The Reasonable Ogre

by Mike Barnes

  The other two nodded slowly, unable to find fault with his logic, though the mention of death perturbed them a little. It was a detail that tended to get lost in their discussions. But they found no flaw in the scheme itself, and envied its simplicity.

  “Well, good luck finding your own!” said the beggar with the scheme, getting to his feet. With a grin at the rock, he strode off importantly into the crowds heading toward the city, showing more energy in his step than his friends had ever seen.

  A few days later, having concluded that the scheme was just hot air after all, hollow boasting of the kind they were all expert at, they were astonished to wake up from a doze at the sound of their companion’s name coming at them from every direction. People were yelling it, hissing it, asking it, whispering it; some were even blubbering it with tears streaming down their faces. People going to the city, and people coming from it. Suddenly, his name was common as a curse. What’s up? they asked a passerby, who was shocked that they hadn’t heard. At a concert, their former companion had shot a beautiful and beloved young singer, her name familiar even to the indolent beggars. Her outraged fans had beaten him to death on the spot.

  The two beggars absorbed this news in stunned silence. He had done it, after all. Though being beaten to death by a multitude didn’t sound quite like the clean and painless exit he had imagined.

  “Still,” one said, “for sheer sloth, his achievement will be hard to top.”

  Some days later, the two were awakened from an afternoon nap by the chink of coins dropping into their begging cap. They looked up to see a smartly-dressed young woman looking down at them. She carried a notepad and pen.

  “Excuse me,” she said. “But I’m a reporter investigating—” And she mentioned the murdered celebrity and his killer, their former begging companion. Doing her research, she’d met a man from a flophouse who claimed to have known the killer. He told her a fantastic story of the god Sloth and the deal he’d offered to find suitable minions; over a bottle of cheap wine, the killer had babbled it to him. Other reporters had dismissed it as a lunatic’s drivel. But she smelled a story that, true or not, might be worth something, and had followed the lead of—she checked what was written in her notebook—“two worthless fools killing time outside the city gates.”

  “Would that be you?” she asked hesitantly.

  The two nodded eagerly, too indolent even to take offence. They’d been feeling slighted that in all the furor their names had never come up. Quickly, the reporter got down to business. Her magazine was prepared to pay good money for exclusive rights to the story. All they had to do was give her a detailed interview and let her take a couple of pictures. She named the figure they’d earn. The two gaped at each other, unable to hide their shock that, without their moving a muscle, money and fame were coming to find them. At the same time, staring at each other, a devious look came into their eyes. One of them beat the other to the punch.

  “I can give you everything you need. There’s no need to involve him at all,” he said, jerking his thumb at the other, who made no protest. “But I’ll take twice what you’re offering. And rather than interview me, you write down the story just as you heard it, and if it looks okay, I’ll sign my name.”

  The reporter wrinkled her nose in distaste, but agreed to his terms, saying she’d be back soon. The story-selling beggar sat back, pleased with himself, sure that for receiving money and fame for a signature, he’d not only outdone his predecessor, but set the bar too low for anyone else to crawl under. He directed a look of satisfaction at his companion, who seemed unconcerned, and then a broad smile at the rock, Sloth’s clerk, who looked back just as impassively.

  When the reporter returned, the story-seller looked over her pages and saw that she had what she needed. Minus a few unimportant details, she’d dug up the whole chain of outlandish events, from Sloth’s appearance to their friend’s eager departure for the city. He double-checked the spelling of his own name. Then scrawled his signature at the bottom. The lawyer handed him a cheque and snapped his picture.

  “Now that we’re done,” she said, taking a careful step back toward the road, “I don’t mind saying that your way of life sickens me. I feel dirty just dealing with you.” She turned to the third beggar, who still hadn’t said a thing. “How does it feel,” she smirked, “to come last in a race of losers? Don’t you even have one detail to add to my story?”

  “Just this,” he said. “Be sure to mention who won the prize without even signing his name.”

