FAMOUS LAST WORDS
FIVE FABLES
by Paul Mann
1. THE MESSENGER
An old man comes from far away. He says: The King has summoned you. Take this packet sealed with red wax, take these directions and leave at once for the capitol of X. He says goodbye to his wife and young son. There was a port, then an uncharted ocean. He floated down rivers and crossed vast deserts. Dense forests and mountain passes choked with falls of rock and ice. At the edge of the steppes he fell ill with fever, and lay for weeks dreaming in a village where no one spoke his tongue. He was taken for a spy and held for a year in a castle keep. On an island he fell in love with a widow and lived there for years till he awakened again to his task. He was captured by nomads and sold as a slave but escaped and barely survived another desert. He slept in haystacks and trees, he foraged for food, he starved. Robbers and demons rose up from the earth. More and more he wondered would he ever arrive. People were kind or cruel and no lesson could be drawn from the way he was treated. He could no longer remember the face of his wife, or the son who hated him. Duty drove him, then hope, then despair, then only habit. Finally he sees: There is no King, no capitol of X. Only a great circle. He comes to a door: His knock is answered by a man wearing what once was his face, and he says: The King has summoned you. Take this packet and these directions, and leave at once for the capitol of X.
2. OLD WOMAN
An old woman lived alone in the woods. She had been alone so long she couldn’t remember her parents. Once she had had a husband and child but they died long ago and she couldn’t remember them either. The forest had grown over them. She spent days on end telling God to stones. One day in the woods she discovered a child, lost and weeping. She took her home. She taught her the ways of roots and leaves. Deer fed from their fingers. Larks answered their songs. When the floods came they withdrew to a cave in a high cliff. When the snows came they huddled together. They wept together, and once they laughed. They discoursed with owls and bats. They could change hawks to geese, trees to fields of clover. They endured the white nights. Their hut grew to a cottage, then a fine house, a mansion, a palace. Black smoke rose from their seven chimneys. A distant train whistle, the sighs of the moon. They came in ways to look alike, to amble with the same gait, to stir the fires with the same impatience. Young and old, their hair both grey. Neither remembered her name. And then one day the girl killed her and ate her, and grew old alone in the old woman’s hut.
3. THE SONG The song came to him at night and by morning his whole body hummed. A new song unheard before and the trees bent over to listen. Their leaves turned blue violet red then fell upward and vanished into the sky. The birds stopped their own singling to let the boy’s song float free. He walked to town and the song surrounded him. It made a shadow in his shadow. All the people came out in the street and began to hum along. The song grew louder and louder and the people stopped up their ears. The song possessed them, drove out all other music, all the fractured melodies that drifted up through their dreams and drowned out all other thoughts and deeds. Movie music, nursery rhymes, tunes fixed to events long past that drag memory with them into the light. He sang without eating, he sang without sleep. Some days he was hollow, some days full. The song bent him and tied him into a knot. It was a wonder to see a boy tied in a knot. The song stretched him taut as a piano string till he could not see his feet. It shrunk him down to the size of a fist and pulsed in the air around him. When he stood on the cliffs the sea below boiled. When he lay on his back the sky above burned. Red flares pierced the clouds. The song consumed his mother and father. He swelled up with the song till he thought he would burst, and when he could swell no longer he began to grow a carapace, white lusterless chitinous. The song was his shell and every hour a new color and texture. It thickened and grew and crowded out everything. Orchestras in distant cities found themselves deep in the song. The players let go of their instruments and the song still played. The boy grew and grew. Nowhere on earth was free of his song. And still he expanded. The song filled the galaxy with one unbearable tone. It was the song that cancelled the song that held all worlds together. It bent the boy to the universe, then it bent the universe to him.
4. RAT-GIRL Rat-girl lived with Rat-mother in the one wooden wall of the old stone house. By day they gnawed wires and boards, by night scuttled close to the walls. They were happy there. Then Rat-mother died. The family who lived in the house took pity on Rat-girl. They took her to live with them. They called her Rebecca. They dressed her in little pinafores and sent her off to school, where she failed every subject. Mean girls tried to torment her, but they spoke in a language she didn’t understand. The family took her to the dentist, to the county fair. They assured her that she was as if one of their own, but she didn’t seem to care. They came in their way to love her, but they did not share her appetites, nor think as Rat-girl thought. And she knew nothing of love. Then one day she withdrew through the rat-hole in the old wall, where at night she listened to her family indifferently, and when they sang kept time to their song with her gnawing.
5. SOMETHING FOUND A man goes on a search but he doesn’t know it’s a search He just feels restless, unhomed. He searches & searches for something but doesn’t know what it is, or even that there’s something he seeks. He searches & searches & finds it but doesn’t know he’s found it, didn’t know he was searching for it, & so doesn’t pause. Without knowing this is the thing, without thinking This thing, he denies it’s the thing. He recognizes nothing. He doesn’t pause, he keeps searching for something already erased. But somewhere within him the thing lost & found & lost again makes itself known, rises up in disguise & is buried. So that in the end nothing is found, nothing is gained, the end seems to go on forever. The thing lost one didn’t know was lost is foundlost & lost again. The nothing one lost. So one sets out again in search of the one thing that doesn’t exist. That I will never again have to search for.
©2022 All rights reserved Paul Mann Used with permission