one knows of someone who has heard, in the crowded street, in the drawingrooms of wealth, in the merchants’ salons and the workmen’s meeting houses, the timbre of an agent of the Bank, facilitating advance, supplying the necessary collateral, acceding to wishes, and accounting, irrefutably, for all the gaps in our human exchanges. Where do such agents come from? How may they be known? They seem never to be seen, but would be recognized at once. Often they can be made out, barely, across a room, in closeted discussion with some luminary. One presses closer, and the bank agent is gone. Furthermore, no one saw him go.

Not to the natural world, nor to celestial orders are such intentions bound. The Bank of Perth cannot be countermanded, is greater than the sum of all countries, for though every country has fallen and will fall, the Bank cannot fall, nor fail. Its location need not be secret, and yet it cannot be known. All currency is dispensed in its favor, and greed is the tool of its want.

Several times in our long history, a mystic or true philosopher has unearthed the deepest secrets of the Bank of Perth. But even to do this is to go beyond use, for those who have seen such sights may never speak of them, may never tell of them, may never treat of them. Save, of course, in parable.

The Suitors

A man was out taking the summer air when along the lane he saw a crowd approaching. Perhaps not a crowd. They were arrayed in a line, and each suitor was grander in dress and manner than the one who came before. The line stretched endlessly, over hill and dale. On the farthest hilltop, the man could see the crowns of kings and the scepters of emperors glinting in the sunlight. Where are they going? he inquired of the first, but his question went unanswered. Where are you going? he asked again. The man did not join the line, but went humbly beneath his roof and began to prepare for himself the smallest of meals, which he would eat without haste by the window, which he would eat with a tiny wooden spoon, making no noise that one might hear, were one to pass that way.

The Seamstress of Bao Suk

There was once in Bao Suk, at the end of a certain unmentionable dynasty, a seamstress living and working in a shop near the gates of the city. Her daughters were lovely and useless, but would serve to wear the clothing that she made, that it might be seen and sold to any who passed by. Her fame had grown over the course of a difficult life, difficult not by any curse of fortune, for indeed, her star had always risen, but difficult because her wishes were not the wishes of her fellow men and women, her ambitions were couched in an obscure turn of thought. As a child she had wandered far and wide with her old father through the mountain range which girdled that ancient piece of land. Of it no good can be said, and even in our modern times, the most scientific of men avoid the treacheries and infidelities of those nameless peaks. In her eighth year, on one such sojourn, she left her father sleeping, and went alone into places even he, faultless and intrepid man that he was, would not go. There she was told the things that she must do. There was given into her keeping the deep heart of her life which would eclipse all things and which in time would itself be eclipsed by a successive and deeper darkness.

Nightfall. An old man is leading a donkey through the city gates. He has come far, from So Lu Chen, and, eager to find a bed, he takes the first turning and passes before the seamstress’s shop where she is seated in the window, addressing herself to first this silk now that, first this thread now that. He stands, transfixed, as a gown takes form beneath her hands that run like water across the supple cloth. All the light in the world issues from a candle in a nearby window. As it gutters and the last light is cast off it like a cloak, the gown lies finished and laid across the arm of a mannequin. The seamstress’s shop is empty. Even the street is empty. The man has moved deeper into Bao Suk, and his donkey trails after him, insensible to the wonders of caprice and adornment.

One Door or Two

As it happened, a young laborer was building a small house for himself and for his family. He was a poor man, and his family was poorer still, for money is lost in every passing of hands, not least from the wages of a dutiful husband. At any rate, the family was poor, and the house to be built would have but one room. Long hours