  And, rising with more alacrity than he’d shown in years, he walked straight into the path of an oncoming truck, beaming at the rock right up to the moment of impact.

  The bested beggar gaped, then scowled, as the reporter hurried away from the scene.

  The next time Sloth importuned the other gods for helpers, he told this story, which had made the rounds and got back to him eventually. The other gods roared with laughter at the hapless beggars and at Sloth’s presumption in trying to justify himself by so sorry an undertaking. The god presiding that day said:

  “You’re deluded if you think it’s any challenge to get men to throw away their lives. Still, you’ve given us some entertainment, which is more than we’ve had from you before. Let us consider your needs, and provide you with the assistance you deserve.”

  Shrugging, Sloth shambled off. After some detours he returned home to find his clerk, the rock, waiting for him. Circling it, he saw that it offered him a seat, a backrest, and a patch of shade for sleeping—amenities he’s been taking advantage of ever since.

  The Glass Garden

  “Unlucky the child with old, sick parents,” runs the saying, “for she grows up too soon.” But curses usually work as well in reverse, and Penelope was unlucky in just the opposite way: her parents were so perennially young and strong, happy as a pair of newlyweds and without a wrinkle or care between them, that there seemed no need for their daughter to grow up at all. And yet, surrounded by games and laughter, with parents more fun than she could ever hope to be, Penelope did develop serious ways early on. While her parents frolicked like a couple of kids, she was sober and unsmiling (which her parents and their friends loved to tease her for, saying she could steal men’s hearts for the price of a dimple), a fine-boned girl with dark eyes to match her hair, who was happiest when tucked up in some corner of the house by herself, reading book after book.

  “Come and see our scholar at work,” her parents would cry at the parties they loved to give, and flinging open the door to the room Penelope was in, would announce to the friends behind them, “There she is, burning the midnight oil!” And the friends would laugh good-naturedly and pat her on the head, saying, “Don’t wear out your eyes. Or your brain!” And Penelope would smile back, partly because she was mannerly and polite, but also because she knew they meant no harm and merely loved a good time, unable to understand the things that gave her pleasure. And therein lay a kind of safety, too. She loved her charming, heedless parents, but she learned early on to keep a prudent distance from them. They loved beautiful things, but they were hard on them. And she had no wish to be swept to the floor and smashed, like the wine glasses and porcelain plates that kept getting batted off tables by people telling boisterous jokes. A bit like a spy in her own house, she picked her way carefully from day to day, observing her parents at play and figuring out what they wanted and when, and keeping to herself her own wishes and intentions.

  If this makes her sound cold or unhappy, that is wrong. For dreams and desires hopped like rabbits in her head; it was only that she knew she was in a place where very few of these warm, small creatures should venture out into the open.

  Her parents kept a large, flourishing garden behind their house; and though they were wealthy enough to employ a gardener (and did not need to work at anything unless they chose), they loved to be outdoors and active in the sun. And that is where their pale, bookish daughter often came upon them: two sun-dark, shapely people, her mother reaching to pi
ck a pear while her father planted a kiss on her outstretched golden throat; or her father crouching to weed between the vegetables, while her mother ran her hand through his thick brown curls. “Oops, a little ghost just spied us,” one or the other would say, emerging from their stolen moment to catch sight of their daughter. “Better not give her any ideas,” her father would grin, looking a trifle embarrassed at being caught. “She doesn’t have those kinds of ideas,” her mother would say, a little more tartly, narrowing her eyes at the intruder. But before the moment could lengthen too uncomfortably, the lovers would resume poking and teasing each other, their eyes twinkling with private jokes, and their daughter, thankful to be forgotten, would be hurrying away on her own errand.

  Usually she was on her way to her glass garden.

