– 3 –
Edmund Gulley sits by the side of the wolf. He strokes its fur. It pants.
It isn’t wearing pants, but it does it. Even so!
. . .
Edmund is safe with the wolf.
He sits by the wolf and he is safe with the wolf and he knows he is safe with the wolf, because he has yet to sire an heir.
He leans against its fur and he lets it comfort him. He even lets it lick him — not on the skin, but on the shoulder of his vest. It is probably the best gigantic chained-up wolf companion that a boy could ever hope for; the wolf has practically raised him, and he loves and hates it like a father, like a father who ate your natural father, like a father who probably expects to bite your head off one day and gulp it down and make you a part of its muscle and its bone?
. . . Like that!
. . .
“I’m scared,” Edmund says, quietly.
The wolf doesn’t answer him. It just licks his shoulder again and waits.
“I dreamt that I was chained to you,” Edmund says. “And that you grew, and it crushed me. It went tighter and tighter and then I popped.”
The wolf whines.
He hides his face against it. “I want to let you go,” he says. “Why do I want to let you go?”
Softly, the wolf says, “It is natural.”
“You’ll eat everything,” protests Edmund.
“Not everything,” says the wolf.
“No?”
“It is a very big cosmos,” says the wolf. “The odds are against me. And I do not even know if I can breathe in space.”
. . .
Edmund works his thoughts around a proposal. He chews it, shapes it, refines it with the teeth of his mind. Then he spits it out:
“You could get free,” he tells the wolf, “and then not eat the world.”
It looks at him.
“And what would you have me do, then?” it asks.
“We could be business partners!”
Edmund seizes the paw of the wolf in his two arms’ spread. He hugs it and does not mind the swords that are its claws.
“I could be the money and you could be the . . . wolf! And we could call it ‘Edmund & Wolf Enterprises.’”
“Is there a market for that?” the wolf asks him, amused.
“There could be,” says Edmund. “The world is bursting with untapped demand for giant wolves not eating them.”
“That’s extortion,” says the wolf.
Its tone suggests that it disapproves.
. . .
“You could build pyramids,” says Edmund. “Or sell your drool. I bet there’s a big market for it in chemistry.”
“Sell . . . my drool,” says the wolf.
“Or you could be a venture capitalist!”
. . .
The wolf laughs quietly.
“Oh, Edmund,” it says.
Delicately it nips at him. It does not let the teeth of it actually touch.
“I must free myself,” says the wolf. “I must grow, and to grow I must eat. That is how I gain power. I am like you, with your eating, only my hunger is a limitless and uncapped phenomenon. You cannot expect me to restrict myself to your sensibilities. It is bad enough that I am turned to gold and then tethered for fourteen hundred years.”
“But,” says Edmund. “But it’s wrong.”
This argument is not as aces as he’d thought it would be. It fails against the great vastness of the wolf, which sings him a lullaby instead; and the sound of it stretches through the house, the neighborhood, it resounds in and shudders through the Earth.
. . .
Children across the county stop in their tracks, crawl out of the street perhaps or out of a doorway, and tumble down to sleep. Birds stagger to the trees and utility poles from the sky. The sun grows sleepy, too; it bobs towards the horizon, fights to hold on, it is early evening and it is not yet time for it to set —
The wolf’s lullaby drones on.
“I’ll get out,” whispers the wolf to Edmund’s sleeping form. He hears it, even through his doze. “I’ll get out, and I’ll kill everyone, like I told your father, like I told your father’s father, and his mum. And you will be part of me, if you wish it; or perhaps I shall offer you no choice; and you shall know the forever and my insides.”
– 4 –
One day the little wooden boy is staring at Hans’ jam when it realizes that the jam does not exist. It is actually looking at a collection of objects and shadows that create the illusion — when seen from the wooden boy’s angle — that Hans’ jam is there. But it’s not!
The jam cannot bear this realization.
No sooner does the boy see this than the jam ignites. It flares from something into nothing in an awful burst of the sacred flame.
“Oh, God,” whimpers the little wooden boy, forgetting that wooden boys don’t talk or do things.
He’s only a little bit afraid of fire, but he’s just terrified of the jamlessness that burns.
. . .
The jamlessness is burning!
He has to get out of there. He must!
The little wooden boy pounds fervently on the door to Hans’ pantry. He’s hoping the farmer will come.
Only: there’s no door to Hans’ pantry!
The nonexistence of the pantry door explodes in flames.
“Noo!” wails the wooden boy. It is backed into the corner.
Then Hans is there.
. . .
Hans glares at the wooden boy as Hans’ beard, slowly, catches fire. Then the dwarf sets his jaw grimly in a smith-work. The fire falls into a dolorous wheel, becomes trapped there, and is banished to a distant sun.
The last smolders fade away with a fervent haste.
“What in God’s name do you think you’re doing?” rages Hans. “I told you you were just a wooden boy!”
“I couldn’t help it!” says the little wooden boy. “There wasn’t jam!”
“There never —!”
Hans masters himself. He sighs.
. . .
“Fine,” says Hans, grimly. He goes. He farms delicious fruits, grimly. He makes some jam. The little wooden boy sneaks out and watches, even though Hans glares at him now and then as he cooks.
Hans jars the jam, grimly. He puts the jam in the pantry, grimly.
“There,” he says. “Are you happy now?”
The little wooden boy is just wooden. It doesn’t say anything. Boys who are made out of wood can’t actually talk.
Hans was probably imagining the whole encounter! That’s what a reasonable person would think.
. . .
After a while Hans says, “That wooden boy’s a trouble.”
He goes out to the wheel of Samsara. He takes a handful of reincarnation’s Kings. He grinds them down into a dread black jam and he rubs it in the eyes and ears of the wooden doll. The boy is trapped in a Cartesian prison.
He is sealed from perceiving the world.
. . .
“Now,” says Hans, “even if he does try to see something, he’ll only see the world of his own conceptions; and if he tries to hear something, he’ll hear the world of his own conceptions; and so forth, and so forth, and so on. And if he should set my pantry on fire, it will be his own conceptions that he is burning; and I doubt there can be contagion between a puppet’s mind and the world.”
. . .
“You’re really kind of old to be playing with puppets,” says Brygmir.
(She makes tape, for his emus.)
“Stop that!” shouts Hans, startling, and the little wooden boy goes skittering down the stairs to the pantry vault.
Sponsors
Today's
STRANGE ENCOUNTER ...
Boot