in the sun, the man had been planning the house, and he had come to the decision that his house should have but one door, as was the custom in those parts. Now the laborer’s wife was a lovely woman, and had been the prize of the district until she had taken his hand and let him lead her beneath the marriage arch. This was a strange thing, accounted strange by all concerned, for the laborer’s wife could have had any man, rich or poor, but of them all, she had chosen him. And it was not for his looks, nor for his wits, nor for his temper, as the laborer would in none of these ways impress. No, she had married him because of a certain child that had grown in the dark, deep inside her, and which, when she was aware of it, had told her by kicking and scraping that if she would be safe and whole and living, she should at once be married. And so she had done; the child arrived, and 3 long years had passed, living within the house of the laborer’s father, day and night, forever beneath the watchful eye of the laborer’s mother, who wondered day and night, why had she, the local beauty, married her plain son. And when the time came for their own house to be built, she had told her husband that they must have two doors, one to the east and one to the west, that the sun might be let in in the morning, and let out at nightfall. One door or two, the laborer asked himself, as he walked up and down in the fields. One door or two, he asked himself again, as he trudged home through a patchwork of hills. For his mother had told him, day in day out, you must watch a pretty wife. You must watch her with both of your god-given eyes, and with the others too, that are little spoken of. For she will squirm in your arms, and tell you that she is yours, but my son, beauty cannot be kept. It is restless, and will speak to every passing eye, will allow the lissome stares of every passing man.

One door or two. One door or two. It was to be but a one-room house. And as she says, day and night, the sun must be allowed to pass. Not just through all the broad and empty places, but through this town of man, and through that town of man, through anger and misfortune, through pettiness and filth. And every sun will be a deeper, a crueler sun. And every sun will know far better the shape, the broad dull shape, of the wound it makes on your face and arms, the wound it presses, deep through the windows of your eyes, where such things will be remembered, but can never be made good.

Trickery

He had two little ones in his care. There there, he would say, and hold them one at a time, pressed up against his chest or leg. How they loved such times! With trumpeting cries they would race away and back. Were they children? Were they capable of such a brutal thing as childhood, such a sweet band of thieves as that? No, no, they remained just as they were, and sat about inventing riddles, which they would leave by the nearest road for travelers to find.

A Letter

Everyone has moved away or died, but you are still quite young. You bathe each day in the salt sea, and ring your lonely shack with twined cornflowers. You are, it is said, expecting a visitor. If the others don’t speak of it, it is because there are no others. There’s no one but you, and you are too young to know how completely you have been beaten.

Before the Emperor

There were once two clowns who traveled the land. They would never be seen in the same city, nor would they speak of each other. However their hatred was a known thing, and everyone longed to see what would happen if they were brought together in one place. Many stories circulated about their hate, regarding how it was begun, and why. Some said they were brothers, others that they were father and son. Both were the favorites of equally prominent noblemen, and so one might not be humbled before the other without calling higher powers into contention.

However, it became the will of the people that the two clowns be brought together unawares, on the great stage of the Capital. It was the will of the Emperor of course, and had little to do with the people. Yet the Emperor was in the habit of calling his will the people’s, and so I have told it thus.

In any case, the clowns were assembled, one in each wing, each thinking his was the only act. The curtains were pulled, the clowns emerged, to stand face to face, as the Emperor watched from his box, surrounded by his retinue, as the massed nobles pressed up against the fur-trimmed stage, as the merchants peered through opera glasses from the far corners of the theater….

Well they were not clowns. It is not known who they were. They did not know each other. They did not know anyone. And when they met on the stage, they did nothing but stand with unpainted faces staring at the thousand jeering heads that slandered the air. But of course, no one spoke. The theatre was entirely silent.

The first clown took a sharp knife from the little bag he had been given. From a seated position, he carefully cut his feet off at the ankles, cradling first the left foot, then the right. He took the severed feet, and gently placed them in his bag. His face was calm. The stumps of his red legs wept a steady stream, passing the time, and he was soon asleep.

The second clown drew a whistle from the folds of his coat, and blew three long notes. An enormous bird jumped from the crowd and snatched the clown’s head from off his shoulders before galloping like a horse three times around the stage. At this point, it was speared by a daring young man who attended the Emperor. The headless clown had fallen from beheading into a kneeling position, hands folded before him.

