The Tale of the Immortal Shaman

Many moons ago, long before we learned the plow, our clan was watched over by a shaman of great power. In that time, the shaman’s role was far greater than the mere storyteller of today, tending to the ill, guiding the people in their times of need, and mediating disputes. In his great mastery of the magicks of the world he crafted a powerful potion that, after passing his lips, granted him an eternity of life. Arrowheads would split and shatter against his breast, illness and corruption evaded him, and age refused to draw near to him. Under his unwavering watch, our clan flourished. No others dared raid our camps, and his wise council kept the people of our clan united in harmony. For many generations, our people were happy and our bellies were full. But even for the immortal, good times do not last forever. Traders who once frequently came to them from the north, stopped suddenly and entirely. The wise and weary shaman sent his fastest scouts to learn of the cause. They returned with a strange and dreadful tale; they discovered a massive mountain of pale, misty blue ice that peered over the horizon of their narrow canyon valley. The path out of the valley was now blocked by this ice, ice that the eldest of the scouts promised rested atop the mountains only weeks prior.

The shaman did not worry at first. He had known that, at times, mountains shed their ice in a calamity not unlike a dust-storm. Though trade with the northerners enriched the clan for as long as even the shaman could remember, he knew that with their abundant resources and his careful leadership, they would outlast this slinking ice. It was not until the appearance of the old oracle of the wood that the shaman grew to worry. She was brought before the shaman roughly, as she had approached from the woodland of the south, home to the hostile and primitive tribes that once raided the storehouses of our people. When he realized who was before him, he bade his guards to leave and apologized to her profusely. Unaffected, or perhaps uncaring, the oracle-hermit delivered her message without regard for his apologies. She foretold of doom. The gods and the spirits of the land had taken notice of the shaman’s obscene undeath and set into place events to return things to balance. “The mountains will descend upon your people,” She told him, “The warnings were clear. The southern clans have all found ways to flee, but you in your arrogance ignored the signs. You chose to separate from bosom of the land and now, you and your progeny will pay the price. The gods do not take well to being cheated, nor do they know mercy for those they catch.”

Perhaps a long time ago, the shaman would have felt anger, or even fear at the grim messenger before him, but in his age he knew to heed the words of oracles. Her accusations were true. Long ago he ceased to be affected by the unpredictable tides of fate and since then he had allowed his attention of their omens to slip. He only asked her, “What can I do?”

Her response was somehow clear, but cryptic. “You must flee, as those you call primitive did before you. The children of your clan did not choose to defy fate. It was you who chose this for them. Lead them away from this valley and pray your redemption will come from theirs.”

“How can we flee?” He asked, “The mountains at our flanks are uncrossable. The forests to our south are foreign to us. The trees will devour us. And now the valley is blocked by ice.”

“Your trial has begun.” She said with a sorrowful look in her eyes, “You must hurry before the gods take their revenge in full.” They sat in silence for a few moments before she stood and spoke her final words, words that our clan repeats to this day whenever the fates take one of us away, “The Earth demands balance, and so it demands that men must die.” She left his tent. The shaman sat in silent thought. It was time to move again.

At that time, our clan hadn’t moved any significant distance in generations. The valley had been incredibly plentiful when they found it, and the shaman’s wisdom allowed them to keep it so. He thought that this would be the balance that would redeem his disobedience to fate. Due to the near-sedentary state of his people, they took the news of their need to move with difficulty. They gathered their things slowly, many struggling to leave behind the luxuries they couldn’t carry. While they dallied, the shaman made his way to the mountain of ice that seemed to loom closer to them with each passing day. He did not have to walk long to find it. The looming plateau was a massive block of stone and ice as wide as the mouth of the valley. It was almost gently sloped with the exception of the ice that reached up to his knees, which was sheer. The shaman listened carefully. The ice moaned faintly against his ear. He could sense it was moving towards them.

