The bunny stuck its desiccated little head through a hole in the ground, peered hard and long at the dusty, barren fields surrounding it, then squeezed its body up and through, before hopping thirstily away…
Dozens more followed.
Through a spyglass, Popsmoll Wrencod watched them go. He would have to report this to the Chief knowing it meant the worst:
Uberlute Sadbard had failed.
Either the old storyteller had expired before reaching the summit, or, perhaps worse, his tale had proved insufficiently melancholic to coax tears from the Godstatue.
The rainless days would continue and the fields would bring no crop.
He turned, dejected—
“Are you certain?” the Chief asked.
“I am,” said Popsmoll Wrencod. “I saw them hop into the horizon with my own eye.”
“Then our times are arid indeed,” said the Chief, and the gathered elders agreed, murmuring amongst themselves about the dreaded dustbowl days, of famine and death, of little ones hungry in the pits, their fingernails torn from clawing through the dirt searching for discarded beets. “Yet even then, in the deepest of the dustbowl, there was no exodus of drought bunnies. Burrowed, they remained.”
“Rightly,” said an elder, “for soon after, the mighty telltale Harpsichordian delivered unto the Godstatue the woesong of Klionimini, of her betrothal and betrayal, and of her death, causing the divine tears to well and fall, and for the most-bountiful harvest to begin.”
“What then are we to make of the current exodus?” asked Popsmoll Wrencod.
“Uberlute Sadbard is dead,” said the Chief.
“Is hope evaporated?”
“Nay. Drops remain, but they are few and boiling in the sun.”
“Insufficient for the prescience of the drought bunnies,” said one of the elders. “They no longer believe, and in this I am inclined to share their pessimism. It is time to migrate.” He stood and left the gathering, with several trailing after him.
“Migrate? Abandon the protection of the Godstatue?” said Popsmoll Wrencod. “Such an act would be unprecedented. Forever have we lived here under its blessing.”
The Chief sat in grizzled wisethink.
Uberlute Sadbard was the last of their storytellers. The others had all failed. Now he had failed. The drought bunnies indeed portended a fate worse than the dustbowl, and there was no one to ascend the Godstatue with a tale sad enough to move the towering divinity to cathartic precipitation. What could he do but decree migration?
And that is likely what would have happened if not for the bravery of a young orphan girl named Seyma of Nosurname, who on that particular night was playing past her bedtime near the elders’ gathering place and had overheard the existential predicament facing her people.
Seyma liked it here.
Seyma did not want to migrate.
Seyma decided that she herself would climb to the summit of the Godstatue and tell a story so miserable that the Godstatue would have no choice but to replenish the earth with its tears!
She decided she must do this in secret, so no one could stop her, and with utmost haste, so her people did not have time to migrate before the rain inevitably began. How she imagined those first raindrops feeling, and the expressions on their faces, the shock, the gratitude, the joy…
The trouble, she realised as she gazed upon the Godstatue’s big toe, was that she didn’t know any miserable stories, and the Godstatue was very, very tall. How tall, she didn’t know, but even its ankles were somewhere far above the wispy clouds, and if its proportions were anything like her own, it might take her days to climb to the top. Thankfully, one concern became the other’s solution, as she decided that the climb would give her just the perfect amount of time to come up with the saddest story ever told.
She took a deep breath, followed by her first steps onto the zigzagging, looping staircase that had been conveniently chiseled into the Godstatue by its creator-discoverers.
So far so good, she thought.
Less than an hour later, she was high enough that the ground had disappeared, consumed by a volume of swirling mist which seemed to whisper to her, turn back, you can’t do it, you shall fail, proceed and die. Despite these sensations, Seyma pressed on. The warnings, however, grew louder, more shrill, until suddenly there was a squawk, and a flutter of wings, and a featherless bird shot out of the mist, yelling and demotivating, flapping madly, undermining Seyma’s self-confidence. She did her best to ignore it, but it was difficult.
“Your story isn’t good enough,” squawked the bird.
“That’s not true,” said Seyma.
“It’s true and you know it,” said the bird.
“It’s not true, and I’ll tell you why,” said Seyma. “I don’t have a story, and if I don’t have one it can’t not be good enough.”
