Folklore

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The Vagabond

Once a gaunt and bedraggled man crept out of the night into the light of a little hut in a clearing into the circle of the warmth of the fire that flickered there.

Amongst a small but curious crowd he drew forth from his dirty sack with trembling hand a silver flute and began to play in halting quavering tones (indeed if one could call it playing) a pitiful, plaintive, desperate tune as if squeezed and wrenched from his pathetic instrument the very last wretched drops of the dregs of the notes of the swan song of his sorry soul. And so sick, so sorry and so tentative was the sound of the song(indeed if one could call it that)that the crowd could not bear to hear it, for it was stark nakedness they heard there in that dwarfed down night, his ghostly shivering nakedness, his ghastly quivering inner nudity.

So embarrassed were they that night that it haunts them still, though they have all long gone their separate ways, yet they still hear it and feel it vibrating as if it was their own nakedness. It is not a tune or notes that are remembered so much as the fact that the unspeakable and unthinkable should have happened at all, should have intruded to take form at all in the lewdly vulnerable rawness of a vagabond flautist, should have taken shape at all in his miserable motheaten music. (indeed if one could ever call it that after all) And no matter if he still lives today and plays a very different tune on another flute in a very different way unknown to them, it's too late now to undo completely the shame of what happened then and cannot seem to totally nullify that night's bittersour anthem, its so abominably fearful and shakey little anthem.

And so some reading this may say,"Hey, just get over it, ok?" And some who were there would say back, "We want to and we hope we are, but we haven't found it all to be quite that quick or easy."

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