Post by Grimm on May 5, 2020 11:01:32 GMT -5
Open mic night at the cider brewery. A good crowd for a midweek evening, some of it owing to longer days and shorter nights (for now), and some of it due to tonight’s events. The interior lights of the former garage (or is it former warehouse, or factory, or…eh, you get the picture) have been dimmed, and the ubiquitous strands of Edison bulbs have been strung from corner to corner to give the room a calm, muted vibe that everyone needs on occasion.
The singer-songwriters do their thing. Some covers ranging from Van Morrison all the way to today’s indie artists that no one has heard of, and some originals that are vague enough to not be awkwardly confessional or flat-out awful. The militants march to the front for their poetry slams. Raging against oppression and privilege, raging against the dying of the light. The standups lope to the corner stage as well, working to be just edgy enough without offending anyone too much. It’s a fine line between speaking truth to power and just being crude. Or maybe it’s not, but anyway, they try to walk that line.
And then…a tall, pale man with striking red hair and equally glorious beard walks to the microphone. Dressed in clothes the color of a storm, he stands with hands in pockets, looking over the room. The room looks back. Looks into those eyes reflecting arctic vortexes even there in the gloom, and they each to a one sit back in their chairs, even those perched on stools. Something has hit them, whether one would call it déjà vu, or a flashback, or a peek into some shared generational trauma. A vision of a muddy road. A man not unlike this one standing in a wagon. A great grey horse and a shabby, sun-bleached banner proclaiming The Grimm Tidings Medicine Show. A bottle of something dark and viscous, and poison, and necrosis. But then the man at the microphone clears his throat and the crowd comes back to their semi-dries and their pretzels, and all is well.
“I have a story,” says the man.
“There’s this fly. And in the course of its buzzing around dead things and droppings one day it ends up on the horn of a great black goat. When the fly feels rested and decides to get back at it, it says, ‘Do you mind if I go now?’ And the goat barely even raises its cold, cold eyes and says, ‘It’s all the same to me. I didn’t notice when you showed up, and I won’t know when you go away.’”
The man shifts his weight to his right foot. His hands remain in his pockets. A clink of glasses, and someone near the middle of the room speaks up.
“That’s a terrible story.”
“No, you didn’t listen. The fly thought he was of much more consequence to himself than he ever was to the goat. It’s something to think about, really.”
“No, it’s still terrible.”
The man takes his hands out of his pockets and clasps them behind his back. “Okay, how about this…”
“There once was a man who slaughtered a pig, as folks used to do, and his children watched him do it. When they began playing later that afternoon, one child said to the other, ‘You be the little pig, and I’ll be the butcher.’ He then took a nice sharp knife and slit his little brother’s throat.
Now, their mother was upstairs in the house, bathing yet a third child, and when she heard the cries of her son she immediately ran outside. Of course she did. Upon seeing what had happened, she lost it, which is understandable. She took the knife, still warm and dripping, out of the one son's hand and was so enraged that she stabbed him right in the heart. And then she ran back into the house to tend to her child in the bathtub. Surprise! The baby had drowned while she had been outside. The woman considered her options, and, seeing no way out of this, she hung herself. When her husband came back from the fields and saw everything, he became so despondent that he decided to join the rest of his family.”
Some members of the audience scowl and shake their heads. Some just look confused. Still others scoot back their chairs and leave in a huff. One person, this time more towards the back, yells, “That was worse than the first. What possible moral could that have?”
“Life is brutal and short…and will be much shorter if you’re not careful,” he says with a shrug as if indicating, duh. Seeing that the room grows restless, he continues a bit louder than before to regain their attention.
“Once upon a time there was a man who had three sons, and he owned nothing else in the world but the house in which he lived. Now each of the sons wished to have the house after his father’s death, but the father, being a good one and all that, loved them all alike, and did not know what to do. He considered just selling the house and dividing up the money among them, but he really didn’t want to do that since the house had been in the family for generations. So he thought, and he thought, and at last a plan came to him. He gathered his sons around him one evening, and he said, ‘Each of you go out into the world and learn a trade. When you all come back, I will judge who has made the best masterpiece and he shall have the house.’