This gave the bird pause.
“You’ll never come up with a story that’s good enough!” it squawked.
“I don’t believe you,” said Seyma.
“You should.”
“You said my story wasn’t good enough, but I don’t have a story, so you were wrong. Because you were wrong about that, you could be wrong about the story I will come up with.”
At that, the bird began flapping so violently—it exploded into a puff of blood and hollow bones!
Although the explosion startled Seyma, the resulting silence was welcome, and it was in this silence that soon she came upon a stone plateau, on which grew a fruit tree, beside which stood a bench, on which was seated an old man, holding his face dejectedly in his hands. At her approach, the man looked up, and Seyma recognised him. “Uberlute Sadbard?”
“Yes,” he said. “And who might you be?”
“Seyma of Nosurname.”
“What brings you this forlorn way, Seyma of Nosurname?”
She described her quest and the circumstances surrounding it, then said, “The Chief told us you were dead.”
“I am and I am not,” said Uberlute Sadbard. “I told my tale but the Godstatue did not cry, so I made my descent until I arrived in this spot, with its bench and its tree, which bears fruit whenever I am hungry, and I am sure would do the same for you, so why not spare yourself the agony of narrative inadequacy and sit immediately beside me, so that together we may sit and eat and age, if not forever, at least for a long and pleasant time in each other’s company, for if there is one thing I miss it is the pleasure of company.”
“Your sentence is very long,” said Seyma.
Uberlute Sadbard nodded. “Indeed it is, young storyteller, for at the summit I used many of my periods, and, as you know, we are born with a fixed number of them, so I have not many left, and I wish to communicate as much meaning as I can with what remains until the sun finally sets upon my wasted life.”
“Our people will starve!”
The old storyteller smiled gently and looked toward the tree, which was sprouting a black, twisted fruit. When it was fully formed, he arose, picked the fruit and bit into it.
Its inky juices discoloured his teeth and ran down from his mouth to his chin, before dripping to the stony ground, hiss… hiss…
He held out the half-eaten fruit to her.
“Thank you,” said Seyma, “but I’m not hungry, and I still have a story to come up with.”
Uberlute Sadbard shrugged, shoved the rest of the fruit greedily into his cavernous mouth and sat down on his bench, which accepted him the way manacles accept a slave.
Seyma continued up the staircase.
Eventually she reached a place where the winds picked up, howling and gusting, and frightening her with their strength, causing her to cling to the Godstatue for fear of being blown off the staircase edge to certain death below.
Her progress slowed.
As it did, the imaginary gears in her head started to spin more quickly, activating her creative innerworks, the little mental workshop responsible for her feelings of horror and wonder and love and future, and as the wind pushed and pulled her, and she dropped to her knees, she remembered what she had once heard about stories, that some were light and others heavy, but that all had an impact upon the world. Sitting on the cold stone steps, knowing she could not take another step forward without additional heft, she realised that what she needed now was heaviness. It was time to imagine her story, or enough of it to give her the weight she needed to climb the Godstatue. She imagined first her own death; then the death of her people, starving or migrating into a new place which turned out to be the mouth of a great beast. She imagined Uberlute Sadbard, sitting forever alone on his bench, eating the corrosive fruit of his own failure. She imagined the winds abating—except it was not imagination but fact: the winds were abating, in the sense that they no longer affected her as a few minutes ago. She could stand, and step forward, and continue…
She came next to a bridge spanning a gap in the staircase.
It was guarded by a troll.
The troll was tall and thin and had tremendously muscular arms, and it held with pale-knuckled hands a bloody, spiked staff.
“What right brings you here?” it bellowed.
“I want to get to the top of the Godstatue to save my people,” said Seyma.
“I want to get to the top of the Godstatue to save my people,” the troll repeated, mockingly. “That is an utterly unoriginal reason.”
“It’s the truth. Will you let me pass?”
“Ask my name first, child.”
She did.
“I am,” the troll bellowed, “Homophonous, Guardian of the Bridge, Nemesis of Banality, Demiurge of Lies, […] and Collector-King of Titles.”
“Now may I pass?”
