Joyland Trio Deal

by Jim Hanas

  When all the household was asleep, she went to sit on the broad marble steps, for it eased her burning feet to bathe them in the cold seawater; then she thought of all those below in the deep. “It serves me right to be in such pain,” she thought. “How could I have left them? How could I have loved this monstrous boy?”

  Once during the night as she slept shivering on the steps with a caftan wrapped about her, and the little dog who was so loyal lay against her, she heard the dog growl and she opened her eyes to see from the window her sisters arm-in-arm, singing sorrowfully, floating in the water. She waved to them, and then they recognized her and swam as one towards her. She tried to mime for them how deeply she grieved for them, how great her mistake had been.

  “I hate him,” she spelled out in signs. She told them about the slaves and the forest and the village and then she wept so hard the dog began to weep as well. After that, they came to see her every night, promising that they would find away to restore her tail and rescue her. She had no faith in their plans, but to see them was her only pleasure. Once, she saw in the distance a row of her oldest grandmothers, stretching out their arms to her, but they did not venture so near the land as her sisters did.

  As the days passed, she hated the boy more keenly, but he was as oblivious to her feelings as his stone likeness had been. He even at times spoke of loving her as his own child, although he would pat her breast in passing. It never came into his head to make her his wife for, in fact, there was little need to secure her further. She was grateful for this oversight as she had seen the liberties the boy took at times with the wives of his slaves and she understood this to be a social obligation of married women, to provide their own bodies as resting places for the powerful.

  One day he kissed her rosy mouth and played with her long waving hair, and laid his head on her heart, while she dreamed of killing him.

  “I have to travel to meet my bride,” he said. “You will come with me and tell me what you think of her. You are not afraid of the sea, are you, my dumb little child, my sweetbread,” said he. She shook her head, thinking of the sea and how close to her feet it would be beneath the ship. Together they stood on the deck of a noble ship, which was to carry them to the country of the neighboring king. And then he told her his tales of storm and of calm, of strange fishes in the deep beneath them, and of what the divers had seen there; she smiled at his descriptions, for she knew he was an idiot. Halfway across the ocean he drew her into his private chamber and opened a case filled with scrolls and models and plans.

  “This is my paper mill,” he said. She listened for hours as he explained the cutting down of trees and the pulping of their essence into a sheet like the one he waved before her. He explained the refuse and chemicals that would be disposed of into the waters of the sea. And then a voice called him from above deck.

  “It is the damnedest thing!” the voice exclaimed.

  The little seamaid rose to the deck behind the boy. She knew before she exited his shadow that the smell of fish rotting meant they were to see some catch pulled out of the long nets. The boy cried out to his God and before the seamaid were the thrashing bodies of three of her sisters. The boy and his men set upon the seamaids with cudgels and beat at them until they lay still, destroyed, in a spreading stain. The little seamaid walked across her sisters. She held out her arms to the boy. He took her in his arms and stared at her soft face. Tears streamed into her open mouth and he saw for the first time the mangled edge of her tongue, which had grown black and infected. He stepped back in horror and slipped on the guts lining the boards of the deck. Her eyes rolled in her head. Her one hand tore at her hair and her other hand held aloft the dagger she had drawn from his person. She rushed forward and stabbed him. His heart collapsed chamber by chamber beneath her blows. And then the little seamaid threw herself overboard.

  She plunged below the surface and opened her eyes. The other seamaids were there. They grasped her and carried her as far from the ship as they could before she would no longer be able to breathe and then they drew her to the surface again. She gasped in deep gulps of air and shook her head and begged them with her eyes to let her drown. “I can’t ever go back to that world,” she signed to them. “Take me home.”

  “We love you,” they said. They embraced her and pulled her down to the bottom of the ocean and kept her there.

  Fables for Now

  The Shipwrecked Dolphin

  A SHIPWRECKED DOG IN THE middle of the ocean had been clinging for a long time to a slender bar of broken wood, when a dolphin came up and offered to carry him ashore.