The crowd was hushed. What did the Emperor think of all this? He had the clowns skinned and had the skins made into costumes which he would wear in alternation to the many costume balls it was his habit to give in the winter season. Of course, from the one skin-suit his head stuck out, and from the other his feet. Therefore the Emperor was always recognizable, which is proper and correct, and prevents terrible mistakes from being made on the part of the foolish or the brave.

An Argument I Chanced To See

It was never and it was nevertheless along a poor and thoughtless line of thought that we had come. There were no longer shopkeepers. There were no longer shops. What it did mean to us? We were forced to make all our own things. Thus we became shabby and kind, and famous in a silly, stupid way. Seven ideas were listed in a book that came to light part way through the emergency. But the eldest of us, Gustav, would have none of it, and took the book away to his room where no one else dared go. What am I going on about? What question was I asked? Ah yes, you, you with the long gloves, come forward. Speak, man! Ask a question of this survivor of the foreign, who stands before you in his smallclothes. Armed struggles are never difficult. It is peace that lays countries low. And the lowest of them, this sinking star of my failed fame, it drips with ordure. IF I MUST walk to the next town on foot, I will, but please. . I repeat, tonight I will tell you STORIES, and in exchange you’ll let me sleep inside your house.

A System of Letter-Writing

All the letters were dated, either with the date the letter was sent, or with the date it was received. They went into a series of cabinets built expressly for that purpose and set against a low wall behind which at certain hours of the day, one might see the sun setting. The letters were written in a bent scrawl which somehow managed to be perfectly legible. From a distance it almost looked like Arabic or Sinhalese. Up close, it was all too clear. One couldn’t begin reading the letters, because if one did, hours would pass and one would have accomplished none of the tasks that had been set. Oh, it was all too easy to spend the day rummaging and filing, all night reading and rejoicing. For in these letters, these peculiar letters of a most unpublic, unadmired man, were hidden tortuous machinations and intricate apparatuses of invention. Of course, the difficulty lay not in setting the letters in order, for they were already in order, but in putting them out of order. For the man had employed us specifically for that purpose. He wanted no letters of similar subject to remain beside one another. He wanted no date congruent, no place-name beside itself. For physicians had told him he would die on the eighth day of the third month of his sixtieth year and towards that day he was preparing a scheme of complication that his legacy might be a lure to fortune seekers and puzzle solvers. He was not known as an author, yet in his letters were hidden many novels of curious scholarship. He was not known as a scientist, yet in his letters he had concealed equations and documented experiments which would revolutionize many sectors of our uniformed existence. Not a banker, nor an economist, he nonetheless knew the hermetics of currency. Not a statesman nor a saint, he nonetheless made speeches (gone unheard) that gave to the human soul the dignity it lacks. He was not a baker or an engineer, yet he devised ovens which would bake as no oven ever had, and breads that might be baked within such an oven, breads the likes of which you have never tasted.

And perhaps you never will, for my friends and I, we are a wily bunch, and we have had years with which to tortuate our master’s genius. And all the years we have been spoiling and hiding, concocting and puzzling. In his maze of letters there will seem little to be found, though truly, as I have said, there is little in fact that might not be found in this seething bath, this system of letters that will be alluded to in the final sentence of the final article of an interminable and indiscriminate will.

Parable of the Lamp

A man may have been in the business of burying the dead, and he may have buried them, day in, day out, for decades, such decades beginning sometimes in the gray of dusk, and ending, too often, in the early murmur of dawn’s foundering cascade. He may have kept his shovel close by the bed, or propped safe against a near wall, cleaned it gently at nightfall with a wet rag, oiled it in off moments, laid by. He may have spoken in this life more often to an object than to a person, more often with question than with conviction. He may have stood for hours on a rain-swept slope, admiring neat rows of stone markers, absent of mourners. And he may have begun a long tale, a new part of which he would invent each night as he sat alone at table.