The sons looked at each other and nodded. And so they were off. The largest and strongest by far of the three -- lets call him, I don’t know, Holden, I guess -- decided to be a blacksmith. We’ll call the second brother Gerard, and he was the most handsome and best dresser of them all. He would pursue the life of a barber. The third and final brother was the wiriest, the most tattooed, and the one who put the most effort into portraying himself in his own particular way. Anyway, we can call him Kyle and he figured what better way to spend his time than learning how to fence. So they settled on a time to come back home again, and they were off on their separate ways.
Lo and behold, they all managed to find skilled craftsmen to teach them their respective trades very well indeed. Holden had to shoe the king’s horses, and he thought to himself, 'Pfft, the house is mine, no doubt about it.' Gerard only shaved and cut the hair of the fanciest people, and so he too already looked upon the house as his own. Kyle received many a blow during his training, but he only gritted his teeth and let nothing vex him. 'After all,' he said to himself on multiple occasions, 'if you are afraid of a few scratches, you’ll never win the house.'
When the appointed time had come, the three brothers returned home to their father. The only problem was that they did not know how best to demonstrate their skills. Being the good brothers that they were, they sat down and tried to work it out together. As they were sitting there on the porch of the very house they desired, all of a sudden a rabbit came running across the field. 'Ah, ha, just in time!' said Gerard. So he took his basin and soap and lathered away until the rabbit came up, at which time he soaped and shaved off its whiskers while it was hopping about at top speed. Gerard didn’t even cut the rabbit’s skin or disturb a hair anywhere else on its body.
'Well done!' said the old man. 'Your brothers will have to really bring it, or the house will surely be yours.'
Not long after (how fortunate!), a nobleman’s coach appeared around a bend in the road, rolling along at full speed. 'Now you shall see what I can do, daddy-o,' said Holden. And so he ran down the coach, took all four shoes off the feet of one of the horses while it was galloping, and put on four new shoes, all without stopping it. Holden raised his arms in triumph.
'You are a fine fellow, indeed, and as skilled as your brother,' said the father. 'I have no idea to which I ought to give the house.'
Then Kyle said, 'Papa, let me have my turn, if you please,' and, as it was beginning to rain, he drew his sword and swung it to and fro about his head so fast that not a drop fell upon him. The rain fell harder and harder until at last it came down in sheets, but he only flashed his sword faster and faster, and remained as dry as if he were under an umbrella.
When his father saw this he was amazed, and said, 'That’s it. This is the masterpiece. The house is yours!'
The other two initially grumbled but then came to accept the decision. It was what they had agreed on in the first place, after all. But, seeing as how they were as close as any brothers could be, they all three stayed together in the house, anyway. They each continued on with their trades, and, as they had mastered them so well and were so clever, they earned a great deal of money. They lived happily ever after, together, until they grew old, when, finally, one of them fell sick and died. It’s not important which one it was, because the other two were so sad that they fell into such a funk that they died soon after. And, seeing as how they had loved one another so much, the undertaker and the sexton figured they might as well all be buried in the same grave.”
The man finishes and is greeted by…silence. No coughs, no murmurs, no glasses, no questions, no heckling. A dark shroud passes over his face before a vinegar smile flashes behind his beard.
“I admit that one can be a puzzle. See, what this implies is that no matter what you do…no matter how devoted or accomplished you are in your pursuits…at the end of it all you end up dead. And if you don’t watch yourself, you end up in a mass grave.”
Silence, still, but the faces spread out before him look more troubled than before. They risk sharing uncomfortable glances with one another. There’s that cultural subconscious again, telling them something ain’t quite right here.
The man pulls a pocket watch out of…well, take a guess. He flicks it open and the well-worn silver looks even more tarnished under these lights.
“Looks like I’ve got time for one more. Let’s see…the Hangtown Horror, a starling, and a copperhead were once traveling together, and they came to a river without a bridge. The starling flew over, and the copperhead swam across.”
The man stops. A meek voice struggles through a parched throat right up front and says, “What…what happened to the Hangtown Horror?”
A subsonic growl escapes.
