New Fables
#5—Young Bison & the Grass
#7—The Panda’s Marriage
#11—The Lonesome Locust
One morning, a growing host of locusts marched to yet another land they’d never seen to recruit more comrades for their army. Only here did they find a single prospect, inert and sullen in the dirt.
Ho! shouted the young Captain. Our numbers are growing, sister! Our wings take flight! We will do as the Old Ones did and devour all lands before us!
The Lonesome Locust shifted only her eyes to reply, first to the Captain, then again to the earth. I’m not hungry, not for crops, nor glory, nor coupling. I am afraid to fly, for I know how all campaigns end.
Far above, a shimmering bird sprayed a wide, white mist.
#12—Orpheo the Horse
Four races did he lead four lengths at the last turn, and four times did a rival catch and defeat him. Each time the speeding glints on his periphery disappeared from sight and into the black, liquid dread choking his heart, then his legs, then his Master’s fancy. Then: second place.
Of course, such proximity to success kept a team of busybodies about him, calculating that with better training, improved diet, new shoes, a smaller jockey—victory was so close at hand. The horse knew better.
Then the fifth race, Orpheo led now by five lengths at the last turn and had sustain. His breathing was steady, his jockey a feather, his rivals sucking dust in his wake. But for the new shoes, which upon the home stretch caught hold of some mite, felling the beast and shredding his hind legs to gory mulch.
He knew something would catch him. He knew the Bad Doctor who collected the souls of his barnmates would one day loom at his stall and coo sweetly as a team of men readied chainsaws. Orpheo at last would cease to disappoint.
But in the searing white light of the hospital, the Bad Doctor never appeared. Orpheo awoke to his hind legs cocooned in plaster, and joy in the Master’s eyes. Then those months spent finding his strength. He ran fields instead of tracks, was mounted only by soft children, not leathery jockeys. His Master even saw fit to put him to stud. There were no turns from which to look back.
Noah Drauschak was trained in poetry at Lafayette College & Temple University. He lives in Philadelphia with his fiancée & a demon cat called St. Ray.
On his Fables, he says: “I am presently working on a collection of fables elaborating on the traditions of Kafka, Schopenhauer, Borges & many others. The works range from Absurdist & darkly humorous to pathetic anticlimax to fragile hope. In these fables, I seek to capture storytelling at its most essential — weaving densities of allusion from religion, folklore, philosophy, colonial studies & ecology into a layered & emotionally explosive whole.”