In the beginning, an aroma of baking bread came up the stairs. This woke the children who, with mouths watering, ran down to the kitchen on bare feet, where the farmer and his wife were sitting by the stove.

While waiting for the bread to finish, the farmer had discovered a blackhead on the tip of his ring finger just under the fingernail. As the children came into the kitchen, the farmer's wife was gently pressing it with tweezers, such that a red thread encircled it and then the blackhead burst forth. The woman held and even squeezed the man's finger as something ribboned out of it and kept coming, out and out, until the issuance made for a dark and overgrown forest which spread from the kitchen to the den to the boot porch—out into the fields and over the mountains, scraping the sky the whole way.

The farmer's wife exhaled a great laughter and the farmer cried tears of relief and the love between them filled the room, amplifying the smell of baking bread.
But the children could not wait for the bread and instead ran past their boots into the new woods, ran beyond the light of the farmhouse and deep into the forest, until they each lost their way in the thick of the night, blind and whining like crestfallen wolves.

And Yorgus begat Mud-Yorgus, and Mud-Yorgus begat Rock-Yorgus, and Rock-Yorgus begat Meat-Yorgus, and Meat-Yorgus laid down with the wife of Spear-Yorgus, and Spear-Yorgus, begat murder, begat tribalism, begat wars, begat rumors of wars—all in darkness. Begat Egypt and Mongolia and Rome and the British Empire. Begat leg irons, begat industry, begat poverty, begat religion. Begat class warfare, begat football, begat light beer, begat absence, begat shoulder bruises. Begat high fashion, begat art, begat the blues, begat the smell of baking bread, begat stories passed from one person to the next, begat tales of a farmhouse, and porchlight, and starlight, and moonlight, and the greatest longshot of them all daylight, and a sun fabled to one day rise and crust and be broken open with bare hands and served with butter and jam to any open hand in wet pajama sleeves.


.

David Drury has stories in or coming from NPR, ZYZZYVA, Pidgeonholes, The Best American Non-Required Reading and others.

Detail of woodcut print on main page from Lynd Ward's GOD'S MAN (1929).

W i g l e a f               05-15-20                                [home]