The facts are uncertain. We have only the book with which to decipher the life, however fictional. He certainly lived, and certainly, quite certainly, he died. That lamp which stands between ourselves and a brighter lamp often seems less like a lamp and more like a hooded man. Thus we inquire of him, from where have you come? Thus we throw wide our doors and set out all that is left in the pantry. Do so with an eking touch, and sparingly, for in the book of names, all names are not entered. Our lies are precautions. Our sentinels are doubts that dredge a living sea.

A Badger told a Rat

And how fine it would be, if, at the end of a life, one could seek congratulation from all those one knew in the circumstances of childhood, as it were, within those very circumstances, when such congratulations, forming, as they would, the basis for a life, would have been worthwhile.

The Infant Elsbet

Oh, too often we hear tell of the infant Elsbet, who is found here or there in the night or morning. She is carried, wrapped in a shawl, back to the cottage where she lives, and set again within her gilded cradle. Yet always she escapes, in light and dark, to wander the hills on her hands and knees, tiny mouth panting, tiny eyes asquint. She is accounted good luck by the fishermen, who find her often on the path to the daybreak wharf. Others think less of her, and treat her more roughly, speak to her with a colder tongue. Why does she never grow? Why do her garments never stain? Who keeps the cottage where she lives, who feeds her? The town sits in the shadow of a distant mountain to which no one has ever gone. On gray porches, stern wives negotiate the wool of half-formed garments, wielding impossibly sharp needles. Along the street, someone is calling, “Elsbet is gone again. Elsbet is gone.” Be sure she will be found.

A Statuette

He took my statuette. I saw him. He led himself a pretty path right up the middle of the street, and stopping at my door, he knocked. Seeing no one was home (for I was hiding beneath my bed), he entered and passed through all the various rooms, coming finally into my own, where upon a small night table the statuette was placed. Oh statuette of a tearful god! How long I had kept you close beside me while I slept. But he put you under his coat, with one quick movement of a slimfingered hand, and off he went.

I thought for a moment, as he stood above me, of coming out from beneath the bed and making my presence known. But it seemed the wrong thing to do. Questions would be raised. What, for instance, was I doing beneath my bed on that miserable and immemorial day?

The Hospital

Inside the hospital there were several villages. I lived in the first, in a small cottage with my sister. We were not allowed to go to the other villages, nor were they allowed to come to us. But news was always circulating regarding the escape of a villager from one place or another.

How long had we lived in the village? This was a question I posed constantly to my sister. We would sit, glazed eyes mimicking glazed eyes, and mouth answers which we dared not speak. When we had first arrived, my sister insisted on saying we had lived there always. Now that we had lived there always, she insisted on saying that we had just arrived. Her skinny arms hung off the sides of her stiff wooden chair, which she kept trying to rock as if it was a rocker. The artist who had drawn her face must have watered down his ink fearing he would run out, for her features were indistinct — almost absent. She would only wear the one color, a pale yellow, and she thought herself a great beauty, though she had never told anyone this. She was always tempting me, slipping into my bed halfway through the night, or groveling at my feet.

The rest of the villagers hated us. They felt we were newcomers and should be hurt at every opportunity. But we had been there longer than anyone, and refused to allow their tawdry claims. After I put a fellow through a plate-glass window, they left me alone. But my sister was too delicate. I’d find her, huddled somewhere, bruised and crying, her yellow clothes torn. Once, I saw her running naked along the riverbank, chased by four old women. Together we drowned them, and used their clothing for scarecrows in our yard.

Always of an evening, my sister would be tapping at the glass with her fingertips, as I sat composing elaborate logical proofs that might one day prove there were no other villages but ours. I suppose she meant the same by her tapping as I did by my proving. Once, she turned to me, face filthy from contact with our matted floor, and said, “Of all the villages, ours is the most easily understood. Each successive village is less believable. Each is worse. Even so much as a thought arrived at bravely can mean your expulsion from one place, your inclusion in another.”

“But what,” I asked her, “did we think of, to bring us here?”