“Pass what?”
“You.”
“To whom, child? There is not another soul here.”
“May I cross the bridge?”
“You may cross it out of existence, but then you’ll never get to the other side. As a practical alternative, I suggest you die.”
Seyma felt a strange tingling in her brain. “What do you suggest I dye?” she asked.
“Surely, you must mean which ewe.”
It was as if a second voice had been born within her first, a narrative voice. “I’ve yet to meet a sheepish witch,” she said.
“Child, you would butcher the spelling rather than the spellcaster.”
“How rude!”
“I have rued nothing in my life.”
“If you’ve an eye, you should see that soon you won’t be true, as I’ve two eyes, and next I will be three.”
“A sea cannot be crossed without a ship. Why, then, not put down roots instead?”
“I already have a route,” said Seyma. “It leads—”
With that, Homophonous bowed and stepped aside, pointing with his staff to the other side of the bridge. “Godspeed, child.”
Where have these voices come from, Seyma wondered as she crossed. They did not sound like hers. They were foreign yet familiar. It wasn’t until she had left the bridge far behind that she remembered: the voices belonged to all the storytellers she had ever known, were of all the stories she had ever heard, and she was glad for their company. As her own story sprouted in her mind, granting her more and more weight against the raging winds, she understood that her success demanded not only a rousing tale but equally an effective voice to tell it, and now she had an entire cultural history from which to choose.
Having overcome the naked bird of self-doubt, the welcome bench of dejection and the tree of fruitful misery, the punishing wind of frivolity and the staffed troll of clever wordplay, Seyma arrived at the Godstatue’s shoulder.
Many had not made it even this far.
Then again, many great storytellers had, Uberlute Sadbard among them, but still failed to make the Godstatue cry.
Seyma pressed on.
The Godstatue’s shoulders were appropriately wide and included a winding footpath leading to a towering Godneck.
The Godneck had a ladder.
As she started to climb, a voice boomed: “Please get off my neck. The ladder is for technical personnel only. It’s off limits for humans. There should be a sign. There used to be a sign.”
Seyma slid down the ladder and neared the Godcollarbone.
“Hello?” she said.
Far above, something moved. Big stone lips and two nostrils appeared in the sky. The nostrils, Seyma saw, were the source of the strong winds she had encountered during her ascent. “Speak, if you must,” the booming voice said.
“I am Seyma of Nosurname and I am here to tell a sad story.”
“I am the Godhead, summit of the Godstatue,” said the Godhead. “I will listen. But tell me, Seyma, is your story truly miserable?”
“I believe it is.”
“Is it more miserable than the story told by the last storyteller who came this way?”
“I’m not sure, Mr Godhead. I don’t know that story, but I can assure you that the one I’ll tell is the most horrible, miserable and woeful one I’ve ever heard.”
“You’re young for a human, aren’t you?” asked the Godhead.
“I am,” said Seyma.
“In my divine experience, young humans are not nearly as miserably-minded as old ones.”
“In my defense, I am an orphan, Mr Godhead.”
“Anyway, proceed.”
“Once upon a time, in a land far below, parentless and alone, in a great dustbowl of a world, there lived a girl—”
“If I may interrupt,” the Godhead said. “I have a question. Is this the first story you have ever told?”
“Yes, Mr Godhead.”
She began—
“If I may interrupt once more, to ask a follow-up question. Is your story about you?”
This caught Seyma off guard, and for a second she panicked, wondering whether she had misunderstood the nature of her inner voice, her narrative voice, and if that voice was not in fact the voice of the Godhead which had infiltrated her mind. “It is,” she said. “How did you know?”
“I may answer that in two ways. First, I am the Godhead, so I can know all. Second, I have listened to an eternity of stories, and that experience has allowed me to formulate several critical opinions, one of which is that first-time storytellers often tell stories about themselves. These stories are boring and terrible and no one should listen to them. They are miserable,” said the Godhead, “in all the wrong ways.”
Seyma did not know how to respond.
The fate of her people depended on her, but she had indeed decided to tell a tale about herself. “Should I continue, Mr Godhead?”
“If you must.”
