My Blog

an old man carried his one eye out in front of him–dangling from a string attached to a long pole that he grasped with both hands like a flag or a prayer. the eye saw and told him many things and so the village woman often came to him with offerings of food to find out where their husbands were or which of their relatives was talking about them behind their backs.

as news of this eye spread powerful men sent emissaries disguised as children to find out the actions of their enemies. though the eye usually only spoke to these petitioners in riddles that would befuddle their parents, one day a young boy saw what the eye saw and knew his father was false. when this boy returned to his father’s house the father saw new knowledge in his son’s eye and cast him out. fearing his son, thus expulsed, would see and learn more he sent the village thugs after him to kill him and when the body was found spread rumors that it was the blind old man with his dangling eye who committed the murder. then he hired a hoard of teenaged boys to steal the eye and destroy its owner.

thus the eye saw and told the old man that the day of his death was coming.

the understanding of his impending death startled the old man for he had put his eye on the string on the pole and carried it in front of him so that he would always see what was coming. but now that he knew his day was near he fell into a fit of terrors and the eye swung like a pendulum and its beam blinked like a search light and the voices and cries of all those to whom the eye had given knowledge filled the old man’s ears.

the old man was weeping when the mad boys came with their teeth and their knives and fell upon him in a frenzy of blood and did the work of jackals. so entranced were boys in their deed they forgot about the eye and didn’t notice when the dead boy’s sister (who had tagged along disguised as a boy) slipped it from its string and sequestered it in the folds of her shirt and made herself scarce in the woods until finally sated, the boys roared off en mass drunken stupor, the leader carrying the old man’s pole like a staff and shouting raucous songs that would become the stuff of lyric.

then the girl returned to the corpse of the man and placed his eye in the gash on his forehead where it sunk three inches down to the center of his head and she took her thread and re-stitched his body and it became a boat, a drunken boat, which she sailed away.

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 16th, 2006 at 8:55 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.