The shaman returned to our people and gathered the strongest men and the strongest clubs and hammers. The shaman brought his bronze adze, the only such metal implement in the clan, brought long ago by far-travelling merchants. The men marched to the ice and began the work of carving a set of crude steps into the largely gentle slope. They worked until the sun set, and again for the entirety of the next day. The shaman cut the last steps himself, his bronze pick the only tool able to shape the stone-like ice at the top of the plateau. When they were done, a roughly hewn staircase adorned the side of the icy mountain. At the top, he looked over the horizon and saw the ice stretching far as he could see. This journey will be hard. He shivered. This mountain seemed to draw cold air from high in the sky and send it cruelly cascading downwards.

The people of our clan loaded up their backs with supplies. Many carried their children in their arms. The mountain sent cold spirits into the anxious village, bringing with them an unnatural chill that most of our people had never experienced. Our clan followed the shaman to the mountain of ice with little resistance, as they were accustomed to following his orders and trusting his judgement. He, of course, was the first to set his foot on top of the ice again, followed closely by the young, strong men of the tribe. As our clan reached the summit, they saw that their journey had only begun and many began to despair. The cold was harsh and unfamiliar to the clan. As they regrouped atop the mountain, dark clouds began to brew above them as thin, frozen flakes gently fell to their feet.

The shaman led the group slowly, hoping to keep our vast numbers together, but the gods would not allow his trial to be so simple. The dark clouds above them turned from producers of benign specks of snow to angry, howling beasts, blowing harsh white winds into the eyes of our people. So long as the shaman’s voice boomed over the winds, the hearts of our people kept strong, but as soon as the storm began to drown his voice, panic began to set in. The quaver in the hearts of the masses broke into full fear when the storm came to fruition, the winds taking a thick and milky tone, stinging any exposed skin and soaking furs. No one could see further than the distance of their hands from their faces. The shaman could feel his control of the crowd slipping. He could feel the anarchy of fear brewing within our clan.

He tried to give commands to the young men around him to create a human perimeter around the tribe, to lend him their voices to lead the people, to help him, but they could not hear his words. The wind buffeted and fought each step forward, and screamed in the shaman’s ears. The snows funneled around his body and froze him deeply and bitterly. He turned to yell to his people, but found that they were no longer at his back.

It is said he wandered atop that mountain, lost in the storm meant just for him, for weeks, but the truth is, we do not know. We do not know how long he was lost atop that cursed hill. Many of our people became lost in that storm. Separated from the clan, either by bad luck or by weakness, they died in the cold. It was those that, like today, stood with the clan and held to the clan that survived and lived to tell this cautionary tale. Those of us that were left eventually found the other side of the mountain, at the mouth of the valley. At this end, it tapered off to the earth below with a softly sloped hill. As we approached the end, the storm cleared. We somber survivors climbed down the hill numbly and from our dwindling numbers established a sort of council composed of those who had been close to the shaman, surviving elders, and any who had useful skills or knowledge, including a man who was my forefather. They led the clan to new lands through clear and merciful weather.

In time, the clan settled in a place that could sustain it for some time. We knew we would have to move further soon, but the council wished to find the shaman, the man who had led our clan well for generations. The mountain was strange. Every day its shape changed ever so slightly and it moved little by little towards the heart of the valley that our people once called home. It took many days of searching, but one day, my own forefather heard a familiar call coming from the ice. Following the call, he came to a slim opening in the ice from which the eternal voice of the shaman bellowed. Blinded by the snow and thrown into confusion by the wind, the shaman had fallen into a crevasse deep in the ice. His legs, the shaman explained, were pinned, and he could not move. His hands could not grip. He complained of the cold and my forefather slid his own furs down to the shaman.

Entire crews of young men tried desperately to free the shaman from his trap, but their stone tools could not stand up to the rock-hard ice on top of this plateau. As the days passed, the shaman sunk deeper and deeper into the mountain, until he was all but invisible to the world. Then, there came storms, rains that kept our clan busy moving to higher ground and building better shelter. When the men returned to the shaman, the rift that held him was nearly closed. They called to him, but he did not answer. One by one, the men abandoned their former leader for dead, until only my forefather remained. He listened to the ice for a long time. As the sun began to set, my forefather called out one more time. To his surprise the shaman spoke. His voice was surprisingly clear, though he was no longer even visible through the ever-thinning entrance.

