MYTHS AND LEGENDS
SO IT’S TEN-THIRTY, THERE’S NO MORE CHAI, AND “SYMON SAYS” IS A RERUN (THE ONE WHERE SYMON AND MICKEY GET STUCK IN THE GYNECOLOGIST’S OFFICE), SO I TURN TO THE KEYBOARD: BECAUSE I HAVE GOT TO WRITE THIS PAPER, THIS PLAY, FOR DRAMA, INTRODUCTION TO DRAMA, I NEVER ASKED TO BE INTRODUCED BUT MR. BANKS WAS SUPPOSED TO BE AN EASY GRADER. SO HERE I AM, TRYING TO PICK A TOPIC. THE PAPER’S DUE IN THE MORNING.
Write a one-act play (three pages, at least two characters) about one of the Myths or Legends on the topic list: Mermaid Summer, Thor vs. Loki, Leprechauns and Fairies, When Cupid Met Psyche.) “When Cupid Met Psyche”? Why not “Psycho Psyche,” and she stabs Cupid through the shower curtain in the Olympus Motel? —Actually I didn’t make that one up, Davy did. Davy’s always saying stuff like that, he’s really funny and really smart, so smart that half the time I don’t even get his jokes but I laugh anyway so he won’t think I’m a dumb blonde. Unless he thinks it anyway, but won’t say so because he’s so nice. And he’s amazing-looking, too, did I mention that?
Ten–forty five. Is there really no more chai? No cold soda either? My brother probably drank it all, the slob.
Eleven o’clock. Myths and Legends. Fairy tales.
We have many names, we are everywhere, we have always been. Fire to your clay, we burn, rise as sparks while you stamp and slobber in the mud. We are the stuff of your desires, we grow wild. Wild. Every name you have for us is wrong.
MERMAID: Come with me into the sea.
FISHERMAN: But I can’t swim. And I can’t breathe underwater.
MERMAID: I’ll breathe for you. Just come on.
FISHERMAN: But I don’t even know your name.
MERMAID: That’s OK. You can call me
…NO, THAT’S STUPID, I don’t even like mermaids. What else is there? Leprechauns and fairies, gag. How could anyone believe in that stuff, I mean even in the Dark Ages or whatever people still had to have some common sense? Although according to Mr. Banks their fairies weren’t like the Tooth Fairy and fluffy pink wings and all that. But it’s like believing in, in ghosts or the Twilight Zone or something, the monster under the bed (or the basement, that’s where mine used to be, between the washer and the dryer; when I was little I would never, I mean never go down there in the dark. My mom would ask me to bring up some soda or something, and I’d cry, and my dad or my little brother would have to go instead). How could anyone take that stuff seriously?
Maybe I can write a comedy.
Peri, nökke, liosálfar, troll and droc and mazikeen. Blood-cousin to the fallen angels, the changeling spawn of exiled Adam forced, enticed, to lie with others than Eve; others than human. In those days there were giants in the land, does not the Scripture say so? Your Scripture. We have no written history, we need nothing but now, this breathing moment, our breathing in your ear; do you hear? Did you think it was the wind? An errant branch, a prowling animal?
Your paths are intersections for our travels, our dark sun rides another sky, but sometimes we pass close enough to see, to watch; to touch. Our touch is light, still it leaves a mark. Always it leaves a mark on the mud.
LEPRECHAUN: Always after my Lucky Charms! [He struggles but they hold him tightly. He’s small anyway and can’t get away.] Let me go!
GIRL: Hey don’t have a stroke. We’re going to let you go. In the myths and legends it says you give us three wishes, well we’re not greedy, we just want one apiece. Right Davy?
GUY: Right. And I know what mine is right now. [Kisses GIRL.]
IN THE HALLWAY I hear my mom, saying something to my brother—“Lock the back door, Jamie?” and he just grunts back, nuh-nhug, too disgusting for human speech. Then her knock, tick-tick, her nails against my door; she has great nails, flawless, not all split and chipped like mine. A French manicure every other week, but will she pay for one for me? No. So unfair.
“Are you still up, Elise?”
No, I’m sleeping with my eyes open. “I’m doing homework.”
“Oh. Well, don’t stay up too late, all right? School starts early.”
Door click, her footsteps down the hall. Now my room is lit only by computer light, like an aquarium, like the lights I used to have for my lizards. A glass box filled with green plants and flat grey rocks, when I’d pick up the lizards they’d squirm in my hand, then stop, turn to stone as if they knew there was nothing they could do but wait to be released again. I’d pet them, stroke their pebbly skin, bring them close to look into their eyes, black eyes as flat and otherworldly as, as what? Staring straight up into space, or down a well, you can’t see to the bottom: as if they saw something, knew something I didn’t, and were just waiting for me to see it, too. Or go away. Either way was fine with them.
[They put the leprechaun into a glass cage, like a big aquarium. He stomps and pushes at the walls, but he can’t get out.]
LEPRECHAUN: My power can’t work in a box! You have to set me free!
GIRL: We’ll let you go as soon as you give us our wishes.
