Insect: An Entomological Fairy Tale

By David Keffer

Ethnographers travel to distant lands to collect and study fables and fairy tales in order to better understand existing peoples and their culture. Archeologists must be content to study bone and stone, in order to better understand a people now gone. Surely, an archeologist frequently thinks to herself, “I wonder what these people were like?” Perhaps every once in a blue moon that archeologist even chances to think, “Wouldn’t it be a fine thing to hear a fairy tale from the people who lived within this buried city?” If such a thought can be imagined for a people who have disappeared, think of how much more precious would be the fairy tale of a people who not only no longer exist at the present time but who never existed at all, in this world or in any other. A reasonable soul might consider that such a rare object as that fairy tale would undoubtedly be prized as a cultural treasure of untold rarity and significance. That gentle soul would be wrong, their chain of logic broken along one of its innumerable links, the fairy tale released to flee and dissolve in the atmosphere, it’s molecules dispersed to far corners of the Earth.

The author of “insect: an entomological fairy tale” scoured the globe and collected those molecules. He assembled the molecules into words and ordered those words in a sequence that seemed best to him though there can be little doubt that this sequence corresponds only peripherally to the original fairy tale. It is the best that can be done, since the culture that created the fairy tale is both absent and imagined.

Trapped within a palace following a holocaust, the inhabitants—two queens, one dysfunctional and the other petulant, an angry gardener, a lovelorn soldier, a merry jester, an astral-plane-traveling court magician, a distraught court minstrel and an oracle who hides in the dungeons behind the boiler—seek to make sense of their existence and develop relationships that will allow them to survive in their post-apocalyptic isolation. The memory of the King haunts the palace and animates the denizens who dwell on the palace grounds, including 33 gargoyles, a host of dryads and zombies, a stone goat named Degtyaryov, a wishing well minnow named Hieronymus and a snail named Jesus. If the aftermath of the apocalypse doesn’t consume the palace inhabitants, then perhaps the ambiguous workings of the King will suffice.

“insect: an entomological fairy tale” was written from June to July, 1993, in the summer of the author's first year in graduate school at the University of Minnesota. It is a relatively early work from a person who found a frivolous joy in the act of writing composition and who no longer exists. The absurd influence of Donald Barthelme is both obvious and intentional.

“insect: an entomological fairy tale” contains the only known instance of an aggegration of five coupled sonnets in which each of the 70 lines rhymes with every other line, an abomination against good taste by all accounts.

• Language: English
• Publisher: David Keffer
• Release date: Apr 1, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301137268

David Keffer

David J. Keffer was born in Kansas City, Missouri. He pursued a technical education earning a B.S. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Florida and a Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Minnesota. After a year as a post-doctoral scholar at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C., he began his career as an engineering professor at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, where he remains today. He has published about 100 technical papers in archival journals. He was awarded a Fulbright Grant to learn and to teach about sustainability in Seoul, Korea.Outside of engineering, David Keffer studied world literature and creative writing. He has published analytical articles on the works of Primo Levi and Kobo Abé. He created various reading aids to several classical Chinese novels. Over the past two decades, David Keffer has been active writing novels, poetry and stories. Several novels and illustrated stories are available from the Poison Pie Publishing House at http://www.poisonpie.com.Beginning in 2012, David Keffer began teaching a course on the subject of non-idiomatic improvisational music, of which he is a devoted listener and a topic which has led aided him on an investigation of a literature of non-idiomatic improvisation.David Keffer lives in Knoxville, Tennessee with his wife, Lynn, and two children. As a family, they enjoy hiking through the local mountains and are always on the look-out for poison pie and other ambivalent mushrooms that dot the landscape.

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insect

an entomological fairy tale

by David J. Keffer

written June-July, 1993

Minneapolis, Minnesota

modestly tinkered with in 2012

Knoxville, Tennessee

Copyright © 2013 David J. Keffer

All rights reserved.

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insect

Table of Contents

insect (an initial fragment)

insect (how things happen)

insect (question answered)

insect (appendage of the first party)

insect (present imperfect)

insect (past diminutive)

insect (finders keepers)

insect (raising the dead and things left unsaid)

insect (lost and dying without Jesus)

insect (wrap it up in yesterday’s paper and send it on its way)

insect (epitaph)

insect (an initial fragment)

Holocaust! Everyone dead. Skeleton mish mash of everybody except those who were confined each night to sleep within the palace walls, which shielded them from the bombarding radiation. They lived underground for the most part. That helped too, sleeping beneath rocks.

