I will tell it to you, as it was told to me. Once there was a little girl who chatted of a world that swirled behind the middle of her forehead. She quivered and glittered from word to word, from story to story, from world to world. She was a skinny little thing, easy to pick up and hard to put down. With long, straight, dark hair and eyes just as dark if not darker, she reignited a world that had begun to flicker. Her parents cooed and adored her. She was funny and fierce, a charming delight, brimming with reciprocity, happiness, and light. “A creative one,” they’d say. “Lives in her head all day.” They’d chuckle, eyes a’twinkle at the joy she imparted.
So she chattered on in her mind and often with her mouth that whizzed through the words at a mile a minute. Consonants and vowels all crowded around to play their part in the riot. They jostled each other and tried to form straight lines to give to her thoughts the sounds that they needed. She talked to her clay, her paints, her stuffies and the Saints. She talked to thin air, fat air, her pillow, the clouds, the sun, the trees, to her dog and even his damnable fleas. She talked to anything and everything because they all replied. Quite simply put, to every degree and command of her imagination, she was a creator. Nothing short of a miracle born into a world of deflators.
One day in her seventh year, the monsters arrived, mean and contrived. Or perhaps she only just noticed them. Ordinarily, monsters do not reply so why would she talk to them? They eat words for a living and turn a handsome profit from spinning them. These monsters, though, weren’t much at all, for they were very tight and compact and given to flight, but they had a sting that could rival a raptor. In essence, something akin to a tsetse fly who takes minuscule bites out of people and makes them sleepy but from lies. How else do you eat an elephant except for one bite at a time? Those mammoth creatures so intelligent and loving but hunted and destroyed as if they mean nothing.
Eventually, as time went on, and the black flies swarmed, awareness dawned. She must be quiet. She talked too much, the teacher would say in a classroom with handwriting on the walls that read quite clearly, “Creators are not welcome here, but monsters are, dearly.”
And she noticed.
The greatest of crimes after all, weren’t crimes at all in a world of deflators who understood and excused as necessary evils drunkenness, violence, and anger but not a creator. Not a speaker who befriended the wind. That is a danger. It’s not necessary. Even if it’s not evil. It would take years before she pondered then queried, “If it’s not evil, how is it not necessary?” For now she is young but still, they made no sense. She smiled anyway and laughed at their jokes, their pokes, their little names as if they could ever gently tease her to refrain. Survival, she discovered meant that she must be very shhhhhhhh…
She imagined a closet, with a high shelf and upon it she put a box partially cloaked in shadows. She carved it with intricate scenes of dreams and visions that fluctuated, flickered, and shimmered under the pinprick of light that remained operational in the extreme darkness. A chatter box, all her own. In it she poured all of her words. It squeaked and it rattled, taking all of her in, awaiting a book to empty itself onto with real pages and a new book smell that tempted the palette of brainwaves who meld. Her chatter box was safe there, as those others – monsters and friends alike- eyed her approvingly for having matured.
No harm?
No foul?
A grown woman now and a man comes to visit. A monster lurked there but was quickly covered by the blank stare that transitioned into another who offered his hand with love at his command. This man she accepted. Although her alarms were tripped at that lurking abyss, the love had her in its grip and it was he that she wed.
Children were born from the hand that love commanded. Children of her own who inherited her mind but their mouths remained closed. She didn’t teach them to be very shhhh but, inside, tacitly aware, they carried her scars that they didn’t know weren’t theirs. Blue eyed, brown eyed, light and dark haired, they were deeply loved but also imprisoned in a world smothered by guards and bears who never bothered to care about what might be prowling there. Even if they did care, what could they do? They were just as imprisoned in the system they helped envision.
The monster, for his own part, kept to his disguises with occasional forays into acts of atrocities covered as incompetencies. He grumbled and growled not realizing his thinking was loud and that she could hear his advances. She is a creator after all. She can converse with it all, even the monsters she learned to hear while still very small.
This life, this man, this duplicity soon was taken by triplicity. A third appeared in just the one body. The Monster, the Love and now the Shell had to share a body in their living hell. Until one day in a pop and a burst of flame so bright, the one who was love separated his light from that which wanted to bury her in a grave.
At the same time and by no coincidence, the closet door, standing alone with no house to shelter it, no place to call home, began to bow and puff under the strain of one tiny box who’d had enough. The chatter box hummed. It buzzed. It vibrated, creaking at its seams, with all of those words contained for too long in longing to break free. There was no need to leave the monster who repressed her so close at her throat. The monster was to leave her, unable to survive the words from love that she heeded.
Freed at last! Pareille, such was her name, opened the door, opened her box and was never the same. Hope, love, good health, abundance, generosity, peace, and contentedness were released into her world awash with unsuspecting sleepers. At the last possible second, she slammed the lid of the box shut. On the monster.
A new story is to be written that mankind has never heard. It’s the one where love wins. Stay tuned to that airwave where the roar of the lions can be heard. Light flees to light and darkness crumples under the starkness of differences bald and clear as any day dawning on God’s planet. There is only one kind of balance and it is not the ratio of light to dark. That is nothing but snark. It is love balanced with love. No monsters allowed. Trespassers beware! Keep out! Violators will be prosecuted.
Poetic Justice 