  “Oh, thank you,” said the dog and climbed on top of the dolphin’s back.

  It was a long way to shore and the dog asked many questions about the dolphin’s life. For hours the dolphin described how to swim and eat fish and get around in the ocean. After a time the dog began to think that he understood so well what it was to be a dolphin that he decided to jump from the dolphin’s back into the sea.

  “Friend, what are you doing?” asked the dolphin.

  “It’s alright. Don’t worry. I’m a dolphin,” said the dog.

  “But friend, you are a dog.”

  “It’s alright. Go away now. I can swim from here,” said the dog as he paddled along.

  “It’s miles to shore and you are not aimed in the right direction,” said the dolphin.

  “Go away now. I think I know better than you how to be a dolphin. After all, I have learned about being a dolphin whereas you were simply born one.”

  For an hour the dolphin pleaded with the dog, out of loyalty or responsibility or because one thing we know of dolphins is that they can tell the difference between themselves and dogs. But the stubborn little fellow charged slowly forward, becoming increasingly insulting to his savior.

  At last the dolphin left and went about his business: leaping into the air and diving down for fish and generally enjoying a good life in the interstitial space of the ocean.

  Lonely, cold and weak, the dog began to talk to himself about life as a dolphin.

  “You see,” he said. “It is the silly dolphins who leap and play when there are channels to cross and dogs that need saving and mice to be caught and cheese to be eaten. Oh, I am so hungry. The life of a dolphin is rife with grief and work.”

  The poor dog, who was now further from shore than he had ever been, began to drown. As he drowned he lamented the pain he felt and the cruelty of life as a dolphin. He sank beneath the surface of the water and saw there the last bubbles of his breath rising. A fish swam in front of his eyes and he made a half-hearted snap at it. Perhaps, he thought, I am a dog.

  The dolphin, who had returned to check on his foolish charge, swam beneath the body of the unconscious creature, raised him up to the surface and carried him, not quite dead, to the shore. At the shore he deposited the soggy dog on a sandbar and left to see how many times he could leap out of the water before the crimson sky faded to black.

  The little dog awoke beneath a vast array of stars.

  “I am alive!” he cried. “You see I must have turned into a dolphin and swum to shore and then turned back into a dog. Now I will take my vast knowledge of dolphins forward to the other dogs so that they too might have adventures in the middle of the ocean!”

  Sympathy is not biology.

  The Farmer and the Crane

  SOME CRANES ALIGHTED ON A field and began to eat the grain growing there. The farmer who had sown the field, upon looking out of the window of his house, became enraged. But the farmer’s child was confused.

  “Daddy,” said the little girl. “Why are you angry? The birds are hungry and we have so much grain.”

  The farmer did not want to shoot at the birds in front of his daughter and so he ran out of the house, waving his arms and shouting. He chased the cranes away from his grain. The next day the cranes alighted again, this time with several new cranes in their company
.

  “Daddy,” said the farmer’s daughter. “There is a lovely party going on in our field!”

  The farmer grabbed his shotgun and showed his daughter that it was empty and charged into the field and pointed the gun at the birds and yelled, “Bang, bang, bang!” This time the birds did not fly off, but began to laugh and clutch their full bellies and laughed some more. Discouraged, the farmer trudged back to his house and ate dinner with his child and read stories to her by the fire and tucked her into bed and got into bed himself and dreamed very happy dreams.

  On the third day the sky darkened with cranes and the noise they made descending into the field was like no other the farmer ever heard. Terrified by what seemed to him to be an apocalyptic vision, he hid his child in the cellar and he stripped down to his pants and walked bare-chested into the melee with his arms held out before him, pretending to be a zombie and hoping against hope that cranes were afraid of the undead. As he moved through the bustling crowd the birds began to coo, more like doves than cranes. A path appeared before him where the cranes stepped aside. The path led to the center of the field and there stood a beautiful woman dressed in a coat of white feathers.

  “What the hell is going on?” the farmer begged to know.

