10/3/1999 Geoff Ashbrook
A Fair Maiden was sitting and reading a book about mechanical vegetable-presses in a high tower built of sandy-colored stones that looked out over the land for miles around. She was sitting in a comfortable plush chair, and her stomach was growling though she wasn't uncomfortably hungry. Glancing up from her book she looked down at the well-manicured lawn that surrounded the tower. The sheep were hard at work keeping the place trim. Ronald the one eyed giant was reading a sewing machine manual. Gribbon, the five-headed eagle was kicking a soccer ball back and forth with Nebby, the twelve armed four-faced illegitimate child of the Buddha Gautama. She waved down to them and they waved back up. It was an ordinary day.
She peeled a piece of Swiss cheese off of the stack on the silver tray and was about to put it in her mouth when the bell began to ring. She rolled her eyes and looked out along the coastline of large forest rim trees. And then she spotted the figure that she only assumed would be the next hero. He seemed awfully far away, and made the trees behind him look larger than they'd ever seemed before. He had no gallant steed, no bag of weaponry that she could see. Though when he got closer it looked as though he were holding the steering wheel of an old car and dragging a blanket behind him. And when he got closer still his armor turned to pajamas. His distance turned to a scrawny stature. Instead of boldly strutting he was wandering his way in not at all a straight line, and instead of waving a banner or showing a sign of good strong will, he held his hand up to shield the sun from his eyes, to get a better look at the girl, and then lifted his hand up and then down in one quick almost bashful "hello" motion. He walked up to the foot of the tower, gave it a look up and down, shrugged, then turned to the giants who had stopped playing soccer to stare with open mouths. "Hi guys," he said. They all looked at each other.
"You don't know him, do you?" Nebby asked Ronald.
"Never seen him before in my life. I take it your not an old acquaintance either?"
She shook her head.
"Well then," she said. And the two of them began to walk toward the not-quite-a-man that was now doing callisthenic aerobics and singing softly to himself.
"Was your challenge accepted by the king?" Ronald asked him, "I find it hard to believe that you'd be any kind of a contender."
The boy looked at him. "Silly Season perhaps? Low on Competition? Luck of the Draw? A hair shade of grey on the underbelly of a drey pony moving books in the public library? Your guess is as good as mine." Despite the brief exercising the boy didn't look very awake, his eyes were half shut and he sort of swayed back and forth as he stood. "I'm sorry, could you hold on for just a minute. I'll be right with you." He then turned back to the tower and made large backward steps until he could see the Princess standing in the bright sunlight with an appalled look on her face.
"What on earth is going on?" she said.
"Oh, there you are," he said, "Listen, there's something I think you ought to know."
"What is it?"
"I don't know, but it should be somewhere in your plush little room up there. Look for a tan envelope." And he dodged quickly out of the way as Ronald swung down at his head with a giant long handled ax. The boy then flicked his blanket, like the mean boys snapping their towels in the shower room, pecking at Ronald's large hands with a velveteen attack.
"I don't see anything up here." The princess said, looking back over the ledge.
"What the hell are you doing with your life?" He called up to her, running from Ronald who was after him and swinging.
"Excuse me?" She said.
"Don't pretend to be offended," he said, "I know full well you don't want to be rescued, and so I'm not going to try to take you away from your wonderful little nitch." Ronald stopped running behind him, and looked at him.
"So what are you here for?"
"To tell you that you suck,"
"How dare you?"
"Well prove me wrong then. Does it have anything to do with my daring that you've consigned yourself away, written, folded, and stamped under the seal of a wax cadaver? Your eyes might as well be balls of puss with rancid raising floating midway for all 'o the world you'll ever see." At this Ronald made another sudden dash at him. The boy turned to look as Ronald's ax was closing in on his head, and he smiled and made a hand gesture and Ronald swung through empty air and lost his balance and fell on his side. When Ronald looked up he saw that he was alone in an empty field. No tower, no boy, no garden and outdoor grill. He began to panic, then looking off in the distance he saw the tower and he recognized where he was near the old orchard; some mile or two away.
"Do you think this makes you attractive to talk to me this way?" she asked the boy.
He pulled a large cigarette case out of his shirt and opened it and removed a long thick joint. He lit it with a crack torch and took a long deep hit, and he turned around and gathered his belongings from the ground and walked off, and then stopped and changed directions because he'd started going the wrong way, and he walked until he disappeared into the trees.
Then Ronald came jogging into her view. "Where is he?" he asked out of breath and putting his hands on his hips and stretching in a backward arch.
"He left," she said.
Ron bent forward, resting his weight on his knees. "He just left?"
"Yep."
"I'm not going to ask, I'll be over here if you need me."
"Ok," she called down.
Then she heard the bell chiming again, and the sound of galloping, and within a minute a large night in blue armor rode a bright red horse up to the foot of the tower.
"Hello, my lady!" he called up enthusiastically, with a jolt of his jointed arm.
"Whatever," she said, and waved without passion.
"You will be free in the blink of an eye," he said.
"Go away," she said.
"Fear not!" he said.
"Go home," she mumbled.
Then Nebby (with the four faces) walked up with a bow and a quiver of flaming arrows on her back. But before she could draw the bow back for her first arrow, the knight had hurled a knife which sunk into her leg.
The princess in the tower screamed and grabbed at her leg, and watched the blood soak through the silk to her fingers and felt it running down her leg.
