Archive for the ‘Alex Dally MacFarlane’ Category
The Most Precious House
Monday, December 1st, 2008
A long time ago, when I was a girl, I found a house made entirely of pearls. From afar it looked like a cloud. Closer, it looked like sugary sweets piled one atop the other.
I was a child. I was foolish.
I ran up the hill to it, I pulled one of the pearls from its side and had it in my mouth before I realised the house was collapsing and there was no sugar in my mouth at all.
Further along the hill was a village, and when the house fell down all the villagers ran out — pulling their hair, wailing, leaking tears from their eyes like a gutted pig loses blood. I spat out the pearl and waited to be told how terrible I was, how stupid.
They were tiresomely predictable.
All except one, a girl with bright yellow paint stains around the egdes of her fingernails, who climbed up to the window of the room I’d been given while the villagers decided what to do with me. “Pssst,” she said, like water falling on the hot plate of a stove. “Pssst.”
I pried open the window and we looked at each other in momentary silence, girl to girl.
“I’m building a house of yellow leaves,” she said. “I need someone to help me paint them.”
I climbed out of the window and we walked down the other side of the hill, through a vineyard and a patch of wild, tangled undergrowth and small trees, until we reached a clearing. Dug deep into the ground were the house’s foundations, yellow against the dirt. The girl told me that the finished house would only be ankle-high — only the roof poking above the ground, like a pile of regular leaves.
“There’ll be a house down here and it’ll be better than dumb pearls and they won’t see it, not at all.” She grinned possessively across her paint pots. Then, bending over to open a pot, she added in a practical tone, “Besides, the wind would blow it all away if it was above ground.”
He Carried Manuscripts in Curious Languages
Wednesday, November 5th, 2008
On the shore of an island made entirely of sand, I met a man waiting for the same ship as I. We stood on the jetty and, to the rhythmic wash of waves against wood, we talked.
I told him of my desire to see the world’s most curious places. “That is why I am waiting for the ship,” I told him. “The island it journeys to is meant to be quite remarkable: trees bearing garnets and sapphires as fruit, parrots with beaks on their feet, people born with metal rings growing from their ears.”
“I have heard that their people speak and write a language known only by them.” As he spoke, he shifted the two baskets on a pole that he rested across his shoulders.
“What do you carry in those? Your clothes?”
“Some. But most of their weight is made up of manuscripts.”
“What are they about?”
He smiled, then — a curve of his lips and a crease of his eyes that made him beautiful. “One manuscript is a collection of poems about the rain. Another is a bestiary. A third, as small as my hand, is a story of travelling through time; a fourth is a collection of floral paintings with mutterings about astronomy on the petals. As for the other then, I do not know. I cannot read their scripts.”
“Why do you carry them?” I asked, fascinated.
“I am rich and bored. I bought them at auction, and now I travel to isolated or unique places in the hope that they will be able to read the texts for me. When they can, oh, it is the most marvelous thing.”
The ship arrived then, with its dark green sails and only one cabin.
He was a curiosity, and it was a night’s sailing to the island. I showed him the tattoos curling around my broad brown nipples and he demonstrated the feel of a foreskin-piercing inside both of my lower orifices.
Afterwards, I asked him to let me see his manuscripts. “I am from a far-away place. Perhaps I can read one.”
I could, and I read it to him: a geography lesson of islands that grew from the sea like sores.
He thanked me, and pleaded with me to travel with him for a while, but I declined. I do not like to stay long with curiosities — they too quickly become normal.