  She smiled and opened her mouth and spoke in trills and chirps. At last she finished and threw off her coat and opened a pair of great silvery wings. She rushed up to the farmer and embraced him, and then pecked his cheek. The woman and all the cranes flew away together in a cloud of music. The farmer returned to his home and began to search in the telephone directory for the address of a local real estate agent.

  The cranes did not return and the farmer chose to keep his farm. Every season the field grew more and more lush and his crops became famous for their extraordinary quality. The farmer’s daughter grew into a lovely and cheery young woman who left home at seventeen to study ornithology at university. After some time she married a lovely serious man who knew almost as much about birds as she did. On their wedding night she told him about the cranes.

  “That could never have happened,” he said. “You must have dreamed it.”

  Life is under no obligation to make sense to the living.

  The Ant’s Revenge

  AN ANT WENT DOWN TO the banks of the Seine to quench his thirst. A young child kneeled by the bank trailing a branch in the water and speaking to herself in hushed tones. A dog passed behind the two of them and whispered to the ant, “Why don’t you sting her and make her fall into the water as revenge for all the homes stomped on and boiled out and poisoned? How many of your children have her parents destroyed? Why don’t you sting her and take one child for the hundreds lost?”

  “You are right,” said the ant. “I will sting her and take my revenge!”

  And he snuck up beside her, crawled upon her soft hand and stung her with all his might. The little girl cried out, shook the ant from her hand, stepped on him and crushed his little life into the paving stones. Her dog licked her hand and pressed against her.

  “Oh, my sweet dog. Always taking care of me. I love you,” the little girl said. She rubbed his ears and scratched his chin and kissed him.

  Consider the source.

  Love’s Limits

  “MY DARLING,” SAID THE LOVER. “Shall I compare thee to the morning outside our window? You are as refreshing and bright.”

  “My love,” said the other lover. “Shall I compare thee to our faithful hound who warms us with his love and never errs in feeling?”

  “My darling,” said the lover. “Shall I compare thee to the bed on which we lie? Thou art soft and comforting at night.”

  “My love,” said the other lover. “Shall I compare thee to the infant who draws forth my sighs with her great innocence?”

  “My darling, shall I compare thee to the journey of life? Thou art so full of laughter and of tears.”

  “My love, shall I compare thee to a book of great literature? Thou doth contain as many brilliant thoughts.”

  “Iwis, my darling! Shall I compare thee to thy mother?"

  The sound of a pistol firing interrupted the lover.

  Quit while you are ahead.

  Liars in the Land of Crows

  THREE LIARS TRAVELING ON HORSEBACK arrived together in the land of crows. The largest crow, who was the size of a dog, commanded that the liars be seized and thrown into the deep freezer with the other meat. The liars shivered between the long bloody flanks of beef hanging all around them like relatives at a particularly tragic funeral. Finally, the door opened and a group of crows waddled into the freezer and escorted the liars out and down a long hallway and through a large entrance into a ballroom where their leader waited. Seated beside the giant crow was a young lioness.

  “Tell me what you see,” commanded the crow of the liars.

  One liar was pushed forward by the other two.

  “I see a great man, beloved by all. Beside him I see a loyal and loving wife. Around him I see his followers, a great people, strong and brilliant and prepared to lead the world in philosophy, science, and the arts.”

  The lioness roared. The walls shook.

  “Tell me what you see,” the crow demanded of the next liar.

  This time the two who had not spoken looked at each other and shrugged. One stepped forward on his own. “I see God and his angels personified in the refined majesty of Your Honor and his kingdom.”

  “Nice,” said the crow. “Tell me what you see,” he said quietly to the last liar.

  “I see my life flashing like a film on rewind behind my eyes. I see my mother and how she loved me. I see all the people I lied to and cheated and the looks on their faces when they discovered how I had betrayed them. I see the person that I could have been and how much time I have wasted trying to keep my lies straight. I see the little I have gained and the magnitude of what I have lost. I see that you will kill me when I finish speaking and yet I am unable to continue.”