“I feel I do must continue,” she said, refocusing and taking a deep breath. “As I was saying: Once upon a time, in a land far below—”
“One final interruption,” said the Godhead. “For my own records, if nothing else. What, human child, did you say your name was?”
“Seyma.”
“Your full name.”
“Seyma of Nosurname.”
The Godhead paused, emitting no sound and ceasing its breath-wind, before two orbal eyes emerged in the sky above its godly lips and celestial nostrils. They squinted. They blinked. “And you say you are an orphan?”
“I am, Mr Godhead.”
“An orphan… of Nosurname?”
“Yes.”
There began now a tremendously deep rumbling. “Orphan Seyma. Orphan Seyma of Nosurname.” The rumbling deepend. It felt like all of existence had begun to vibrate. “Seyma of no surname. No surname, an orphan,” the Godhead said, his booming voice inflected with a hint of bounce. “Oh, that’s good. That is very good!”
Seyma stood motionless, staring up at the face in the sky.
Its eyes had closed, its lips had curved into a smile, and the rumble had become a chuckle, a divine, omniscient giggling-to-a-guffaw become an all-out boisterous laugh, which was awful and infectious, and Seyma too joined in the laughter.
Until from one of the Godhead’s eyes, there escaped:
a solitary tear.
Seyma watched in wonder as it flowed toward the corner of the eye,
and fell—
I’ve done it, she thought.
And not only that. The first teardrop was only the beginning. Soon, tear after tear was flowing from the Godhead’s eye and raining on the world below, her people’s world, the parched world from where even the drought bunnies had sought escape.
If only she could have seen the expressions on their faces.
It is difficult to say for how long they laughed together, the girl and the Godhead, but I am sure it was a long time, and after the laughter had passed, the Godhead said, “Seyma, it has been an eon since I have heard a joke. I must say, it has been a pleasure to experience one again, and I thank you for delivering to me such a precious gift.”
“You are welcome, Mr Godhead,” said Seyma.
“Go now, but promise you shall visit again some day, with another joke to share.”
Seyma promised.
Smiling, she turned, walked the winding footpath to the Godshoulder, and happily began her descent down the Godstatue. She passed the troll bridge, the place of the winds, Uberlute Sadbard sitting darkly on his bench, and the spot where the featherless bird had exploded, which had retained the faint smell of blood. It wasn’t until she was several hundred steps below, however, that a horrible tremor passed through her because: rather than diminishing, the smell of blood had intensified. She paused for a moment, sniffed the air and listened. She was not far from the ground, and certain sounds wafted gently into her ears: screams, mumbled pleas, the breaking of bones, the snapping of things human and sinewy…
She sped up.
Leaping rather than walking, steps at a time.
When she reached the surface of the world, she noticed at once that it was different than she remembered. Where the land had been dry and barren, it was now verdant and overgrown. Where it had been dusty, it was damp. Grasses had grown taller than she. Trees had gnarled into foreboding, serpentine shapes. And the stench of blood was undeniable. Even before reaching the entrance to her village, she splashed through puddles of it, marking her legs with crimson, and the sounds only grew louder in voices more familiar. She called out all the names she knew. She called out for anyone, but nobody answered. There was only the breaking and the snapping, the crunching and the chewing, her breathing and—
The bunny stepped into her path—
She slid,
into a tumbled halt.
It was a hundred feet tall and porous, a biological framework of bone interwoven with strings of pale flesh and wet vines, sprouting varicoloured flowers and tufts of white fur, and in its belly, which writhed like worms, she saw the remains of Popsmoll Wrencod.
The bunny perceived her with its charcoal eyes.
From within it, the half-digested remains of Popsmoll Wrencod gurgled like bubbles rising through a swamp of vomit.
The bunny bared its teeth.
Seyma ran!
Past the bunny—toward the village, where with racing heart she witnessed: absolute devastation. Buildings lay as rubble. Bodies littered the once-peaceful streets. The surrounding fields, fertile with agitated vegetation, snarled and cursed, and silhouetted against the red and thundering sky loomed the bunnies. “Seyma…”
The syllables of her own name startled her.
“Seyma,” said the skinless face of a man pulling himself toward her.
He had been halved.
