John Paul Cacioppo

All I Can Offer You Are Complications

5: Traveling Story

1517

Escante never saw his children past the age of four, but he lived on in their house in the form of stories. Some were true and some were not, but one of them – which rained down for many generations, was told by himself on the night of his youngest born’s birth. He spoke it to his wife and his children, who were all laying in the same large cot.

The young baby, Rory, hadn’t learned how important crying was yet while the other two – the twins – had realized its consequences, so the children remained quiet as their father spoke on top of a titled tin can that had been meant for cow’s milk. Their mother laid with the baby in her arms and the two other children at each side, breathing softly to the rhythm of her husband’s voice.

This would be one of the last stories that he’d come to tell them. It’s one that his wife would think about often. Escante hadn’t realized it then, nor did he ever realize it during the rest of his living life, but he wanted it to be that way. He needed the escape of a life in a town where he raised his own kids; however, his family needed his story engrained in them in a way that left its print. Regardless of whether they understood it or not, Escante spoke the story with such a voracity that they had to respect its meaning. That much he ensured. That much, he gave to them as their inheritance in this life and the next.

Escante’s story went like this:

A blue man with a red beard pulled out a fish from the riverbed, dragging it away from its mother – the water. The man than took the fish into his home and placed it in a jar for his other pets to watch. You see, the man was a collector of pets and animals, and he had all of the finest specimens. Or so his neighbors thoughts. But what they didn’t know was that the animals hated each other and fought amongst each other with a rabid ferocity, and this fish that came up from the riverbed was unprepared for this. The fish could only wish and wish for its mother, the water, to save it but it did nothing. What truly kept the fish safe was the its jar that the other animals could not scratch. The reason this jar had become unscratcheable was because of a trick done by the blue man with the red beard, involving a string and an ancient spell. Unfortunately, this turned the fish into an easy sport for the other animals to play with and torment.

So the fish came up with a solution. It would peel its own scales until another fish appeared to be in the tank with it, and with this second image – the fish played tricks for the other animals and entertained them day in and day out until one day the animals began to grow older. Old enough that they could all leave on their own, but as each one traveled off to their own land and their own adventure, the fish realized that they were still stuck in the jar that now became its home. There was no way for the fish to leave the jar, so it convinced the last of the animals to take it off the man’s shelf and roll it down to the river. And they did, but when the fish found the water – its mother – nothing was the same. It had gone dark and muddy, and the fish was still trapped in that jar, so it told the animals to set it down where it would float and follow the current to wherever its next destination went.

And as the fish traveled, it saw many things. More things than any other animal that the man with the blue beard had brought into his home, and soon enough other enough other animals who had known its tormentors would ask it for help and advice. The fish would become something great and golden, but its jar would never change. It would always be full with two fish, the fake and the real, and no one would know which one to talk to. The fish never knew how to stop this, so one day it tore up the scales and showed every animal what it truly was and despite the fish’s worries, no animal dared to be cruel to it from that point on. The fish had gained something, but it didn’t know what it was. It could never see it because the jar was full of tiny, broken scales that never went away.

The reason Escante said all of this was because he lived in stories – lived for stories. Each decision he made had been carefully tailored with the story in mind because that’s how he learned to handle his worth. Naturally, it had not been from his mother or how her blood made him a bastard-child; nor, had it been from his father who simply shooed money in Escante’s way as an act of silence. Instead it had been his peers, who had chosen to torment him in their free time and ignore him at all other points. He’d never known what was worse, but he learned what was best and that had been the times he could make them smile or gasp or look at him with something besides disinterest or contempt.

His family would never understand this because his story could never truly include them, since they were not what the audience desired. Had he ever known that the spectators could change, then maybe things would have gone differently, but that thought hadn’t crossed his mind when he parted the village that his family would come to live in. It wouldn’t even be in his thoughts when he died. But there would be a couple times when the audience around him could see the family that they left behind.

It would happen when a child would fall on the road or came up to them begging for money. The gentleness in Escante’s actions despite the few gruff words he spoke around these young ones had told the men that he traveled with much more than he wanted them to know. Stories would circulate around him and not the kinds that he would have wanted – none of the heroics of his warrior life.

Those stories that he desired were only ever told through his children who waited for the father that would never return, and those stories were spoken by their mother, Penelope, who had loved Escante once (and who would still claim to love him today). The two oldest would find themselves disillusioned early and young, but it was the youngest – Rory, who’d keep the stories near his heart and create his own as he lived out his days and eventually found himself mourning a man he’d never honestly met.

This figure that Rory took up into his mind wasn’t like anyone that Escante could be in a given day. Not even his lovers, whom he’d have numerous of, would find this spirit in him. The closest he’d come to being the man that his children could imagine would be during his time in battle when others told him what action to take and what heroic thing to do. He’d be especially skilled, and he’d live past the wars and battles that called him in. His death wouldn’t be that of a warrior, instead it would be the death of time.

Death would lay a siege on his body, taking him until he stood like a shriveled branch about to crack at its end. Nobody would care for him, especially not when he became a beggar, holding out a cloth sack to the women he had formerly swooned. It’d be like this that he’d travel from town to town by cart and good fortune until he finally stopped his own heart by dropping into the water-well of a town that hadn’t offered to gift him a moldy piece of bread.

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