Nebby drew her bow, never so much as flinching from the wound on her leg, and sent an arrow curving through the air and into the knights shoulder between the joints of the armor.
The princess screamed again, stumbled over to her bed, collapsed, buried her face in her pillow, bit down on it, and grabbed her left shoulder which was spurting blood all over her newly cleaned sheets to the pulse of her heart. She looked up from the bed then, and stopped breathing for a step at the shock of the sight of herself standing in front of her closet, staring back at her. This was no mirror. She beheld herself unwounded and smiling back at her. "Who are you?" she yelled at the figure. The figure just stood there with a leering smile, and then reached down and clutched the sides of her dress and began to slowly lift the layers, revealing inch by inch her legs beneath, revealing that they were made of small stone blocks delicately fitted together and blending perfectly into the floor of the tower room.
The princess moved as best she could despite her wounds, over to the ledge to see the two now fighting with swords long and short.
"Stop fighting!" she yelled out.
She had to holler it again and again before she caught their attention. "For gods sake just stop." She was crying hysterically.
The two stepped back from each other, eyeing one another suspiciously, each thinking that surely the other could not be trusted to stop their blind mission.
"What's wrong?" Nebby asked. The two fighters were looking up for an answer.
The princess was slumped over the sill, sobbing uncontrollably, and they could hear the teardrops hitting the grass at the foot of the tower, and they noticed that not all the drops were tears. As soon as they saw the blood they felt a wind pick up and all of a sudden the two fighters were flung through the air at each other as if by some insurmountable gravitational attraction. Then the two of them on the ground, in graceless embrace, heard a strange noise coming from the woods far off and all around them. It sounded like voices calling. Then they saw figures, a dozen perhaps, tumble out from the trees, turning and bounding across the flat of the grassy field as though it were a steep incline, all moving toward them. Then fifty or more appeared from all directions, then hundreds, then thousands of people, all poured from the woods and did not stop until they had hit up against the walls of the tower.
The princess looked down and around her, where there lay a great heap of knights and villains and farmers and nobles, men and women, old and young, all dazed and tangled in arms and legs; too stunned for speech. If she wanted there was a ramp of bodies that would grant her soft passage to the ground below. She turned around to look back into her room to see if that simulacrum of her were still standing and peering ghoulishly at her from across the room, but she was alone. However, she did notice a large tan envelope hanging off the corner of the table - and she was sure it had not been there a moment ago.
She limped over to a chair and sat down and opened the piece of mail. Inside was one large single piece of paper. At first she could not figure out what it was. It looked sort of like an instruction guide for assembling a new piece of furniture. She looked at the little cartoonish step by step illustrations, which depicted her in all the scenes of events that had happened to her since she'd woken up that morning, up to her sitting and reading the piece of paper itself, and then it showed a picture of a table, then in the next frame the table had a speech bubble coming up from it, and it said, "Only this morning I was a table fit for holding beverage cups, ice cube trays, and illustrated books of frustrated lingerie, but now since I've had a taste of Dan Edward's hand squelched orange juice I can lift twice the heft of a Russian intellectual, no beard is brawn to a plane of flat oak attitude, loosing altitude." Then she heard a squeaking sound come from outside. She stood up and went over to see what it was, and there was a man pushing a vending cart across the grass with a large sign that bore the image of an orange ball.
She climbed over the ledge and apologized as she stepped on and over the people until she was finally at the bottom. Then she walked slowly across the grass towards him, and when she got to the cart, with its big wooden keg of something, he was standing with a glass in hand. She took the glass and thanked him, and began to sip it through a long thick straw. It was rather good, and she nodded in approval, and he nodded back in thanks. As she drank she noticed that there was a long tube extending from the top of her tower into the sky, and then she noticed that the sky around her was not moving normally, that it was moving down, as if the land she stood on were being sucked up into the air. Quickly she saw what looked like gigantic fingers move down through the sky and out of sight behind the trees, and a split second later she felt a small hard something burst from the straw into her mouth. As she swallowed it she gagged and coughed and she felt her legs go weak and she saw the vender man move and grab onto her to hold her upright. And she saw his mouth moving slowly but she couldn't hear anything. But she saw him exaggeratedly mouth the words "It's ok," over and over, with a kind smile, and she saw him snap his fingers in the air, and she felt her sense of hearing begin to come back with a bursting that overwhelmed everything else, and she coughed the smoke out of her mouth, and saw Jacky -who was sitting on the bed next to her- take the bong from her and start to fill it with clean white smoke. The music was a nice mix of Jazz from the late 50's sampled over an Indian sitar and tabla. "Good, huh?" Jacked said, nodding her head with the music. She watched Jacky take the hit and then she turned to look out the window, where large ships were moving by in front of a black background studded with pin-bright stars. She moved over to the window and looked out into the electronically woven strips of space that formed the networked-multiverse that she called home. The pools of data being sorted and resorted by people searching their way with questions and topic-words from one place to another. The streams of space of all shapes moving harmoniously around each other like a carpet being woven and unwoven and rewoven ever differently with threads that contained clusters of galaxies like sandy knots that passed in and out of her field of vision. She picked up her cup from the table and took a sip of cold water, and popped a piece of chocolate into her mouth as a planet rolled by outside taking the view from the window all to itself.