His legs were nowhere to be seen.
“Seyma, run,” the man said, and as he neared her she recognised him as the Chief. “A terrible… has happened. The worst…”
“I don’t understand,” said Seyma, crouching.
“Flee.”
“I made the Godstatue cry. I ascended to the summit and I made him laugh and—”
“It was… you?”
“Yes!”
The Chief’s upper body lunged.
He grabbed her leg,
bit her ankle.
She kicked him off, and backed away. “What’s happened?”
“Tears of mirth… are not tears of sorrow…”
“I thought—” Seyma said.
“You have damned us all!”
At those words the Chief’s upper body expired, and Seyma collapsed in dreadful comprehension to the saturated ground, on which violently sprouting blades of grass cut at her skin, releasing her tragic essence into the soil,” concluded Uberlute Sadbard while peeking up at the Godhead’s features, trying to gauge its reaction.
There was none.
He prayed that he hadn’t bored the Godhead to death.
“Godhead?” he called out.
Nothing.
“…releasing her tragic essence into the soil,” he repeated, with a little more oomph at the end.
The Godhead stirred.
“Mmm, yes. I mean, are you finished?”
“I…”
“It’s quite alright if you’re finished, you know.”
“Are you—on the edge of tears?”
“Well, to be truthful, I may have dozed off somewhere in the middle, but I did catch the beginning, and now you’ve also given me the end, her tragic essence oozed out into the mud and so forth, so the second act is easily implied.”
“And… ?”
“It’s no Klionimini by Harpschordian, but that perhaps is too high a bar.”
“I see,” said Uberlute Sadbard.
“The obstacles were overcome a little easily, wouldn’t you say? They were a smidgeon too symbolic as well, but as a symbol myself I may be oversensitive. The girl lacked a certain cohesion of character. Another draft may have been in order before you came all the way up here. I mean, I don’t see how a girl could have bettered an experienced and titled troll in a contest of verbal wit, no matter how much culture she would have consumed in her short life, not to mention that the troll himself is, I think we can agree, a lazy trope. Also, in the end there, you really let yourself go in the telling. There’s style, and then there’s that. I felt as if the tragedy were being pushed onto me.”
“As if you were pushing the tragedy onto me.”
“Excuse me?”
“You used the passive voice. It would have been better in the active voice.”
“Are you critiquing my critique?”
“My sincere apologies. Sometimes my inner editor comes out when I’m interacting with others.”
“That’s a laugh a half, because based on your story I wouldn’t have imagined you have much of an inner editor.”
“Funny.”
“It was, wasn’t it?”
“Just don’t cry. I might be able to deal with my friends and family starving to death, but I wouldn’t be able to deal with their being mauled by rabbits.”
“Bunnies.”
“Whatever they are.”
“You know that’s not actually what happens—when I laugh, I mean.”
“Yeah? It’s what our legends say. Tears of mirth lead to complete annihilation by unbound planetary fertility and mutated drought bunnies.”
“No—that part is surprisingly accurate. Pat on the back for that. What I meant is that laughing doesn’t make me cry.”
“So where do you get tears of mirth?”
“Oh, dear me, that is a real inconsistency, isn’t it?”
“Fat amount of luck it does me.”
“Yes, don’t worry too much about it. It doesn’t really matter, and I could always say I cry at weddings, couldn’t I?”
“You’re asking me?”
“I’m being polite. I’m the Godhead, I can do and say whatever I like.”
“Are there other Godheads?”
“No, just me.”
“Are you married?”
“To what: a human, a rocking chair, a mountain chain?”
“So at whose wedding would you cry?”
“I see you’re still poking at this. Not yours. All your potential human mates are about to starve to death in an arid world of dust and desolation.”
The Godhead chuckled.
“That’s not funny,” said Uberlute Sadbard. “It’s even rather sad, if you think about it.”
Fuck, thought Uberlute Sadbard, raising his face from his hands. That’s what I should have fucking said. I went too personal, with the innocence and the girl, when I should have gone cosmic, with the death of humanity. That’s the real tragedy. Now I’m stuck here on this cold, uncomfortable metal bench, eating that stupid black fruit, which doesn’t even taste that good, while my world turns to dust and I’ll never see anyone again. I’m such a stupid fucking failure.
