Of Horny Nabras
In a long forgotten mythology lived a nabra and a nabra wasn’t a snake or a bull. It rather resided between the two.
Dunsany was a descendant of a famous writer, one who spoke of charwomen and Spanish dons and things like gods and unicorns and dolls houses and model ships. He did not even need mythology to shelter such conceits of wonder and magic. He conjured forth hills, beyond which hills were further hills as far as the mind could stretch. Between these hills sat lesser hills … and mounds and inverse dimples: and on these flatter parts lived the folk who harvested reality from fantasy.
Sybil was one such.
Murton another.
They were in love. Stories need two people who are in love. But these were not storyfolk. They were as real as you and I. Sybil, of course, was beautiful to look at (with soft contours), beautiful to hear (with rounded vowels) and beautiful to know (with huggable smells). A heroine through and through.
Murton – on the other hand – was no hero, being sallow, surly and salacious. What could one expect from a herdsman of the pale yellow nabras? The se creatures carried similar tides of tumescence.
Dunsany -- fantasy writer in the shadow of the hills of his great ancestor -- failed to see the mismatch. He had simply taken his eye off the ball. Too much in the high-flown aether. Sybil and Murton were already in love; she for real, he for show. Dunsany had somehow lost his grip.
Murton bought Sybil a dolls house.
"You can give it to our daughter, when she arrives," said Murton, with a smile, knowing full well Sybil would play with it day and night, keeping her mind on small things, rather than the big issues from which all women, he thought, should be kept.
Sybil was blind to motive. She was as excited as a new Princess. She jabbed the figurines up and down the stairs and lifted up secret roofs to reveal the attic systems tilting into infinity.
"Thank you, sweet Murton? Where did you buy it?" Her voice was lilting like fairy lark.
"Dunsany made it for me to give to you." Murton's skin wrinkled like an ox, as if the words lifted fitful air pockets beneath it.
"Dunsany?" Sybil wondered where Dunsany had been all this time, indeed forgot that she hadn't seen him since she was a small girl. That was the extent of a god's inattention.
Murton was a good man, at heart. Anything told about him before was really written to deceive. Nothing is told right when the author’s inattention is part and parcel of the plot that the same author writes. So, having bestowed of his best, Murton scuttled away to tend nabras: herds with spiralling horns. Horns like snaky figureheads on the prows of boats. Or things that burst out of dolls house roofs.
(unpublished)