“The Hangtown Horror,” says the man, “is very disappointed with you for still not learning your lessons. Even now. After all this time.”
The man cricks his neck, rolls his shoulders, and steps out from behind the microphone.
Oh, the room thinks. That’s why this all feels so familiar.
The singer-songwriters do their thing. Some covers ranging from Van Morrison all the way to today’s indie artists that no one has heard of, and some originals that are vague enough to not be awkwardly confessional or flat-out awful. The militants march to the front for their poetry slams. Raging against oppression and privilege, raging against the dying of the light. The standups lope to the corner stage as well, working to be just edgy enough without offending anyone too much. It’s a fine line between speaking truth to power and just being crude. Or maybe it’s not, but anyway, they try to walk that line.
And then…a tall, pale man with striking red hair and equally glorious beard walks to the microphone. Dressed in clothes the color of a storm, he stands with hands in pockets, looking over the room. The room looks back. Looks into those eyes reflecting arctic vortexes even there in the gloom, and they each to a one sit back in their chairs, even those perched on stools. Something has hit them, whether one would call it déjà vu, or a flashback, or a peek into some shared generational trauma. A vision of a muddy road. A man not unlike this one standing in a wagon. A great grey horse and a shabby, sun-bleached banner proclaiming The Grimm Tidings Medicine Show. A bottle of something dark and viscous, and poison, and necrosis. But then the man at the microphone clears his throat and the crowd comes back to their semi-dries and their pretzels, and all is well.
“I have a story,” says the man.
“There’s this fly. And in the course of its buzzing around dead things and droppings one day it ends up on the horn of a great black goat. When the fly feels rested and decides to get back at it, it says, ‘Do you mind if I go now?’ And the goat barely even raises its cold, cold eyes and says, ‘It’s all the same to me. I didn’t notice when you showed up, and I won’t know when you go away.’”
The man shifts his weight to his right foot. His hands remain in his pockets. A clink of glasses, and someone near the middle of the room speaks up.
“That’s a terrible story.”
“No, you didn’t listen. The fly thought he was of much more consequence to himself than he ever was to the goat. It’s something to think about, really.”
“No, it’s still terrible.”
The man takes his hands out of his pockets and clasps them behind his back. “Okay, how about this…”
“There once was a man who slaughtered a pig, as folks used to do, and his children watched him do it. When they began playing later that afternoon, one child said to the other, ‘You be the little pig, and I’ll be the butcher.’ He then took a nice sharp knife and slit his little brother’s throat.
Now, their mother was upstairs in the house, bathing yet a third child, and when she heard the cries of her son she immediately ran outside. Of course she did. Upon seeing what had happened, she lost it, which is understandable. She took the knife, still warm and dripping, out of the one son's hand and was so enraged that she stabbed him right in the heart. And then she ran back into the house to tend to her child in the bathtub. Surprise! The baby had drowned while she had been outside. The woman considered her options, and, seeing no way out of this, she hung herself. When her husband came back from the fields and saw everything, he became so despondent that he decided to join the rest of his family.”
Some members of the audience scowl and shake their heads. Some just look confused. Still others scoot back their chairs and leave in a huff. One person, this time more towards the back, yells, “That was worse than the first. What possible moral could that have?”
“Life is brutal and short…and will be much shorter if you’re not careful,” he says with a shrug as if indicating, duh. Seeing that the room grows restless, he continues a bit louder than before to regain their attention.
“Once upon a time there was a man who had three sons, and he owned nothing else in the world but the house in which he lived. Now each of the sons wished to have the house after his father’s death, but the father, being a good one and all that, loved them all alike, and did not know what to do. He considered just selling the house and dividing up the money among them, but he really didn’t want to do that since the house had been in the family for generations. So he thought, and he thought, and at last a plan came to him. He gathered his sons around him one evening, and he said, ‘Each of you go out into the world and learn a trade. When you all come back, I will judge who has made the best masterpiece and he shall have the house.’
