(My first story. I wrote this right after finishing reading A Hundred Years of Solitude. Its magical realism has certainly influenced my style then.)
Chapter 1: Ike and his shades
In a forlorn little town stood a row of stout wooden houses with mountains beyond their backyards and a river running in their front. Squatting by the river was a young Mexican man with shades on his hooked nose and a lit cigarette jutting out of his scraggly beard.
“Ike, the cows need milking,” cried a voice within the house. “And your pal Dennis came. His solar panel broke again. For heaven’s sake, stop loafing around and do something!”
“Alright mom!” Ike stood up reluctantly, accentuating his short stature with a prolonged yawn, spit the smoking stub into the river and hurried back home.
Inside the hut, Dennis was sitting on two stools, scraping the remains of the potato stew from a heavy iron pot brought in from the kitchen by one of Ike’s little brothers. There were twelve of them—the little brothers—sitting around the table and there were twelve more cooking in the back. The father of the house was long gone, ever since the birth of his first son, Ike, but confusingly, the sperm left by this unknown father of Ike seemed to multiply in his mother’s womb so that ever since her first labor, this woman experienced a yearly bulge of her belly and always exactly after nine months and three weeks delivered in the privy a crying baby amid a pool of blood and the howls of all the barn animals in the yard.
The poor woman was groaning on the bed when the door creaked close behind Ike. The cyclical pregnancy has rendered her once charming face tired and weary. She smiled when she saw Ike navigating himself to her bed, with his shades still on.
“Go and make sure Dennis is well fed, son. Go and take care of our guest.” Her bloated hands left the interminable dome of her stomach and tugged Ike’s woolen trousers. The latter didn’t say much; he never said much, ever since the devilish shades took away his eyesight and stayed forever on his hooked nose.
It was on his third birthday that he found the pair of shades washed up from the riverbed. While his mother was putting all her might into delivering the third brother in the privy, the oldest one crawled out of his cradle, followed the moonlit path to the shore and found deep in the mud the pair of shades that were destined to impose on him like his second pair of eyes.
In those early years, the shades were always an inch too large; it was not until adolescence that they started to grant him a vague sense of coolness when he noticed, while milking the cows and mucking out the pig pens, the giggling of the girls on the neighboring lawn. As he grew older, there were more mouths in the hut waiting to be fed, and while the shades stayed on, his beard was no longer trimmed and his boots were always smudged with the manure of the pigs. The girly giggles were never to be heard again, but the cries of newborns were constantly ringing in his ears. After a long day of toil in the barn, he dared not to take the shades off even inside the house, for he worried his already tormented mother might see those tired and pensive eyes. Until one day, he grew completely accustomed to the semi-darkness of his life and did not take the shades off even when he slept.
It was those years of hiding behind an impenetrable solitude that made Ike reclusive and taciturn. When he reached the twenty-year mark, at the ceremony that the village held for every young man coming of age, Ike stepped upon the deerhide-covered stool and saw, from this vantage point, his mother and his nineteen brothers clapping and smiling amid the crowd. He felt radiant, proud. Finally, with a flourish, he took off his shades, and with a blinding light, passed out on the podium.
It was two hours later from a sulking charlatan that the crowd learnt the source of this ailment. The charlatan, who at the moment of the incident, was crouching behind a haystack, thieving eggs from a chicken coop, when the distressing cries of the people woke up the hens and cocks which attacked the invader violently and whose squawks attracted the nineteen brothers who dragged the disoriented charlatan out of the fence and carried him on their shoulders all the way to the tarpaulin that shaded the unconscious Ike. The charlatan, with nothing much else to do but to attend to the patient at hand, laid down two cracked eggs at the feet of the angry brothers, and flipped back the eyelids of the supine body on the ground. Goggling back at him were a pair of unfocused, quivering eyeballs with translucent eye whites. After muttering a few words of incantation as a precaution against the skeptical, the charlatan announced that because he had worn the shades for too long, his eyes had turned sensitive to even the weakest of rays, so much so that a slight abundance of them rendered the soul overloaded. Since then, Ike wore the shades not of appearance, nor of reclusion, but of necessity.
Chapter 2: The gluttonous musician
The walking stick clicked on the uneven ground—it struck a table leg and broke Ike’s reverie. His thoughts came to the present: back to the hut, to the groaning of his mother, the ruckus of his brothers, and the low, throaty grumbling of his friend Dennis. Ike sat down carefully, feeling the table tilted dangerously towards his guest. An image of a giant, as tall as his tallest brother, and as wide as all of them put together, gobbling over the sacrifice of the villagers, came into his mind.