  The lioness stepped down from her seat beside the crow and sauntered to the side of the last liar.

  “Tell me what you hear,” she said, breathing hotly into his ear. Her hard whiskers scraped his neck as she turned her giant head.

  “I hear my heart, which I fear is about to fail me. I hear a buzzing in my ears, which I think is my brain crying. I hear how my friends have caught their breath. I hear you purring and your feet pacing. I hear the crows gossiping behind me. I hear the air in my ears and my eyelashes fluttering. I hear the end of my life approaching.”

  “Tell me what you feel,” said the lioness, licking her long fangs.

  “For God’s sake, eat me or maul me or let me go, but don’t play with me any longer!” cried the liar. “I am a weak man. I am a liar. I don’t know what to say to you because I don’t know what lie you want from me!”

  “You can go,” said the crow.

  The liar ran as fast as he could out of the ballroom and as far away as he could get from the crows, the lioness and the other liars.

  The crow turned back to the two liars who were now shaking in each other’s embrace.

  “I can take your eyes and tongues and you can leave here now. Or you can keep your eyes that only see how to manipulate opportunity and your tongues that only twist the truth. And for every lie that you have told over the course of your life you can work another day as my slave, digging when I tell you to dig, dragging what I tell you to drag. But if you ever speak another lie your penance will be over and my lioness will eat you.”

  The liars agreed immediately to keep their eyes and tongues. A slave or a laborer they might be to the end of their days, but they were happy to abandon freedom in order to live and be whole. And so, for years the liars worked. In order to protect themselves they never spoke again, fearing that lies might issue forth unbidden. The crows were cruel, but they were honest. They never injured or threatened the liars again. Time passed
with excruciating slowness. Eventually the liars lay down and died as old, old men. They had been long since forgotten by their victims. Life had gone on without them.

  The liar who escaped visited their graves only once. He shuddered to think of them. His own life had been much improved by that rush of honesty provoked by his certainty that he would die in the court of crows. He had transformed and become a kind and honest person. Life was much easier than he had ever imagined it would be and full of rewards. When he died he was in a hospital and his wife, his children, his grandchildren, and many friends were at his side. It was a beautiful day and he felt loved.

  In the long run the easier you make it to live with yourself, the more free time you have.

  Monkey Prince

  A PRINCE TRAINED A TROUPE of monkeys to dress as courtiers and dance at his birthday ball. The monkeys endured weeks of dance lessons until they were more graceful than the Moscow ballet. They preened before the mirrors in their silk jackets and gold-buttoned trousers. The night of the prince’s birthday they enjoyed hours of applause. They devoured cake and sipped champagne and chattered with the lovely lords and ladies. They went to bed in sequined pajamas under sheets so soft they were like summer breezes.

  In the morning the prince sent the monkeys to the local zoo in cages full of prickly hay. For days they refused to eat the brown pieces of banana pushed through the bars at them or drink from the muddy bowls of water. They asked for the prince. They asked for a lawyer. They asked for the people who had seen them dance. After a month of living like animals one monkey took his own life by attacking a guard and so forcing the zoo officials to inject him with poison.

  The monkeys began to organize. One day, when a crowd stood outside their cage they began to dance. They danced and they danced and they danced while the crowds cheered and threw coins and hats and feathers and handkerchiefs to them in appreciation. At last they bowed. The zookeeper opened the cage to bring them a platter of fine foods purchased by the happy zoo visitors as a treat. The monkeys fled the cage at once and stole all the bicycles lined up in the parking lot. A long line of monkeys pedaled madly to the palace. At the palace they broke a window and invaded. The prince was easily overcome by their sharp bites and scratches. They locked him in a cage and showered and dressed in his clothes. The sleeves of his shirts were long and his crowns slipped over their eyes or fell about their necks. But the servants obeyed them with the same deference they had shown their human master. After some time the monkeys formed a government that was virtually indistinguishable from the previous government except for the absence of humans (dispatched to the zoo) and the new tradition of drinking champagne with one’s feet.