Archive for the ‘Alex Dally MacFarlane’ Category
The Storyteller is Swallowed
Tuesday, January 29th, 2008
Rajab stood still while the monster approached, despite the way its dun and ochre hide blocked the view of pastures and trees behind it, despite the size of its maw as it spread dark brown lips wide. That’s larger than any of the arches in the palace, he thought. It must have come from far into the mountains. And he thought, also, about the pain in his legs from running so quickly from the palace and from the city. He couldn’t go any further. The soldiers chasing him had stopped too, but did not stand still. Fearful gibbering filled the air in-between the monster’s thudding steps; two of the men fled. Their captain didn’t call them back. “It is right that you should die in such a filthy manner!” he called out to Rajab, his voice shaking. “And then the city guards will come to destroy the beast, and you will be twice-killed. Just as you twice broke into the harem, twice distracted the women with your presence. I am sure the Sultan will agree that this is more fitting than any death a lowly captain could have devised, and he will clap his hands in delight!” A moment later the monster was upon Rajab, its great lips around him, its tongue drawing him inside.
In the mouth of the monster, Rajab told the story of the first spice farmer to the broad, dark uvula. It quivered in delight and only let him pass to the oesophagus when he had told it another tale. On the way down that long passage to the stomach, he spoke of dark-eyed wizards who together raised the first city from the sand–a long, convoluted tale with monologues on the making of laws and the design of plumbing, and nested anecdotes about the people who came to live in the pale houses. And in the stomach, where he came to rest, he told many tales. He entertained the walls and the acid with stories about djinn, animated carpets, sand-beasts such as the creature in whose stomach he rested, palaces that teleported and palaces that were no larger than a peppercorn, and countless more.
The city guards never did destroy the beast. Instead they joined Rajab in the stomach, along with women and children and livestock. Though some passed through to the intestines, many remained with Rajab, and their numbers were replenished regularly. Rajab, who had won the favour of the stomach and was not digested, was content. He possessed what he had been seeking all along: greater audiences for his tales.
The New Language of Masks
Wednesday, January 16th, 2008
In the city of sticks and glass, a girl sits bridgewise and trails images through the air with bone-thin fingers. Under her stony seat, gondoliers steer the city’s hidden ways, singing hexes for safe passage. Past her step the city’s people and the world’s people come to visit, unseeing of her fingers’ work. Their bodies brush the air-patterns, send them folding eyewards, and in bursts like the flashed sun-reflection of a coin dropped to the ground she sees their masks.
Alphabets of colour and shape, a language of dreams and futures, paint their faces.
“Beware spiders,” the girl whispers, sibylline, to a woman whose silvery hair clings silken to her neck.
A hitch in the woman’s step, the only indication that she heard more than wind, kicks other air-patterns into spirals.
“I see…”
Something new. The girl blinks. “Music on your face, sir.” New language, of quavers and halves, written barwise across polished white cheeks-paper. She reads, and does not like it. “Bad music, sir.” Fingers draw handkerchiefs in the air, and the two men with music on their faces pause and stare at her until the church clock’s chime draws them onwards.
She sees it everywhere, now she has noticed; it baritones into masks and the skin beneath, trebles in the air between shoulder and shoulder.
At twelve chimes the architect comes to her, bearing a plate of food and a question: “What do you see?”
“Music.”
But not in her images. Laughing suddenly, she twitches her fingers in curves and in their wake forms a cat, mirror-image of the one hopping after a butterfly across the bridge. Then she sees a semi-quaver sneaking up the tabbied tail and looks away. “Too much music.”
The architect is smiling.
Fingers shaking, she tugs her hip-long hair in front of her face. Black curtain. She doesn’t want to look at him. Music stains his face, his clothes, his hands.
“It’s in my food. You’ve put music in my food.”
“Tell me what it tastes like.”
Fingers tangle a quilt of No into her hair. She tips the plate, watches spaghetti twist and fall and plop into the canal. “Bad music, sir.”
He laughs and walks away.
There is music in the water, too. The gondoliers’ songs are different.
The girl sits bridgewise, trailing images from her fingers, and waits.