“How’s the food, big bud?” Ike asked the mountainous shadow on his right.
“Not bad, not bad. I wish the steaks were rarer, but no complaints.” Dennis gulped down another glass of wine. “You see, I tried to make some pasta this morning. Ah, awful. Who knows you should follow the book exactly, and not to swap water with milk? Now the goddamn wastes are all sticking to the pan. Who am I kidding? I can’t cook!”
“Aye, aye.” Ike patted the broad back of his friend, a choking sound came out the other end. His fingers searched for the wineskin that should hang on the wall and refilled Dennis’s glass. “Rinse it down,” he said, and raised his voice slightly, “people in the back, we need more food!”
The reason that the family was so keen on feeding Dennis was a secret hailed by everyone in the village. For he was a musician—a bassoonist—with rare magic and a voracious heart. And it was widely acknowledged that only when his hunger was satiated could he perform his music to the highest level and transcend anyone within earshot to their best selves. A truly remarkable ability that was in great demand in the village and that’s how Dennis literally earned his bread and butter.
It was not until the chill breeze of the dusk settled that Dennis began to lose his gluttonous momentum. Words had spread out that it was in Ike’s house that the musician resided tonight. And the uninvited guests were all congregating outside under the dim glow of the twilight: girls fidgeting on tiptoes, men stomping like horses, hens and geese sneaked into the house through its pophole, while the large animals—cows, pigs, goats—snorted impatiently in the yard.
Finally, the kitchen rang with the clattering of empty plates, and the anxious people perceived the scratching of furnitures moving against the stony floor, the tantalizing purr of a zipper, the low thump of the wooden instrument being handled, and a series of loud belches of the musician which, in the ears of the outsiders, was not unlike a countdown to the New Year’s Eve.
Inside, a space was cleared out. Dennis sat in the center, the twenty-four brothers circled around. In between the legs of the brothers snuggled the hens; a few of the younger ones chirped timidly. Standing at the corner was Ike, supporting his mother who reclined heavily against the bedhead. Under a flickering candle, the shadow of the family trembled, and the giant, holding the laminated woodwind like a cannon in the half light—slowly and formally—placed the excited reed between his luscious lips.
The music was recalled from the sky, and flew in like silk, through the cleaves in the clay roof, and looped around everything and everyone. Ike took off his shades, and through tears, he saw the dingy shebang had transcended into a lush ballroom. The magic had morphed stools into bongos, plates into cymbals, and pans into tambourines, all of which the twenty-four brothers played accompanying the bassoonist. The hens clucked along, laying eggs in a dozen, and the milk unleashed by the cow had overflown ten buckles. Girls rushed in, their peasant smocks dissolved into flying skirts the instant they passed the door. Even Ike’s father had come back as a ghost, with the same aquiline nose and a magnificent beard that rivaled any man in the room, waltzing with a beautiful lady who Ike just recognized as his mother. Flat-bellied, hairs tied into a bun with a golden string, and in heels as shiny as fairy lights on a christmas tree, she glowed as if she was the one conjured back to life.
The magic music meandered through the crowd: it transformed a goat into a satyr whose cloven hoof tapped happily around a lady with traces of red welts on her face, revitalized a timid girl who twirled in a green gown amid a wall of mesmerized gentlemen, and made a young man so charming that he was later seen being chased into a corner by a multitude of girls. The music bumped into the charatan, dressed in a three-piece tuxedo, on his way out with three eggs poached from the over-occupied hens, and a piglet under his arm. Suddenly, infused by the magic, the piglet gained a hundred pounds and dropped to the ground with a thud, and three live chickens flapped out of the magician’s lapels like white doves. Amazed by the brazenness of such mortal magic, the amiable crowd clapped to the startled performer, who with a reddened face, bowed himself out of the back door.
The luminous party went on for two hours till Dennis was too tired to blow another stream of air. Then all the light passed out, and the music tumbled into a clatter of silverwares onto the floor. With cries of dismay, the guests—men and animals—left the dark house with their noses and beaks in the air. The rosy flagrance of the girls had flown out of the window, without a single bout of echo. The last to leave was Dennis, who apologized profusely with his last ounce of breath.
“Don’t worry bud,” Ike walked him out the door, “I’ll still have your solar panel fixed by tomorrow.”
The thumping footsteps of the last guest dissipated into the dark. The door creaked close again behind the shaded man. The house lapsed into its usual cruel silence, or maybe more so tonight.
Francis' Life 