  THE GLASS GARDEN was hers because nobody else wanted it. It was laid out in a corner of the property that no one but Penelope ever visited, a neglected place though a protected one, first by the paving stones surrounding the oval bed, then by a low wrought-iron fence, about two feet high, around the perimeter, which together ensured that no one could blunder accidentally among the delicate stems and petals. Someone had taken the trouble to shield the garden, though who that might be neither of her parents could say. History was not something that interested either of them, for obvious reasons. They were having too much fun to think of the world as anything but a carnival that had popped into existence yesterday, with them as its first two giggling visitors.

  She listened for a moment, to make sure the voices laughing and calling were still distant, before she stepped over the fence and knelt at the edge of the glass garden. It was a wonder. Clear glass stems suffused with greenish light; tall tulips in orange-and-pink, brilliant yellow, red—luscious cups whose dregs were smoky brown stamens tipped with beads of honey pollen; velvety roses, pink and red and white; purple and blue hyacinth clusters; tall blades of iris, orange puffs of marigold; glass flowers of all kinds, even, down near the ground, for variety, the little green and purple mounds of hen and chickens—and all shot through with the sunlight caught by the facets of glass and sent shooting and bouncing in a hundred different directions, with a dozen moods and characters: softly pulsing and throbbing on cloudy days, fiercely glinting on bright; hurting the eyes with glitter when the snow lay round about and multiplied and intensified the reflections. Even the bed’s porcelain base had been done in a deep earthy brown, which showed through between the witty litter of straw and wood chips worked this way and that, as if strewn, above it.

  With all of its maker’s art of patient and loving attention glancing from every detail, the glass garden was Penelope’s natural home. She felt connected through it to the slow, steady pulse of art—and, through that, to the pulse of the unseen artist, with whom she was more than a little in love. Years had passed, inside her parents’ endless sunny day; and though her parents took no notice, or noticed but then forgot, she had left childhood behind. Not only was she capable of romantic ideas, as her mother’s narrowed eyes accused, but these consumed her thoughts. But, as always, her dreams differed from those of her parents. If theirs belonged to the knight and princess phase of romance—stolen glances and kisses behind a screen of grape leaves—then hers already looked beyond this to something older and quieter; and outside the castle walls, too, beyond king and queen to a vision of two scholars reading by the fireside, looking up from their books to share a moment, a memory. The stolen glance and kiss were still there, but more refined, more (in her view) rounded and intoxicating, as the cup of finished wine is to the grape buds it started from.

  Dreaming such thoughts, she stared into the restlessly flickering fire of the glass garden. Cautious almost to a fault, she seldom reached out to touch it, and when she did so, she would only let a trembling finger graze a flat and sturdy-looking surface—a veined green leaf, say, at the base of a stalk—whose smooth coolness still surprised, though not as much as when summer sun made it hot, like the rim of a dish left too near an oven.

  ONE DAY AFTER a rain, when she was tending her garden, as she put it, she heard a small, bright sound in the damp air. She listened. When it came again, she recognized the trill of a cricket, calling from somewhere nearby. Peering into the grass beyond the wrought-iron fence, she cocked her head when it chirped again, but as usual, the tiny voice seemed to hop about, coming from here, then here, and she could not locate the source. Silence. And she waited. The next chirp seemed to come from right beside the fence, from the slick grass blades almost touching it. She stared at the spot without blinking, waiting to see the grass stems twitch when it crawled, which was about the only way the little black ventriloquist would betray its position. What if it springs right into the glass garden!? she thought, picturing the black and hard-shelled—but living—body moving its long legs among the rigid glass stems. It gave her a queasy thrill to imagine it, and she realized she had never seen a living creature among the glass blooms: not a ladybug, not a wayward toad, not even a butterfly or cabbage moth flitting above them. Even such small creatures know where their living lies, she thought, a little sadly.

  The cricket trilled loudly, clear and close. With a start, she realized it was already in the garden. There! behind the rose stems!—the sound sprang out again, sharp as glass within the glass; and without thinking she plunged her hand in after it, hungry to trap or rescue it; perhaps even to crush it—in her eagerness she couldn’t say.