“Brother of mine, we looked in every cabinet and under every tree for the way back to an earlier village. But with each passage we fall faster.”

With that she removed her dress and began to rub herself against the curtain. Then I realized, the tapping was continuing, but she was not tapping. Looking up, first at this window, then at that, I saw that behind every pane of glass there was an uglier and more spiteful face, beneath which gripped and ungripped, tapped and tapped and tapped again, the many fingers of a great and angry crowd.

Mention

And to think, of all the great and wonderful things that could have happened. . that your name should have been mentioned, and by whom and to whom! Now you are sorry for all the terrible things you did when the world seemed an unkind place. Now you recoil from your darker period, that time which preceded this glorious day. No more shall you sit alone in windswept cafes as rain broods over dim cities. No more shall you stand for hours outside your own terrible door, outside the doors of others. No, no. . you have been mentioned, spoken well of before company, and it is plain to all — your life has acquired the glorious sheen of reputation before which all else must inevitably fall.

A Scene

Day draws to a close. One man passes another in the street, and as they pass, each looks the other in the face, as if to say, “You may indeed be the center of all this, but sir, it is just as likely I should be.” Nearby, a painfully soft little bird has alighted on a branch, watching the comings and goings with great interest. And you and I, we arrive later to that moment, and thus cannot be noticed, nor gainsaid, as we make our way along the thin streets of that decades-lost foundry town. Equally, we can be certain both men were quite wrong.

An Emerald

It came to be known that one of the miners in that filthy godforsaken camp had found an emerald as big as a man’s fist. The jealousy of the other miners. The pleasure of the miner’s wife. The worry of the miner himself over the possible theft of his newfound prize.

And how he woke the next day and the day after from dreams in which it had not been he who found the gem, but another. And how nothing could be done to comfort him but that the emerald should be brought out from its hiding place, and that he should be let to touch it and hold it and wake fully from his dream with all the glory of this true plane upon his dirty lap.

Claus Valta

During the golden age of punishment, peasants often dreamed secretly of a brutal public death that might earn some measure of fame. The greatest of the executioners, Claus Arken Valta, was much in demand, and would tour the country with a coach and horses, sleeping each night in a golden pavilion. He wore a moustache, though it was not the style, and always bathed his hands in a bowl of milk that would be set beside his axe, or laid nearby the gibbet. He had a fine voice and could carry many a pleasant tune. Often he would sing as he went about hitching up horses for the drawing and quartering of a felon or wastrel. He took pity on everyone, and would cry if he saw a bird with a broken wing, or a three-legged dog stumbling through the crowd. At such times he was inconsolable, and would refuse to go on with the execution. Afterwards, always, he repented and would slaughter as many as nine or ten deserving souls in as many minutes. His penchant for public speaking was exceeded only by his memory for faces. “Why, haven’t I seen you before?” he would remark, as he tightened a noose around some unfortunate’s neck. Without waiting for an answer, he’d loose the trap and watch the bagheaded wretch drop to a wrenching death. He rarely let the dying have their last words before the crowd, instead gagging them, and inventing speeches which they might have said, the which he would recite to the crowd from memory. In this he was no different from other great men. What they imagine is always more palpable, more true, than anything we might wish or wish to say.

Of the Secret City

AND if on the banks of that river to which you once did go, there arose a fair city, of which you alone could know — how sad that this knowledge has eluded you, how sad that you have lived so long from home, spendthrift of your life until even this has abandoned you, even this hidden city, never seen, has faded out of possibility into such a realm as the one in which we now speak.

Parable of Life’s Wake

— A woman who has just smothered the man with whom she slept. The disarray of her clothing. Her steps, back and forth in that tiny room. Light is beginning by the window, intending to cross slowly as it always has done. If the woman were to scream, and someone, anyone, were to come to her assistance, how much could she hope for from such a person? Might they help her to hide her crime? Might they take advantage of her in this, her weakness? If she should sigh and toss her pretty head, and pass through the town in crinoline, gold glittering on her thumbs and ankles, why, who could tell her different? Who could say, “You may not do this that you have done.” For life is its own excuse, its wake the shed gray, the unbearable touch of the harshest wool.