A featherless bird landed on the stupid black fruit tree.
“At least you’re still alive,” it squawked.
“You again? I thought I had gotten rid of you.”
“You did, but I got reborn.”
“Good for you.”
“I always get reborn. It comes with the territory. I wouldn’t be much of an obstacle otherwise. The first storyteller to make the climb would make me go poof and that’d be that.”
“Has anyone ever turned back just because you told them to?”
“Once or—well, once. A few minutes ago. Some little girl came up and I started squawking at her, you know the schtick, well, she got really, really sad and started to cry, then turned around and ran back down the stairs.”
“Seyma?”
“Speak to me in bird level words.”
“The girl—was her name Seyma of Nosurname?”
“How would I know?”
Uberlute Sadbard leapt suddenly off the bench, to his aching feet!
The bird squawked. “Goin’ somewhere?”
But he was already running down the staircase, chasing after the girl. Maybe he didn’t have the storytelling chops to save the world. Maybe he wasn’t a literary giant. “Seyma!” he yelled. “Seyma, stop!” But there was no reason why Seyma of Nosurname, a character he fucking created, should have to suffer twice, first in his lousy story and now again in the real world. “Seyma, for the love of Godhead, don’t go down there!”
Don’t worry.
Uberlute Sadbard didn’t subsequently trip over his own feet (although I argue that he could have, because I did hint at the possibility with the aching bit), break his neck, and fail to save his character, who, despite lacking consistency, did later become a beloved creation of his. No! What happened was this: he raced down the stairs at a much greater speed than Seyma, probably on account of his longer, adult legs and renewed sense of purpose, met her on the penultimate step, and saved her life; discovering in the process that something inside of himself which makes every human special, and every human life invaluable: that inextinguishable spark of divine potential that not even a Godhead and his damnation can extinguish, a spark so powerful it made Uberlute Sadbard the first person to ever slump onto the Bench of Dejection (note the proper capitalisation)—and rise from it!
It quivered.
The Godhead’s mouth quivered.
That’s when I knew I had him. The set-up, the middle, the twist ending.
Plus the coup de grace:
Thematic:
Re-[fucking]-demption!
“Damn you, Harpsichordion,” the Godhead said, its tears beginning slowly to trickle. “You get me every time. Every single time I think, No, he won’t do it. He can’t. I’ve already heard Klionimini, and nothing can top the betrayal scene in that. Yet here we are—” The Godhead blew its nose. “—and you’ve, mmm, you’ve outdone… yourself once again, and I, mmm, I just can’t handle it, you know? Your stories, the way you tell them, I just…”
At this point, the Godhead’s speech became a sob-logged babble that I couldn’t understand, but that’s not important. What’s important is that I descended the Godstatue in a triumphantly woeful rain that replenished the soil, saved the world, and earned me another round of accolades. Deserved accolades, I might add, because you have to acknowledge your own worth. If you’re great, you’re great, and pretending otherwise is mere ostentation. Unfortunately, there was one small hiccup. It turns out that while tears of mirth are unlike tears of sorrow, the interpretation of legends is not an exact science, and you shouldn’t take everything literally, so while the Godhead’s tears did replenish the soil and save the world, you really shouldn’t get any kind of tears on a drought bunny unless you want it to morph into a hideous man-eating monster. The way I see it, though, the blame isn’t totally my own. The bunnies fucked up by losing their faith in me and coming out of their holes when they totally should not have done that. I maybe fucked up by waiting too long to compose this story and make my way up the Godstatue. If I’d done it earlier, the bunnies would have been underground, we would have survived, and you would have gotten a happier ending. C’est life, right? Oh, and please excuse the absurd length of this final paragraph and any spelling mistakes. It’s dark here in the drought bunny’s belly, its stomach juices are melting my organs and I’m writing through sincerely agonising pain. But as a wise man once said, we write to the bitter end.
I’m dying now.
Farewell.
P.S. It was me. I said the bitter end thing in Klionimini.
Deep breath, and goodbye for real.
(I have no lungs.)