  Her thumb caught one of the rose stems as she slipped her hand between them. It broke with a clean snap, and fell into splinters on the porcelain bed. Oh! She darted a look behind her, her heart catching when she realized she couldn’t hear her parents, who were seldom quiet; but she couldn’t see them either, and she turned back to the damaged garden, hearing her own heart thudding in her chest. There she saw the cricket that had started it all, making its way along the cedar chip illusion. Except—

  Leaning in to get a better look, she saw that it was no illusion. A real black cricket made its way slowly—even a bit ponderously, like an old man with a pack on his back, she thought smiling—along a trail of wood chips and straw that were just as real as it was. She could almost smell—or she could smell! very faintly—the spice of the damp wood chips, the must of the straw bits; and, leaning even closer in, she saw the cricket’s feet slip and scramble on the chips and then sink into the crumbled earth between them. Beside this little scene, and ahead of it, were the coloured porcelain and stems of the glass garden’s base, and where the two scenes met was a thin wavery blur, a film of humid air not quite in focus. As she watched, entranced, this film, and the harder edges around it, pressed in upon the cricket-walk-scene from all sides, making it shrink and then suddenly wink from view, as if a door had closed slowly but firmly, and then swiftly, with a click. Like a figure in one of her books who has witnessed something uncanny, she rubbed her eyes and stared, and rubbed her eyes and stared—but nothing changed anymore in front of her. The glass garden was as it had always been.

  That night she had a dream. The dream seemed like a continuation of what had happened in the glass garden. Both times she felt as if a door had opened suddenly and she was standing on the threshold peering through at what went on beyond it. Her eyes felt rinsed by the newness of what she saw. She peered eagerly, and a bit anxiously, stuffing her eyes with details, knowing that the door would swing shut just as suddenly—she felt it poised on its hinges. Ahead of her stood a man in a study or library; an older man, dignified and well-dressed, he stood with his back to her, looking out a small window. Penelope couldn’t see what was beyond the window, but the light that came through it, flowing around him, together with the bookshelves reaching to the ceiling on either side of the window, made him seem to be standing in a stained glass window, or an illuminated page in a book, whose title might be Knowledge. Or, thought Penelope in her dream, Freedom. The brightness of the light coming from outside made the room seem shadowy, though it was daytime, and the shadow thickened back from the window to where sh
e stood watching, in a kind of night. The scene seemed silent at first, so silent she might have heard a clock ticking; but then she was aware of a low droning music, a kind of chanting, or rumbling, that she then—these changes happened at abrupt, but regular, intervals, as if she were climbing step by step into another world—understood was the man speaking, in a calm low voice, but in a language she didn’t know. I’m dreaming, she thought, and then, I wonder if he’ll turn. The possibility set up a gnawing in her stomach, and she thought firmly, Time to wake up. Open your eyes.

  But her eyes were already open, she realized. She was staring at her own bedroom, with its smaller shelves of books, and its dolls and figurines, gifts of holidays past. These things still partook of the scene in the library, one dark replacing the other only slowly, the man staring out his window where her dolls stared back at her. The transposition only sped up at the end, hastening to that click. Just as the glass garden had reclaimed the space occupied briefly by the cricket. Slowly swinging . . . shutting . . . shut.

  Was I dreaming? she thought. Where was I? Where am I? And her thoughts swam confusingly, though she did not feel tired in the least.

  The next morning, while her parents picked strawberries in adjacent rows—bobbing up every so often with a cry to tuck an especially plump one into the other’s mouth, or—“Unh unh”—to tease and pop it into one’s own—Penelope stepped over the iron fence and went round to the other side of the glass garden from where she’d knelt the day before. There was no back or front to the garden, since the rows were arranged to face out all ways and the paving stones allowed an approach from every side, but on this side she was near the hedge that marked the edge of their property, close to a shed where the former owners had probably kept tools. Standing here gave her a view back through the gardens to her house—a safer view, she’d always known, letting her see anyone coming, but also distracting her from the glass garden itself. Today, though, was not a day to get lost in daydreams. Today she needed to keep her house in view.