She came here among us, yet no one knew her name.
Some called her the Fabulist because her currency was stories and her audience mostly children. Yet I listened too, and my name is Rashida, and I am a grown woman.
Her stage was formed in rubble, the pale beige dust tracing a chalklike ambit, the sporadic roar of warplanes a sonic frontier. The audience was the silence and its inverse. Amid bloodred cartographic deltas, septic watery spools of unraveled gauze, the dirty frightened actuality of a war zone, the Fabulist came and told her dream-clean tales.
Of pirates, of explorers, of women who entered a dark place and found light, of men who relinquished their power in favour of something new, of wolves who moved into a magic park and changed the warp and weft of the scenery. Not content with that, she embellished the proffered truths of our age and threw them into relief. And the children loved her more than anyone, as if Santa had dreamed of a cartoon mouse and made of his largesse an infinite childhood shrine.
As the regime moved closer, sending shells and rockets and even a terrible airborne assassin that formed sickly bubbles on the lips of the children in lieu of screams, her stories were bulwarks, speaking of the lionhearts of history, sketching the tales of forest outlaws who accosted the elites and reapportioned their ill-gotten gains to those more worthy.
Robin Hood. Joan of Arc. Simón Bolívar. Arthur Pendragon. Che Guevara. Marie Colvin.
The people, reduced to a faux square block of crumbling rock and broken minarets, began to gather, bereft of any other hope, and the Fabulist told stories to undo their last dissent.
“Feel my heart beating,” said Ahmed in spattered surgical scrubs.
“I shall. But first, a story.”
And it went like this:
A headstrong woman on a beach sat for days after a shipwreck until a coconut became a fledgling palm. Nothing sailed by, and the sun remained in the sky, and the air was still as death, and shivering with the fragile ebb and the tenuous flow the palm became a tree but slowly. The woman walked the beach and traced the cadence of the tides and sang in tune with them.
Until one day another castaway coughed and gasped his sickness upon her world.
“How dare you come and sully this expanse?” asked the woman, now angered.
“My ship is lost, and this is nothing I would choose,” he said, still puking ample saltchuck.
“Ingrate!”
She moved to smite him with a blade of pale driftwood, but a wave pulled him back beyond the scope of her rage, a riptide rescued him, and she felt a rib inside her creak and twinge. She thought for a second about relenting and retreated.
Shearwaters drew letters in the sky—“please help us all”—and a turtle crawled from the tide and made its way along the lower jawbone sweep of the beach, the great Nike swoosh of this desert island uptick, and settled by the sawgrass and the tiny dunes. The humans from their distant perches—she downwind on the glimmering sands, he on a cluster of rocks offshore—watched as it laid its copious eggs and buried them. Food for days, they thought, and schemed.
But they miscounted the days and the eggs all hatched and tiny spiderlike bodies began to row tideward.
“You should have come in sooner,” the woman yelled across the still ocean, “so you could help.”
“Why? To meet the flat of your oar blade?”
Like this, their days dissolved into something other than days, a way of being, a miscomprehension, and still the ponderous air stayed still.
Until one day she said, “Come, then. Let us merge our skills and build of this a new brightness.”
And he came swimming from the dwindle tail of rocks and walked the remaining shallows and met the brandished edge of her driftwood blade and was dead before he hit the sand.
“That will teach you,” she said, while the petrels wheeled and screamed in cryptic cursive against the firmament and thunderheads built upon themselves offshore, distant, convulsive, revolving like sickly guts.
The children sat like penitents atop a monastic peak. The Fabulist stayed among them, now silent. Someone screamed they should go down the stairs, but no one moved. Post-traumatic blasts ramped up like lariated strings of cherry bombs. In what world does a child distinguish between a cluster bomb and a rocket? What rift has split the twin realities of life as its lived and mere story?
Only the Fabulist knows. No, thats not true. I, Rashida, cowering under the withering trellis of vines, showered by dust, dreaming spindrift tales of unthinkable escape, also know.