The sons looked at each other and nodded. And so they were off. The largest and strongest by far of the three -- lets call him, I don’t know, Holden, I guess -- decided to be a blacksmith. We’ll call the second brother Gerard, and he was the most handsome and best dresser of them all. He would pursue the life of a barber. The third and final brother was the wiriest, the most tattooed, and the one who put the most effort into portraying himself in his own particular way. Anyway, we can call him Kyle and he figured what better way to spend his time than learning how to fence. So they settled on a time to come back home again, and they were off on their separate ways.
Lo and behold, they all managed to find skilled craftsmen to teach them their respective trades very well indeed. Holden had to shoe the king’s horses, and he thought to himself, 'Pfft, the house is mine, no doubt about it.' Gerard only shaved and cut the hair of the fanciest people, and so he too already looked upon the house as his own. Kyle received many a blow during his training, but he only gritted his teeth and let nothing vex him. 'After all,' he said to himself on multiple occasions, 'if you are afraid of a few scratches, you’ll never win the house.'
When the appointed time had come, the three brothers returned home to their father. The only problem was that they did not know how best to demonstrate their skills. Being the good brothers that they were, they sat down and tried to work it out together. As they were sitting there on the porch of the very house they desired, all of a sudden a rabbit came running across the field. 'Ah, ha, just in time!' said Gerard. So he took his basin and soap and lathered away until the rabbit came up, at which time he soaped and shaved off its whiskers while it was hopping about at top speed. Gerard didn’t even cut the rabbit’s skin or disturb a hair anywhere else on its body.
'Well done!' said the old man. 'Your brothers will have to really bring it, or the house will surely be yours.'
Not long after (how fortunate!), a nobleman’s coach appeared around a bend in the road, rolling along at full speed. 'Now you shall see what I can do, daddy-o,' said Holden. And so he ran down the coach, took all four shoes off the feet of one of the horses while it was galloping, and put on four new shoes, all without stopping it. Holden raised his arms in triumph.
'You are a fine fellow, indeed, and as skilled as your brother,' said the father. 'I have no idea to which I ought to give the house.'
Then Kyle said, 'Papa, let me have my turn, if you please,' and, as it was beginning to rain, he drew his sword and swung it to and fro about his head so fast that not a drop fell upon him. The rain fell harder and harder until at last it came down in sheets, but he only flashed his sword faster and faster, and remained as dry as if he were under an umbrella.
When his father saw this he was amazed, and said, 'That’s it. This is the masterpiece. The house is yours!'
The other two initially grumbled but then came to accept the decision. It was what they had agreed on in the first place, after all. But, seeing as how they were as close as any brothers could be, they all three stayed together in the house, anyway. They each continued on with their trades, and, as they had mastered them so well and were so clever, they earned a great deal of money. They lived happily ever after, together, until they grew old, when, finally, one of them fell sick and died. It’s not important which one it was, because the other two were so sad that they fell into such a funk that they died soon after. And, seeing as how they had loved one another so much, the undertaker and the sexton figured they might as well all be buried in the same grave.”
The man finishes and is greeted by…silence. No coughs, no murmurs, no glasses, no questions, no heckling. A dark shroud passes over his face before a vinegar smile flashes behind his beard.
“I admit that one can be a puzzle. See, what this implies is that no matter what you do…no matter how devoted or accomplished you are in your pursuits…at the end of it all you end up dead. And if you don’t watch yourself, you end up in a mass grave.”
Silence, still, but the faces spread out before him look more troubled than before. They risk sharing uncomfortable glances with one another. There’s that cultural subconscious again, telling them something ain’t quite right here.
The man pulls a pocket watch out of…well, take a guess. He flicks it open and the well-worn silver looks even more tarnished under these lights.
“Looks like I’ve got time for one more. Let’s see…the Hangtown Horror, a starling, and a copperhead were once traveling together, and they came to a river without a bridge. The starling flew over, and the copperhead swam across.”
The man stops. A meek voice struggles through a parched throat right up front and says, “What…what happened to the Hangtown Horror?”
A subsonic growl escapes.
“The Hangtown Horror,” says the man, “is very disappointed with you for still not learning your lessons. Even now. After all this time.”
The man cricks his neck, rolls his shoulders, and steps out from behind the microphone.
Oh, the room thinks. That’s why this all feels so familiar.