Who were not inside the walls? Who did Harry S. T.’s hand pass over when he crawled out of the gritty soil, pulled his spectacles out of his breast pocket, unfolded them, and pushed them up the damp bridge of his nose? Harry untied the purple ribbon that held his jaw shut and pulled the silver Walking Liberty dollar off his rotting tongue. Harry brushed the dust of his sports jacket’s elbows, dusted Hiroshima off his right elbow and dusted Nagasaki off his left elbow. Expelled from the earth, Harry shed his dreadful, ashen skin. The breeze sifted it up into the stratosphere where it fell again like hot, dirty water onto everyone: goats in the mountains, sheep in the pastures, cattle on cattle-cars lined up in rail yards and outside of slaughterhouses, and rabbits, crows, dolphins communicating beyond the threshold of human hearing, humpbacks bellowing beneath it, sea turtles scrambling off the beaches, tortoises collapsing on their soft underbellies, penguins, walruses, snakes, earthworms, crawdads, and men, wiping them out, family by family, one species after another. Insects too: moths, ladybugs, lightning bugs, wasps, horseflies, dragonflies, butterflies, roly polies, and beetles rubbed out with a heavy-handed footfall. All that was left remained within the radiation-retarding shelter of the palace walls.

Who were inside the palace walls last night? Who woke to a gray dawn and a dead world? In her lofty tower, Queen Petulant woke with a slight cold, rubbed the sleep from her eyes with the forest green 100% cotton sheets, stumbled over her slippers to the window, peered out the molasses-textured glass, and found it odd that the birds were silent and lying on the back of their wings with their reptilian claws clutched toward the sky.

In her honeycomb, Queen Dysfunctional commented to herself that the honey she poured over her pancakes tasted of rot and fretted over the same dilemma which had greeted her each morning for the last few months: How was a kingdom to be governed with no king and two queens? Would Queen Petulant have mysteriously disappeared during the course of the night? Probably not. If Petulant had vanished, then with whom could she now pass the hazy morning hours, the brilliant hour of noon, the lazy afternoon hours, the quiet, cheerful evening hours, the duty-filled hours of early night, and the somber hour of midnight, in short, all the hours of the day and night which she currently passed in Petulant’s company? Who could replace her if she departed? The two queens were quite splendid anyway, she complimented herself and her complement, a situation not in need of a remedy, a pleasant thought with which she had begun each morning these past few months as her subjects whispered through-out her realm the delightful rumors of the comings and goings of the two monarchs.

In the irrigation ditches, wandering through the flower gardens, in grids crossing the vegetable gardens, between the strips of stalks in the corn fields, dotting through the pear orchards and the pomegranate orchards, wetting the vineyards, trickling through the greenhouses and the arboretums, and emptying in the rice terraces which occupied the grounds between the protective, outer wall and the inner courtyard, water moved. Tsu trounced to the gardener’s shack, splashing mud up to his knees and beyond. He arranged his tools for the morning prayers on a square piece of well-manicured lawn bounded by shallow creeks. He lined them up, approximately parallel, hoe by flat-edged shovel by curved-edged spade by rake by scythe by fruit baskets by colored glass vases waiting to be filled with lilies of the valleys, peonies, or black-eyed susans. He focused on the tools and his put his mind at ease.

In the trenches immediately inside the outer wall, Zhu loosened up and then commenced sprinting the circumference of the palace grounds. He followed the course of the trench counter-clockwise, so that the outer wall remained on his right side. His head bobbed up above ground-level with each stride forward and he examined the wall for any new fissures that might have developed during the night by natural decay or other means. Of course, the wall was flawless, having been crafted to last well-past Zhu’s lifetime and the lifetime of his subsequent re-incarnation as well. He passed through the tended horticulture, scented gardens, orchards of fig trees, olive trees, lime trees, and fields, through the wild woods which were allowed to claim part of the outer grounds surrounding the cemetery until he arrived back at his subterranean barracks where he did push-ups, jumping-jacks, pull-ups, sit-ups, and touch-your-toes, before cleaning and oiling his automatic rifle.

In the cemetery, Tsetse woke grumbling, gathered some deadwood which he used to build a fire and boil some water for coffee, and then waited for it, crouching down behind a tombstone, out of the morning chill. When the kettle began to whistle, he retrieved a satchel sitting down at the bottom of an as-of-yet unoccupied grave, beneath his cloak and blanket. On his hands and knees he crawled about the cemetery, examining the clumps of grass and soil, pausing over this or that clump, digging up small glass vials buried several inches deep, swishing the contents of the vial, be they liquid or powder, against the sky, and then either reburying it or stuffing it in his satchel. Having covered the grounds, as a squirrel might, searching for hidden acorns, Tsetse reclined against a marble slab and removed a small pair of tweezers which had been tucked above one of his ears. From the satchel, he produced a mortar and pestle with which he then proceeded to fill with pinches of ingredients of his gathering and to grind the concoction. Having rendered the leaves, pills, drops of philters, and seeds into a clumpy paste, he dissolved it in his coffee and drank it down, grumbling all the while, glad to be grumbling in the company of so many grumbling-less dead. He imbibed this mixture daily to provide him with a full supplement of vitamins, a hearty constitution, a willingness to learn, and a resistance from evil spirits, curses, premature death, and radiation.