Unnoticed Offenses

One man said: I refuse to be seen with such a person!

He spoke of you.

I wonder what you did, unknowingly, to make him hate you so. I wonder who else, unknowingly, you have made enemies of, on this and other days. And of them, who will wait in the wings of your moving theatre, trembling and grinning, anticipating a later scene or act?

To Knock at an Unknown Door

A wealthy man went walking one day, on the grounds of his great estate. He walked in familiar places, admiring first this view, then that. He ranged farther from the manse until, as the sky began to darken, he realized he was walking in a region of his lands where he had never been. Through a veil of trees, he saw a tiny cottage; in the window were lighted candles which seemed to welcome him.

Such a man, such an estate, such a cottage (near and yet impossibly removed from all else, come to only at dark and in confusion) — out of this what is possible? What is not?

The man approached the cottage and with the boldness of a landowner stamped his feet loudly upon the doorstep and knocked upon the door.

It was a moment before anything happened, but when things began, it seemed they happened all at once. The door flew open — behind it was a man, in face and manner identical to the landowner. With a sneer and a shout, he drove an iron poker straight through the wealthy man’s chest, and with a second roar withdrew it, stepping forward to catch the body as it fell. Discarding the poker, he pulled the body back into the house, drawing shut the door in one clean motion. Not even a cry had escaped the landowner’s mouth. Door shut, the cottage stood again in silence, its windows candlelit, the season pressing in on all sides. It is possible, the candles seemed to say, that a double may stay in hiding at your heel for decades, and that one day you may come upon him. A man may not resist his double.

Late in the evening, a landowner who had been out walking returned, and advanced up the tree-lined carriage drive before his elegant house. He paused repeatedly, as if to admire each thing, each object of his vision as though all were new to him. At the door he was greeted by a servant, who took his coat and led him to table, where his wife and children awaited him. Servants saw to his every need.

Mutterings

Do not come near when flood waters are rising. It was in foolishness that our hearts were overthrown, and it will be in haste that our lives end. A set of toys, laid out on some inarticulate floor, will be like causes in a causeless time. Ask why, as if in doubt. Doubt is a glorious luxury, and one upon which we base all our hopes. Upon a silver field, motley hunters have speared a boar. The composition shakes and trembles, as wind moves from object to comparison.

The Book

In the book she wrote down things that were surely true and things that were surely false. Nothing was subject to interpretation — this was the necessary wrong, with great freedom the result. She wrote, a man has hurriedly leapt from coveted position, and found surfeit of disaster, then stopped, looking out an open window to where two boys were piling rocks. Upon those of our own breath, we heap the hardest, heaviest stone. A knock came then, with a letter pushed beneath the door. She took it to the bed, and drawing her knees up to her chest, read the letter spread out before her on the bed.

My dear, my darling,

I have been told by those who now

manage my affairs, that I may never

see you again. would that it were not

so, and yet it seems maybe that we

may each accomplish what we need to

best in the other’s absence.

I remain, yours,

X

She rocked back and forth with drawn features, and sobbed once. Yet soon she was again at the window, where she wrote: Those men who are false to those they love have a hell set aside solely for their kind. In it, they must stab themselves for a glimpse of beauty, at which they expire and wake, left only to stab themselves again. With a smile, she closed the book and locked it in her desk. Then she ran nimbly to the door and down the stairs, throwing a light shawl about her slender shoulders, for the wind then came often and without warning from the north.

A Fortune

Once, a man went to a fortune-teller to have his fortune told. He went through his city to the district where such business is conducted. He crossed a small courtyard, and was admitted to her private chamber. She said, “You will die in the spring of the year, and crying of gulls will muffle voices that may come through the wall from another room.” The man was undone.

He begged of her to tell him what year it would be, yet she refused. Finally, he asked, “Is fortune-telling true? Have you told me the truth? Or do lies make your fortune?” To this she replied, “It is not not-true.