“This is my curse, trapped undying in this unholy ice.” He said, “The eternal punishment for my eternal hubris. I know and accept this now. I struggled against it when I fell, a struggle I’m sure only doomed me more. I struggled again when I heard you return for me, yet, since then the mountain has only pinned me further. Return to the others. Live well and tell them my tale. Let them know that the earth always returns to balance. The arrogant will of one man, no matter how great or just, will always work to destroy the integrity of his people. Trust only in the clan, the whole. Live together with this earth, or die in vain struggle against it. Remember this if you remember only a single thing; the earth demands balance, and so it demands that men must die.”

My forefather listened to these words and waited for more to come. When none did, he waited still. Night fell around him and the cold began to turn intolerable. The wind moaned for him to leave. He tried to call again, but received no reply. And so, he left. He told the clan of what he heard and they, in turn, bestowed upon him and his descendants the role of shaman. But my forefather was a wise man, and he listened well. He heeded the warning of the undying shaman trapped in the ice. He remembered his tale and told it, like he did many other fables and stories. He did it for the clan and only for the clan, never seeking glory, riches, or magic. He did this, as did his son, and his son after him. And here I am, doing the same. It is my humble service to our people. No longer do we seek to control this world, to cheat nature of her harvest, or lead our people to greatness. Now we are tasked with remembering. Remembering the warnings of our ancestors, the stories of our people, the lessons we have learned living here. Heed my words. Balance will always prevail no matter your power or your will. Always, it waits until the time is right to correct our wrongs. Always, it wins.

The Art of the Day

Everybody knows why pastry rules

But no one ever asked

Why

The cookie crumbles

Check ‘em out, how they grasp at the vivid

Baubles of us rich kids

Your effort if you wanna call it that,

Is not something I got

Respect for cuz if art

Means ducking under

Reason’s radar and woefully

Fabricating complexity

All to make a boy a touch closer

To trending, then hell,

You can do it all baby,

Without me.

               

It’s like that big famous museum

You know,

That one,

You see that shining lady over there, or that man with

Glittering eyes.

O! How they weep

For the hanging piece

It’s like the last bit of

A puzzle, But

It’s not

And all that proves it

Is that noise

When someone who

Really works

Vacuums the floor next door.

But hey I got my illusions too,

All tastes aside,

And since I’ve sworn

Up and down to take it

All very seriously,

Because I know I’m not allowed to laugh

About this n that

Or conflate honor with

Some dumbass

With a dictionary and an expensive camera

And a chip on his shoulder but,

Look, anyone can come home

From wherever to see

The sort of business us lesser

Grunts have been up to

From climbing peaks to digging pits

Both familiar and far and fun and not so much, but

My mind hasn’t changed

And though this is all a whole lot

Of fun

It really is

Undeniably

Stupid.

The Principles of Civilized Society

Let's see who walked into the wall, brick by brick always waiting until next Friday, whose high-pitched voice boxes chant old tabloid headlines, who yell ‘bozo’ at passersby while shakily chain smoking, whose whole lifetime seemed like a decade but had been six, who faded back into time to an era nearly as incomprehensible as this one, whose oil fields were looked at with deep hope and no one really had any notion of having nice teeth,

Who first molded bricks from the river Nile with hopes of something more sturdy than reeds and mud, whose innovative dentistry was still no match for ours, who crave barriers for a lie we made the mistake of giving a name, whose adrenaline rush is frankly both unfair and embarrassing, but useful in a pinch, and who hasn’t been in one of those?