In the courtyard, beneath the window of Queen Petulant’s bed-chamber, FIE dreamed of singing, disembodied angelic voices too high-pitched and rushed to be soothing. In their haste, the voices lost their timing, the harmony shattered, the melody battered, and FIE woke singing himself, continuing the song as it ought to have been continued, in his opinion, as it ought to sound in the morning of a holocaust, when there is no possibility of discovering meaning in lyrics or one’s dreams. Petulant opened the window farther, leaned out, and stared down at him. Blushing with pleasure, FIE bowed deeply and craned his neck up as he sang, so he might better please her.

In the throne room, swinging above the checkered floor, square obsidian tiles and square jade tiles, in a canvas hammock strung between two side pillars, folded ornately patterned squares of paper into origami praying mantises, then dropped them onto the floor beneath her, where they moved in and out of her shadow, into the flickering torchlight, casting their own shadows, and out of the torchlight, the hammock eclipsing them. The 33 gargoyles, who lined the side walls leading up to the two thrones, were permitted to speak only when the hall was vacated, but had taken to speaking in ‘s presence, and hers alone. She kept their transgressions in her confidence and the secrets which they divulged in the privacy of her abysmal heart. This is what the gargoyles were saying on that morning following the holocaust. ‘Holocaust!’ said one. ‘We’re lucky our bodies are made of stone,’ replied a chorus of rough, gargling voices. ‘And lucky our hearts are made of glass,’ added a solitary gargoyle. ‘No, our eyes are made of glass,’ contradicted another, ‘our hearts are made of plumbum.’ An argument ensued in which the gargoyles were evenly split between glass and plumbum, the last undecided, or decided halfway on both. A small gargoyle voice (Only the voice was small. In physical appearance, all the gargoyles were identical, except for the expressions of mischief on their faces which were as diverse as the stars, ranging from red giants to blue dwarfs.) piped up, ‘It’s academic. It wouldn’t have mattered glass or plumbum or even argentum, aurum, or platinum. Even the stone outside has melted. The diamonds have dripped out of the bases of wedding rings, fused with the ashes of the metacarpus, and the diamonds have flowed off the cartridges of phonographs, boiling the vinyl of the finest overtures. The purest sentiments have melted from the most single-minded hearts. We are lucky only because we live inside the palace walls.’ The chorus agreed, complimenting the meeker voice on its wisdom. removed a pencil with red lead from behind her ear and began recording the gargoyles names on the inside of her papers before she folded life into them.

In the cellar, neck cramped, legs stiff, back sore, crouching behind the brass boiler, e cried. He directed each of his tears into a funnel which emptied into the boiler. He gnawed on a pipe until his teeth hurt. He watched the images form in a porthole on the side of the metal tank, foretelling the future, the vast expanses of infertile soil, without so much as sparse patches of weeds or underground tubers, without so much as a single field mouse scavenging for sustenance. He saw the atmosphere still, endlessly, devoid of motion except for the tumbling of brittle leaves, yellowed newspaper classifieds, strands of hair, and the same even dust coating everything, lifting up in a gust of wind and recoating everything.

It was Queen Dysfunctional’s second indication that something was amiss, the first being that her honey tasted like rot, the second, tasting her oracle’s tears in her morning tea.

According to legend, the palace was situated on Mount Ararat. A geodesic dome capped the entire palace: outer grounds, inner courtyard, and palace proper. The hemisphere was formed of a grid of triangular panes, the glass doped with lead (Pb), protecting those inside the palace like the out-spread wings of the arch-angel Umbriel. The glass itself was almost entirely transparent, dimming the sun unnoticeably. The metal skeleton of the dome, holding the panes together, cut the sun’s rays into wedge-shaped slices as they fell in fractured shadows onto blithe faces sheltered beneath it.

