Tag: fable

• Monday Composition: The Sea is a Horse, Of Course

  A man named Beaver had a baby with his wife, Bunny. In the weeks before the birth, Bunny bulged big, and Beaver walked proud. Yet, when the labor came due in the maternity ward, the baby was born not from Bunny but through Beaver’s mouth.

  This caused several complications.

  When the wee babe’s scalp crowned, all of Beaver’s teeth fell out. All that precious ivory, yellowed so diligently with years of coffee cups and pipes of tobacco, gone.

  I will need Bunny to nurse me like the baby, Beaver thought. Beaver thought, like my son, I will need to eat strained carrots. 

  When the umbilical cord was cut, it did not retreat down Beaver’s throat but flopped about his mouth like a second tongue, creating its own babble of poppycock and taradiddle. 

  My language has been confounded, Beaver thought, and my words will scatter away from my face until I can once again sift falderal from folderol. 

  As for the afterbirth, having nowhere else to go, it settled in Beaver’s gut, bloating his belly and hunching his back. 

  Once they had returned home, Beaver lay long in bed under the weight of the afterbirth. He resolved a reversal was in order. He told Bunny he would swallow the baby and let it be born again, through her.

  Ith my birthrighth, he gabbled.

  Having none of that, Bunny slept on top of the baby every night, while Beaver haunted its crib, looking for his son while he gummed the bedposts.

  One night, instead of covering the baby, she replaced it with a smooth stone wrapped in swaddling cloths, and Beaver swallowed it.

  The next day, Beaver visited Dr. Brevity to complain of a pain in his gut. The doctor poked his skin feeling the stone perched within atop the afterbirth, and diagnosed, you have a stone.

  Will it pass? Beaver asked.

  With luck commensurate to the size of the stone.

  Whew, said Beaver, and he headed off to sea, to float on his back and find relief in the weightlessness of water. I will pee and let my salty sea join the greater sea and the greater salt and the stone will flow away from me.

  But with each wave, the tide grew higher and Beaver sank lower, dragged down by the weight of the stone he could not disown.

  As he began to drown, he thought, this isn’t birth.

  He thought, this isn’t right.

  A selection from Esau’s Fables, published by Mount Diablo Books and available in print and as an e-book from Amazon. The piece also appeared previously in Bending Genres Magazine.

  

  2025.02.04

• Monday Composition: The Enormous Whisker

  Feeling the need of increased stature among his peers, Pepkin decided to grow a beard like those of the great philosophers or Tolstoy or Brahms, and so he stopped shaving. When his beard came in though, it came not as many hairs but one enormous whisker. It grew just above the jawline of his right cheek and resembled a tree trunk. Since it lacked the look of a conventional beard, he thought about shaving it off but decided to give it some time and see how it developed. 

  As it grew longer, it continued to thicken and soon grew quite heavy. He found himself tilting his head to the right most of the time, as one with classic paralysis of the fourth cranial nerve, and people thought it gave him a contemplative air. In fact he found himself being given considerations he never had before.  Friends would listen attentively as he spoke. Strangers would ask him to opine on matters of the day. Clergy sought his advice on matters both theological and lay. Pepkin noticed other men adopting what had come to be called the Pepkin Tilt. 

  He worried this imitation might dilute his uniqueness, but it was about this time his enormous whisker began to sprout fruit. At first they were just small green nuts clustered at the end of the whisker, but over time they blanched until they looked like pulpy white berries. The weight of the fruit and the still-growing whisker itself caused it to bend down, and the fruit would sway and slap against Pepkin’s chest as he walked. While some men tried to mimic this look as well, with beaded scarves or lengths of pasta, the consensus was that Pepkin had taken his innovation too far. He found himself shunned. 

  So, he stayed in his apartment more and more, then retreated even farther, rarely leaving his bedroom. Finding the open space of the vast room vertiginous, he constructed a canopy over his bed and brooded inside. After several weeks within this crib, his fleshy berries began to split and ooze a viscous liquid. From within, little baby snakes emerged, each with a face identical to Pepkin’s. When all the snakes had hatched, he took a razor and shaved off his enormous whisker. From its fine-grained substance, he built a boat and sailed it out to sea. The snakes sunned themselves on the deck while Pepkin steered the wheel. 

  Those who saw them go tried to tell the story of their departure, but few would believe them. So, the storytellers formed their own clubs and societies. They would take turns retelling the tale of Pepkin. They called it “tilting.”

  A selection from Esau’s Fables, published by Mount Diablo Books and available in print and, as of this week, as an e-book from Amazon. The piece also appeared previously in Flash Fiction Magazine.

  

  2025.01.28