Archive for the ‘Series’ Category
This Is the Fairy Tale
Friday, August 24th, 2007
This is the fairy tale your mother wouldn’t tell you. This is the fairy tale the brothers Grimm found too horrifying to ink on pure white parchment. Through the years only the meanest mothers passed it down to their most iniquitous children to frighten them into submission (and wetting their beds) in the darkest, coldest hours of bleak German winters when the bloated moon cast shadows of swaying tree limbs into the children’s bedroom–the gnarled fingers of a witch lingering just outside and tapping at the window.
This is the fairy tale that survived on the back flyleaf of dusty library tomes hiding Grimm’s worst fairy tales that an unfortunate listener had to pen in order to purge herself of the nightmares that still stalked her into adulthood or in order to burden new generations with his own childhood afflictions. This is the fairy tale, rumor spreads, that the fabled old wives share with a hearty cackle as they squat around a boiling black cauldron deep in the thickest thorny bramble and poison-oak woods.
This fairy tale is typed here only to purge the world. Legend tells that if the story were told to the world at once, evil would flee from the land and leap back into Pandora’s lock box. And so, paradoxically, I wound the world to save its soul from the stain of this story:
Regarding Moth Pixies and Browncaps
Monday, August 20th, 2007
The above photonic capture included the following from the notes of Dr. Julius T. Roundbottom, a naturalist at large in City Park:
I returned to the small forrest of brown caps after a week of working within my laboratory to discover that a family of moth pixies had made homes of the mushrooms–or at least, had tasked some other tiny beast to make homes out of it for them. Moth pixies, according to my field guides, are noxious pests that delight in uprooting gardens and spreading aphids (which they eat, but apparently in not very large quantities). The addition of chimneys to their homes was a proper shock–it is not in the published literature that moth pixies can wield fire! The discovery immediately set my mind racing.
I collected one of the browncap homes for dissection, much to their consernation, and I received a tiny bite for my trouble. The bite is healing very badly, despite being doused in poultices of my own creation. I’m not sure it was worth my trouble. The chimneys serve no function and are not connected to the inner dwelling. They are decorative in nature only. My theory is that they construct them in a mimicry of the rows of brownstones that line the streets just outside the Park. Despite folklore, this variety at least are far from intelligent creatures, I believe. Their intelligence seems more akin to that of a parrot, if parrots were so gleefully malicious.
There are such wonderful discoveries here. My heart runs wild imaging what more lies in wait for me out there in the brambles.