Five Public Opinions

I told him I was only a callow youth with two foolish feet. “I’m old and half blind, and couldn’t care for eating the likes of you. But in exchange for your shoes and satchel I’ll tell you how to avoid the people who smell the anger running down the mountainside. Didn’t your father tell you? The people who run down the mountain to the valley only come to eat youths with foolish feet like your own.”The men of the earth hungered for my people’s flesh. If I did not provide them with a sacrifice to abate their sorrows, they would take my body and walk amongst my people like one of the undead. They would find ways to sip their lives into their own empty souls.Without my father I stood on two rotten feet inundated with fear.When the people of the soil touched my feet they fell back into the ground with shrieks and cries. Now I could reach the top of the mountain without fear of falling down.As I approached the top of the mountain a white spectacle blinded me for an instant. When I blinked again I saw a white dragon shifting over the mountain like a layer of foam riding ocean waves. I could tell by its movement that it was a territorial creature; I could tell that it would fight me before allowing me to press further.Through the blind frenzy of earth and shadows I plunged my dagger into the creature’s heart and watched as it melted into rain.I called out,”Help, please, help!” The white crane grazed the skin of my pursuer and held my shirt between its beak.Before I could tell my mother anything the boys spoke for me. “We’ve found father,” they cried. She burst into tears and hugged them both, ignoring my stinking presence.

“As a child, my son could dance along the soil so quickly that the men who died and live in the ground could not catch him. Prove this to me now,”

Without hesitance I lifted my pant legs began to dance in father’s leather bottomed shoes. The soles breezed across the floor, cutting the mist with rhythmic motions. I then turned the ring on my finger and watched my father rise, soil shedding from his skin. His shaved face and clean hands stood against the paling crowd. This impressed the people who stood before me, as did the fact that my tongue did not bleed from the needle it held.

The soil on my skin turned into sprinkles of gold dust. The people proclaimed me some kind of god.

My false neighbor kowtowed to the floor in mercy. Father and the man in robes let him do so until his forehead bled from its meetings with the hard stone floor.

It’s like “The Eye of Argon” meets Kafka. Generate your own steaming pile of number-twos here.