GUY: We want
By Kathe Koja
—WELL, WHAT DO THEY WANT? How should I know? What would you wish for, I mean if it were really true, if there were such things as leprechauns or whatever? Not a million more wishes, that never works, or even regular stuff like tons of money or a new car (I’d probably pick a Jaguar, a silver Jag two-seater with burgundy seats). I mean those things would be nice, but—If you really had a wish, one you knew would be granted no matter what, what would you ask for? You’d have to want it a lot, and for always, not just now. And you’d have to be careful, because wishes can turn on you. Like that story we had in Lit last year, where the dead guy gets wished back to life, except he’s not alive, he’s like some horrible zombie even his own mother doesn’t—”The Monkey’s Paw,” right. That must have been some monkey.
Maybe that’s what I should write: “The Leprechaun’s Curse,” like where they wish for something but it gets all inverted and ugly, like the girl wishes they’d— No. I don’t want to write that, I don’t like to think about things like that.
But—but if it was a real leprechaun you captured in some aquarium, why would he, it, whatever, want to grant your wish? even to get free? And even if he did, wouldn’t he want a payback of some kind, revenge for getting caught in the first place?
What if the leprechaun knew what you wanted was bad for you, or just bad in itself, wrong, something that shouldn’t happen? but he gave it to you anyway? Gave it to you because it was wrong? and then laughed when you let him go, jeered at you, like: Enjoy your Jag! and then you wreck and you’re paralyzed? Or The one you want will love you always! peering at you through the glass with flat eyes like my lizards’, like black water in a well, like the sky at night that goes on forever, who knows how long that is? Do you really want to find out? And then he does love you, the guy you want, even when he’s like a hundred years old and all sick and corroded and awful, even when he’s dead, he stays with you.
Always.
You people of the mud, you dream of wishes granted, great gifts bestowed for nothing, as if to grasp must be to gain. Perhaps for you it is, with the simple toys you fancy, baubles like bubbles that burst when the wind rises. But still you are incorrigible, corruptible, you wish, you pray and we hear you, not the clean prayers of the will but the hot, wet, twisting whispers of the meat, the red heart that thinks itself the center of the sun; what sun? What heart? What you believe you want, we give, you get and then you scream, oh! like a slaughtered beast: what a treat.
We answer your desire. Always.
GIRL: Let’s let him go, Davy. It’s wrong to keep him this way, cooped up in there like a lizard.
GUY: But what about our wish?
GIRL: We can make it come true ourselves, if we want to. [They kiss. The leprechaun, who’s sleeping or something, hears them and wakes up. He puts his face against the glass, as if he doesn’t believe what he’s hearing.]
GUY: You’re right, Elise. We’ll take him back to where we found him and just let him go. OK? [He taps the glass.] You want to go back?
LEPRECHAUN [smiles at them]: No, let me go right here.
GUY: OK. [He puts out his hand but the GIRL grabs it back]
GIRL: No don’t! What if it’s a trick?
LEPRECHAUN [still smiling]: Why would I want to play a trick on two nice kids like you? Maybe I can grant your wish after all . . .
GIRL [firmly]:No thanks.
GUY: You’re right again, Elise. [He picks up the aquarium cage.] Let’s go, buddy.
CURTAIN
SO THEY TAKE HIM BACK to the woods, and let him go—and then what? Run back to their car, that’s what I would do, run like hell and don’t look back. And don’t forget to wear your seatbelt on the way home.
That’s the other thing that bugs me about these stories, you know? All these myths, the people in them are always like, Oh, ho-hum, I met a leprechaun today, like it’s nothing. I mean, even if the leprechaun doesn’t screw you over for life it’s still pretty scary, don’t you think? Just to meet a leprechaun, or even Cupid—he’s got arrows, doesn’t he?—to meet some kind of supernatural or extraterrestrial being, even if they don’t do anything, that’s scary. You’re in the woods, gathering sticks or something, and then this bizarre creature crosses your path and even if you end up getting away OK it’s still like, Hey, what just happened? And what if it happens again? Or something even worse? Wouldn’t it make you, I don’t know, kind of jumpy afterwards? Kind of terrified? Like you’d found out what things were really like, out there in the woods.
Twelve-fifty–four; I should stop now, I’m done anyway and I have to be up by six. In the kitchen, something makes a buzzy, thumpy sound: the refrigerator, turning off? Or on? Was it the refrigerator? Maybe it’s my brother, come down for his fiftieth snack of the day. Or my mom, checking the back door again . . . My dad’s in Sausalito, he won’t be back tonight.
I yawn; my eyes are dry and I’m thirsty, really thirsty, for a soda or water or something. But then I’d have to go into the kitchen . . . What’s wrong with going in the kitchen? Did I freak myself out with my own stupid play?
When I shut off the computer, my room will go dark, too. Aquarium light. I kept my lizards for a whole year, almost, but then they died. All at once, like they’d all decided that they were tired of living or something. I came home to feed them after school like I always did, and there they were, just lying there staring at me with their black eyes. I cried and cried, and my dad helped me bury them out by the fishpond.
But what nobody ever knew, what I never told anyone was when I saw them, in their glass box, I screamed. Not because they looked dead. Because they looked mad. At me.
WE ARE NOT EVIL, we of the fire; we are not good. We are: that is enough for you to know, mud heart, there in your hut, twig-house that could not withstand one-hundredth of our heat but we let you go, we have much to do and so little of it in your woods, your world, your blue sphere that rotates in this dark so great no one, not even we, can glimpse its end. We ride that dark, we gather what we need, we take what we deserve: our spoils: your dreams, your breathing infants, your courage in the night. Behind the air that wavers like glass our black eyes watch you: we grow wild in the wild places, and all places, now, are wild.