Seeing

I was walking down a dark path at night. It seemed deserted, for more than my lack of vision in the midnight fog. It was then I heard something; much like an animal, perhaps it was that I noticed her. A girl, barely twenty, dressed in a style, but not the colors, to catch the eye. Logically, she was out of place, but from her comfort level and color palette, I was unconvinced. I called to her, “Hello, are you lost?” Unwilling to admit I might be.

She greeted me by name, much to my surprise. Did show know me? “What are you looking for?” she then asked me, skipping all pleasantries. She hadn’t answered my question.

“I seek civilization; in walking I seem to have left it behind. I seek food but mostly shelter.” I was slightly unnerved, but saw little reason to not answer her.

Shifting her weight to one leg, bending the other slightly, and tilting her head, she said, “Now tell me something everyone else doesn’t.” My eyes widened at her newfound personality. She continued, “You have to be looking for more than that. You must want more than a tent and a potato. How should I know if you’d prefer steak to goose?”

This line of reasoning took me back. Beggars were not choosers so the cliché goes, but I didn’t want to lose face. At the same time, it took a fake confidence to say, “I’d take steak over goose, most days.” As I uttered my words, it felt like foolishness spilling over my lips. The look she gave me in return assured me of such. When presented with a choice, one has already stopped being the beggar. Yet we are doomed to unhappiness, even with choices, if we don’t know what we want. It isn’t about steak or goose. The tent would have been too little, and a palace would have been too much. Regardless of what I was really being offered, how could I get what is closest to what I want if I don’t know what that is?

“But you’ll take the tent then?” she squeezed the words out of her smirk. Putting her hand to her hip she added, “I’ll do my best to find you a good steak if it’s what you really want.”

What I really wanted. But was it? I found myself terribly uncertain. She had extended her hand to me, and I took it, charmed at her gesture. She took me back the way she had seemed to come from. Walking through the mist of the night, we came to a bazaar. It had an eerie air to it, but a strange charm to those offering it. A bazaar of wheeled kiosks with paper lanterns at night was something I had expected to unnerve or mesmerize me. It did neither to any extreme.

An old man sold boxes of various sizes and incredibly specific purposes. He called out softly, “utensil boxes, piano roll cartons, and more, dividers come free,” from beneath his short white beard. “I bet he has a special shaped box for his teeth,” I said to my young guide, and she made a face at me. A young girl had shelves filled with only creatures that kept well in fish bowls of different sizes. Fish, scorpions, turtles, beetles, frogs, and things I didn’t recognize moved about their respective bowls, to some extent reacting to one another. I joked in her ear, “I bet she kissed them all and was disappointed at the results.” She playfully hit me in the arm. A pale, thin fellow sold paper lanterns. They cast their colors upon him, and he changed with their luminescence. Some were for luck, others for attracting women, and just a few for communicating with the world beyond. Perhaps he was so frail because of all these forces constantly pulling at him. I wanted to make another joke but was distracted by a change in her warm grip. She hadn’t paid so much attention to the impressionable lantern man, she was looking for a good steak for me.

Approaching the butcher, I told my escort, “I can’t make fun of him, his knife is too big.” She suggested I try anyway. We reached the butcher, a hearty man with a dark beard and an apron. He had the ill placement of being next to a shrill woman who sold nothing but stone cats in many different cat poses. Despite what I viewed as his misfortune, he greeted us with a large smile and a question, “What are you looking for?”

I was looking. It was in looking over his goods I realized, I would know it when I saw it. In seeing it, was truly wanting it. Not how it seemed to someone else, or how it looked to someone else. Not what it might be, but what it was to me. She couldn’t have found it for me, but she knew how I needed to search. Maybe she even knew why. I couldn’t have described the steak, and I could have been happy with a lesser steak. It wasn’t about choosing for myself, though I was the happier for it. It was about connecting to the experience.

Had I been looking for her? I wouldn’t have known among the mists, I would not have known as we passed the first wheeled kiosks of the bazaar, but seeing her, the way she was in those moments, made me know. I didn’t know if she had been looking for me though, there was the trouble. I was sure however, that she knew, when she saw me.

A Fable

Here, we break from the anecdote format for moment in the name of short fiction. That can happen sometimes.

A Fable

or

A Short, Moralizing Story about Animals

Once upon a time there were a number of animals in a setting appropriate to the species of the animals present. One animal, the Exemplary Animal, embodied a set of characteristics and predilections deemed to be favorable by the Author, but this fact was not revealed by the Narrator, who for artistic and stylistic purposes had a separate point of view and voice altogether. Another animal, the Admonitory Animal, embodied a set of characteristics and predilections deemed by the Author to be dangerous, countercultural, and subversive, but this fact was also excluded from the fable’s introduction by the Narrator. There were also several other animals who were symbolically unimportant, and who merely served as a means of advancing the fable’s plot.

At a certain point, the symbolically unimportant but nonetheless plot advancing animals acted so as to give rise to a particular situation. The situation required action on the part of both the Exemplary and Admonitory Animals, but their course was unclear. The stubbornly moralizing Author caused the Narrator to go to great pains in describing the situation such that it would be apparent that it mirrored a common human situation familiar to the fable’s audience, albeit oversimplified due to a desire on the part of the Author for universal applicability and some general constraints upon short moralizing stories about animals to deal with complexity without becoming arduously long and muddling the all-important clarity of their symbols.

After consideration, the Exemplary Animal responded to the situation in a way consistent with the traits the Author wished to promote in his fable, and was rewarded accordingly: specifically, in a way suggestive of the idea that audience members who act similarly in corresponding situations might also be rewarded thusly. The Admonitory Animal responded in a way that was not necessarily opposite, but was nonetheless consistent with traits the Author did not look as favorably upon. As such, the Admonitory Animal faced repercussions sufficiently harmful and relevant to his actions so as to communicate to the audience that the actions caused the repercussions and that the repercussions were undesirable.

At the conclusion of the fable, the Narrator—acting in a capacity not envisioned, endorsed, nor fully understood by the Author—drew attention to the contrived simplicity of the situation, the unreasonable and unparalleled lack of complexity in the characters, and the arbitrary nature of a medium in which an author (though not necessarily this one) can impose results of actions while the opposite results are perhaps equally likely, thereby calling into question the very relevance of short moralizing stories about animals as a meaningful way of communicating moral truths.

Then, in an attempt to regain control over the content of his work, the Author revealed a brief, easy-to-remember summation of the lesson he’d hoped his fable to teach, but, inexplicably, it rang somewhat hallow. The Narrator wondered if this could be construed as a statement about the intimidating difficulty of genuine ethical analysis, but decided it was best not to read too much into it.