But who guessed that those bricks would one day evolve to build for us great Giza and many, many walls, whose facades at times would be decorated,

Or painted with crude taunts, lives of their own, who were written by the young and the angry and bored officers of the law, whatever the difference may be, whose gap-toothed grins burned so many to death in too many ways to count, who bleed, or fall into shock, or vanish from the face of this Earth, whose veins aren’t showing like they used to, who in an uninspired twist of fate was, in a way, responsible for its own fate, whose bounty was too good to resist, who could never resist the pull of anything and collapse like neglected ancient tombs, whose hidden treasures were never good enough for the hands and mouths of men, who hunted, whose mysterious trauma could never be dealt with, who instead chose to fashion bricks and build palisades block by block in an uncompromised delirium, whose glue-huffing kinsmen have gotten well out of control, who first gave fear its cursed name and tricked us into idolatry,

Who rides on the broken backs of billions, too late for a four-star ending, we, who never trust gleaming white smiles, oh and just remember, if I may quote the Devil, it’s off to work, or it’s off to jail.

The Old Man of the Woods

Some nights, you can hear him on the hilltops, laughing. I don’t really know how to describe him. He’s simple now. And wild the way a deer is. Once, he was a sulky and angry man. When the moon is full he howls at it like a wolf. I’ve seen him running through the pasture, patting the animals and shouting wordless praises at insects flitting by. Filthy with dirt and pollen he could only have picked up by rolling in the flowering wheat. He sleeps in a half-covered den just under the massive oak tree on the outer edge of our farm.

He wasn’t always like this. For most of his life in fact, he was very different. He had been a farmer, and he had been my father. He changed one night though, and I suppose you could say that it was my fault. Though my mother was offended when I told her I felt this way, instead preferring to take the responsibility herself. I couldn’t tell if she was proud, or ashamed, but she clearly didn’t want that burden to fall to her son. He had come home very late one night, like he often did, after spending the evening down at the pub. The house was small, two bedrooms, a kitchen that melded into a tiny parlor of sorts with a coffee table and a couch. Sounds travelled very well through these wooden walls, and it was easy to disturb the sleeping. I woke when he clamored in, slamming the front door. In mere seconds my mother was upon him and my little brother woke and crawled to my bed. He clung as I stood and walked to my door, opening it just slightly to see the scene play out.

“What the hell is wrong with you?” She hisses at him, her eyes wide with anger despite being so recently roused from sleep, “Do you have any idea what time it is, you worthless drunk?”

He walked past her, grumbling and opening the refrigerator. He drank directly out of a carton of orange juice. “You listen to me, you lout, I’m sick of you wandering in here in the middle of the night, making a mess of things, waking me and the children. I’ve had enough. You can’t do this to me, to us anymore. You have to leave.” He just looked at her for a moment. His face was old before its time. His receding hair was a disheveled mess. I wondered if he thought about hitting her. He used to more when I was smaller. Taking over the house during nights like these. But more and more lately, he’s grown docile and almost child-like in his drunkenness. He turned and put the juice back in the refrigerator. He stared into her face for a moment, then burped and laughed. She grabbed his collar, and keeping her hiss strong said, “The day is coming soon when the boy will be old enough and strong enough to carry what little weight you do around here, and when that  day comes I got half a mind to call my cousin and tell him you been beating me every night all these years.”

Now my father scoffed and responded, “Sheriff won’t do shit. I reckon he’s still afraid of me after our wedding.” My father was a large man. He still is, but he doesn’t lean on his size now, like he used to. He went on, “And I wouldn’t count on that boy getting to be as big as me. He’s fucked up. A runt, you know. I’ll bet that womb of yours did it to him. So toxic it crippled him. Hell I feel bad for the kid, having you as a mom.”

Mother started to cry now, but her tears were from anger rather than pain. She pounded on his chest with a small and ineffective fist, “Fuck you!” She yelled, enunciating each word between weak strikes and prompting a quick response from my father, “Ah, ah! Who’s waking everybody up now?”

“You are! They’re already up, I’ll put money on it. When you stumbled back in here, you woke everyone up!” She could never keep her temper with him. Perhaps she really did love him at one point, and seeing him like this hurt her more than I could know. But she was a closed woman, and never one to dwell in melancholy. “You’re hardly ever around, when you are you’re either drunk, or angry. I had to raise these kids all by myself!”

