Archive for the ‘Alex Dally MacFarlane’ Category
The Lioness in her Abdomen
Tuesday, August 19th, 2008
If the single remaining mural from her palace is to be believed, the first queen of Umer was born with a metal cage in place of her abdomen. At the bottom of the cage curled a tiny brown kitten.
As Eshi grew from babe to girl, the kitten became a miniature lioness with a long tail and sharp claws. The lioness never outgrew its cage; throughout Eshi’s life, as depicted in the mural, the cage gave it ample space to pace and curl.
The second panel of the mural shows all sorts of people gathered around the girl — old and young, bearded and bare-breasted, modestly dressed and clean-shaven — examining the cage and the feline. Their confusion is painted clearly on their faces.
The girl silently bore it.
When she became queen, and the people of Umer gathered at her bare feet in obeisance, she cast those people in the second panel out from the city walls and did not let them return. Words engraved at the base of the mural record her words to them: “The lioness is a part of me, like a heart, and I will not have you prod her like a beast at market.”
Eshi ruled for two decades, and the lioness prowled and purred in her abdomen.
In none of the panels is the lioness shown eating. Perhaps it took scraps of meat from the table like a pet. Perhaps, as one historian has inferred from the way it licks the bars of its cage in three of the eight panels, it gained its sustenance in a more unusual manner. Eshi is shown eating twice: putting flatbread and beans into her mouth like a regular person.
The intricacies of the connection between woman and lioness were never understood, although its importance to their wellbeing was illustrated on the day that Eshi went hunting with some of her relatives and friends, when her drunken sister misfired and her arrow pierced the lioness.
As the lioness’ blood pumped from its body, Eshi clutched her abdomen and moaned in pain. Physicians rushed to her side but found no wound except that in the lioness.
They could only watch as the lioness bled out and their queen died with it.
According to some historians a textual fragment contradicts the mural, saying that Eshi died from an arrow through a vital organ. According to others, the two versions of the tale are in very close agreement.
The Child and the Raspberry: A Prairie Fable
Friday, August 1st, 2008
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In a house near the prairie town of Anntown there lived a small child who liked to pick raspberries from the plants growing around the house.
The family cultivated the fruits with wires and careful grooming and nets to keep the birds away. The child, still too small to do more than pull weeds from the soil when directed by an adult, spent some time each day wandering through the plants and plucking the fattest raspberries from the green branches. This was permitted, provided the child ate every one for lunch. But each day, the child took too many, and one of the adults took the rest for pudding and scolded the child, saying, “You should not be so greedy!”
The next day, the child had forgotten the words and again plucked too many fat, red berries to eat.
On one of these days, the child found a particularly large raspberry lying on the soil near one of the plants. This raspberry was so large that it covered over half of the child’s palm. Imagine how many sweet mouthfuls it would provide! Crying out in excitement, the child picked it up and examined it. No other raspberry had ever grown so large on the green branches!
Then the child saw another raspberry on the ground, equally large, and grabbed at it, imagining how delicious lunch would be.
But the child’s small fingers only splashed against water, over and over.
The second raspberry was a reflection, the child realised.
And while the child had fumbled in the water for a raspberry that didn’t exist, a bird had snatched the real one and flown away. If only the child had not been so greedy, lunch that day would have been more than four un-exceptional berries.