And when I lie, it is because a fortune is too grim to be told, and then it itself bears the burden of the lie.”

Thus, in the spring of each year, the man laid out his best clothing, and went about as though bereaved, and each summer, he sang and spent great sums of money, as if to do so was nothing and of no consequence.

A Man Whose

sleight of hand was so fast that even the flourished points of his tricks could not be seen. He would pull coins from behind people’s ears, but the audience would see neither the hand as it hid the coin, nor the hand as it took the coin away. His art was too great. The best of his tricks, to circle the globe in less than a second, impressed no one, as he, for reasons of his own, would always end up precisely where he had been standing before. “He’s a fraud!” they chanted. And they were right, in a way. Someone else would have had to come along and teach the audience to see, before they could ever appreciate this dancing of a human hand upon a second hand.

A Gift

A heavy wooden staff is presented as a gift. In 7 of 9 possible worlds, it is a stern staff, some length of thickly carved wood, a strength to the traveler. In the 8th world, separate, it acts and speaks upon its own, casting a moving shadow, bending its long neck beneath a canopy of leaves. We may not name it there, for there it names itself. And in the 9th, that farthest of far places?

Questions of the 9th remain unanswered, for statement there is nothing but swiftness of motion.

The Carriage Driver

In the midst of a terrible storm, a carriage comes thundering down a narrow drive, and pulls up at the entrance to a large mansion. The carriage doors are thrown open and a man with a haughty, powerful bearing exits the carriage and goes to the house. Hours pass. The storm is a brutal call from an angry host, and the tree line flails upon the near hills; the mud churns, pounded by the water’s ceaseless assault. Still the carriage driver waits, trembling. He wants to rub the horses with a soft blanket, but he cannot, for the mud about their hooves is too deep now for him to stand in. In fact, the carriage has now sunk so that only half of its wheels rise out of the mud. The horses are curiously dead, slumped in their harness, unmoving. Soon the mud will cover them. Then and only then will he knock upon the house’s great door. He will not speak when the door is answered, but will simply point, dumbfounded, at the carriage as it sinks from sight.

Three Visitors

It happened that a man returned from his day’s labor to find three young women living in his house. The first was black-haired, the second yellow-haired, and the hair of the third was scarlet. They gave him different reasons for their arrival. The first said they had been drowned in a lake by their father, who could not bear their taking lovers, and this is where they had emerged.

The second said they were tinkers, and had come to fix his pots. The third said they were commissioned by a lord to find the only honest man in Christendom. The beauty of but one of these girls would have lit the rooms of his house as by some small descended sun. The presence of three was uncanny and hardly to be borne. “I think you have come to take a husband,” said the man. And the girls laughed, and it was true that one would remain. But which? Each day, the three would tell stories, and he would guess at who was lying. And always he would catch the black-haired girl, while the others could deceive him. For her lies were grand, implausible affairs, and a signal delight. The girls slept in his bed, all three, while he laid out a mat on the kitchen floor, and wrapped himself in a single woolen blanket. Each night he would hear their murmuring, as they composed the next day’s lies. Finally, he took to writing these lies down in a leather book. For one year they stayed, and when they left all three left together, in the night. And when he looked at the book he had kept, he saw that he had only ever written down the tales the black-haired girl had told. He saw also, that he had been wrong, and that some tales he had thought false, now seemed true. A book, he thought to himself, a book of lies and truths. All equally redeeming, all damning, all brought upon us by these ghosts, our selves, and where we walk, where we have walked, where we will walk yet, guided by a chorus whose nature must always be hidden.

A Measure

And therefore, simply keep a cup, dusted lightly with poison, within your cupboard. When the time comes, let your fellow pour the drink, first in your cup, then in his. Drink well and long to various healths. The health of life. The health of love. And the health of hate. By then, he will be beyond help, or health, and you may say what you like for as long as you like, as well or as poorly as you know how.