Her angry sobs stifle her voice for a minute. My brother wanted to go to her, “Mommy’s crying.” He whined in my ear. It was a better idea to just watch and wait, a lesson I had learned the hard way, a long time ago. If it got physical, I would have no choice, but this might still just be the normal nightly row. My brother was still little. He didn’t know.

My mother composed herself a bit, “You’re nothing but a burden to this family. You’ve failed us and you’ve failed as a man. I married a drunken coward. What was I even thinking?” Her words dripped with poison.

“I’m such a fucking burden, am I?” He leaned his head back, cartoonish doubt etched into the lines of his face. “A burden, eh?”

“Yes.” She nearly barked. “Yes! You’re useless, all you do is eat our food and drink our money away. I don’t even understand why it is you come back here every night. I know it sure ain’t for the kids. And I figured a long time ago it wasn’t for me. Believe me you ain’t crawling in my bed after this.”

He chuckled meanly, “Why would I want to? Your bed’s got you in it. Fuck this place.” He staggered out of the kitchen and made his way into the bedroom he irregularly shared with my mother, gathering a few random articles of clothing. They spoke there briefly, but I couldn’t make out what they said. When he staggered back to the main room, he was talking, “Why would I ever come back to this house? Not like I don’t live here or anything. Not like my children live here.”

“Your children hate you.” Mother replied flatly.

“Not the little one.”

“He’s only six. He doesn’t know any better yet.”

Father took a pause, looking at first pensive, then angry. He leaned close to my mother’s face, clutching a ragged flannel jacket in his hands. “You’re fucked without me.” He growled, “You need my connections in town.”

“Get out. That is some bold bullshit you’re trying to get me to buy. Go to the barn and sleep with the horses for all I care. Tomorrow you’re gonna pick up your garbage and get out. I’m done with you.” My mother had said this before. But her courage in kicking him out always faltered the next day. When my father was a boy, his father, my grandfather, was also a drunk who was eventually kicked out by his wife. Mother feared I’d turn out the same way as he did if she really got rid of him. I suppose, in a way, I should thank her for keeping him around as long as she did. At least I won’t have room in my head for glorified fantasies of my drunken father’s mysterious life. I guess it’s my brother we have to worry about, when he gets older. But her courage steadily increased, night by night. She could sense, as well as we could, father’s will to dominate being replaced with the desire to drink and sleep.

“You want me gone?” He asked in a mocking tone.

“Yes. Leave.” Mother said, turning. She strode confidently, though sniffling, into her bedroom and shut the door. The audible sound of a bolt, installed after one such night, confirming his banishment. He stumbled around aimlessly for a few moments, grumbling something to himself. I convinced my brother to get into bed and stay there with a promise of sweets and a mild threat of physical retribution. Father lurched noisily outside. He didn’t even shut the front door behind him. I followed him out the door as soon as I thought he no longer lingered by it, and watched as he bumbled into the darkness of our farm, his silhouette reappearing as a lantern came to life outside the stable. I followed him down the dirt path that leads to the place where the horses and many nights, my father, slept. We had two horses. One old and docile creature, another younger and jumpy. There was a third, empty stall in the stable that I think my father kept purposely empty for this exact purpose.

He left the door to the stable open too. I crept in and saw him patting the older horse in the dim light of an old, cheap lantern. I don’t know why I followed him that night. He would often come out to the barn to sleep off his stupor. Somehow, he would wake when the rooster crowed and he did his chores. Well one chore. He often only had the energy for one before slinking off somewhere for a long nap before restarting his drinking routine. But it was always a hard chore. Stacking hay bales, moving stored feed to the troths, sawing firewood, and moving manure from the byre… I remembered what he said about me being a runt and I could feel an anger brewing in me that hadn’t been present when he first said the words. Somehow it only then sunk in that he was really talking about me.

My father moved from one stall to another. He stroked the hind of the younger horse. It flinched to his touch and stirred from sleep, standing and neighing. He hushed it gently and kept stroking. Though it now stood, it seemed to relax and once more fall into sleep. In my building anger, one of my steps was misplaced, crunching a twig I had failed to see. My father swiveled away from the horse and took two steps away from the stall, “What was that?” He asked loudly. In the second of tense silence that followed, something came over me. I should have stayed hidden. He was a drunk that heard a noise in the barn in which he slept. He would have forgotten about the noise in an instant. And I almost did just that too, but the moment his attention slipped away from the mysterious noise, I stepped out of my cover in the little quarter-stall used for our buckets and our manure shovels and meant to confront the man who was my father. I think, in that moment, I wanted to fight him. To prove I was not runt. But before I could say anything to him, he saw me and jumped in surprise, giving a drunken, loud, “Hey,” an interjection that startled the half-sleeping horse behind him. Instinct yanked the creature out of sleep at the loud sound and it kicked its leg towards its origin, my father’s head.

The sound of the impact was like the slap of a baseball hurled into a catcher’s mitt. My father hit the ground before I was even sure what happened. There didn’t seem to be any blood, but I didn’t stay long to find out for sure. I dashed out of that barn and back to the house, where I roused my mother by pounding on her door. I told her what I saw and she called the sheriff, who in turn called an ambulance. The nearest hospital wasn’t particularly close, so he made his way to our home too, hoping to make every minute count. When he arrived (long before the ambulance), he had me lead him to the stable to see. My mother didn’t come with us and stayed inside with my brother.

When we arrived, however, he was gone. Not dead, just gone. Missing. The horses were still, sleeping soundly and hardly caring about the sheriff’s flashlight or booming voice calling out my father’s name. A search party was formed, but after 48 hours they called it off. There was no point looking for a drunk who didn’t want to be found. We all assumed he crawled off somewhere and died. My mother mourned in her own way. For the first time in my life, I saw her drunk. Her sorrow, however, didn’t last and eventually things returned to normal. About two weeks after he vanished, we saw him again. My brother and I were playing one evening at the edge of the woods where I had tied a rope to a tree. We heard a strange whistling and rustling come from the brush. When we stopped what we were doing and looked, we saw him. He was thinner and his clothes were ragged, but it was him. He stood there staring at us and whistling a tune we had never heard before. He howled like a dog. And then laughed. Then he plunged back into the forest. We tried to follow him, but he was like a deer, weaving through the grove as naturally as we navigate crowded markets.

From then on, we would see him from time to time. Mother didn’t believe us at first, but one night she saw him too. It was sunset and all three of us saw him at the top of a tree, singing into the sky. When we got to the tree, he was gone. My little brother leaves things on our doorstep for him. Little baubles he made in school, or small bags of chips and cookies. It seemed like my father appreciates it, since the gifts never stay the whole night on the doorstep. My brother and I found where he slept one day, at the edge of the woods, in a giant, gnarled oak tree. A small burrow was dug into its base. It was hard to imagine him sleeping here, knotted up in the roots of the tree like a badger, but this had to be the place. Scraps of food and cloth littered the area. Wrappers from the snacks my brother leaves out along with others pilfered from elsewhere, empty bottles of water and beer, and bits of fleece and wool were jammed into the corners and crevices of the burrow. I started keeping a little journal of the places and times I see him, along with what he’s doing.

My mother seems happier now. More relaxed, despite the increase in workload for her. It was her that convinced me not to tell people that we still see our father. According to her, things are better this way. She doted on my little brother after it all happened. I think she has the same worry that I do about his future and the legacy of my father and his father. The little boy was, after all, about the same age my father was when my grandfather left. My father seems happier too. The rare instances where I see him up close, he’s always smiling. I haven’t heard him say anything, but what noise he does make always seems merry. Singing, whistling, howling, and laughing seem to be his language now. Work here on the farm has gotten harder for me too. I’m not as strong as my father, but I still have a few years to grow. Ultimately though, I’m happier not having to wait up every night to see how far my parent’s fights will go. I still feel bad sometimes though. It was, in a way, my fault the horse kicked him. But maybe my worry is misplaced. He seems happier. And we seem happier. Perhaps we’re really better off now. And maybe, he is too.