The only entrance or exit from the dome was provided by a short tunnel that ran through a shallow stratum of earth, traveled through an underground hole in the glass barrier and then rose to emerge outside in a small glade, which had been decorated with clover and pansies, and encircled by a ring of oak trees. The location of the entrance to the tunnel from inside the dome changed periodically and it was the duty of the soldier, Zhu, to see that it did not stay in any one place too long. By tacit agreement, Zhu then did not reveal the new location of the entrance to any other residents of the palace. In fact, though, the gardener, Tsu, who had the shovels and plenty of wheelbarrows, often lent a hand in digging a new entrance to the tunnel and hauling the dirt in the squeaking, wobbling wheelbarrows from the new site to fill the hole left by the old entrance. For this reason, Tsu, in addition to Zhu, was privy to the location of the tunnel entrance.

The location of the tunnel entrance outside the dome was not subject to change, remaining within the ring of oaks, where it was the intention of the long-dead, superstitious architects of the palace that a living wooden ring about the entrance would serve a two-fold purpose. The first fold of this purpose was to prohibit unwanted visitors from entering the palace grounds. This intent was accomplished by the oaks, with their massive trunks, shielding the entrance from the sight of travelers wandering through the forest. The second folded purpose of the ring of oaks as laid forth by the architectural ancestors both embarrassed and charmed the current palace residents. The oaks were planted for dryads, the feminine tree spirits, to possess and inhabit, in hopes they might migrate, eventually, through the tunnel and into the woods within the geodesic dome. It was universally considered back then, that is, at the time of the palace construction, (read year = 0 P.C.), an extremely fortunate circumstance to have dryads on the property, tending the woods, devouring marauders, seducing the young men, thus preserving the chastity of the young maidens. Universally considered fortunate, except for that tiny corner of the universe where the young maidens sat alone dismally playing Mah Jong with their tutors instead of young men. The current residents were shamed at their ancestors’ primitive gullibility, but they were charmed by the simplicity of their logic.

insect (how things happen)

What does one do on the morning following the holocaust?

The eight inhabitants of the palace—excluding the gargoyles who rarely blinked or twitched, much less shifted from one perch to another, excluding the dryads in the wild woods, excluding the zombies who lay against the soil of the cemetery trying to get in, and excluding the termites who burrowed determinedly in the dungeon—gathered in the inner courtyard next to the drawbridge. They stood in a straight line, side by side, each facing beyond the drawbridge, lowered across the algae-coated moat, toward the fields. After some minutes of standing in this manner, Queen Dysfunctional deemed it unsatisfactory and ordered them to form a regular octagon, each facing inward, staring at the knees of the person located in the corner directly opposite them. Again, in a matter of minutes, this stance was deemed unsatisfactory, this time by Queen Petulant, who rearranged them into a regular hexagon, gently directing each person into their corners by gripping them from behind by their shoulders and aiming them toward it, releasing them, only when they were in the proper position. She then took Queen Dysfunctional in the same manner and herded her to the center of the hexagon, where they stood, with excellent posture, back to back.

‘This is most satisfactory,’ Queen Dysfunctional admitted. ‘I must commend you on your keen eye for geometry, Queen Petulant.’

‘Unnecessary,’ she replied with a terseness that belied the beaming pleasure on her face, unseen to her counterpart. ‘Please begin.’

Queen Dysfunctional’s voice boomed out in the morning stillness, ‘Tsu!’

‘Yes, my Highness,’ he answered in a similarly amplified voice, not moving from his position.

‘That’s your Highness,’ she corrected him. How someone who had worked in the palace for decades could continue to get simple things like the proper honorific salutation wrong day after day was beyond her. Still, he was an excellent gardener and allowances had to be made.

‘Yes, your Highness,’ Tsu repeated.

‘Tsu! What are you going to do today?’

He took off his straw, farmer’s hat with one hand and placed it over his heart. With the other hand, he raised the crowbar he held to attention, as if it were a rifle, and replied, ‘Today, I am going to venture into the sewer system and remove any detritus which may have collected at the grills that screen the water as it enters the palace grounds.’

Queen Dysfunctional nodded approvingly. ‘See to it also that these birds whose claws are clenched in rigor mortis toward the sky are cleaned up off the lawn and properly disposed of.’

‘Yes, your highness,’ Tsu replied, replacing his straw hat and lowering the crowbar.

‘Zhu!’ Queen Petulant called out.

Zhu, who was wearing a balaclava helmet and did not remove it, raised his crossbow to attention. ‘Yes, your Highness.’

Queen Petulant wrinkled her nose in distaste. ‘For my part, you may feel free to address me as my Highness, which I prefer, as it implies intimacy, which I am not adverse to.’

‘Yes, my Highness,’ a smiling Zhu responded.

‘Zhu! What are you going to do today?’

‘Today, I am going to patrol the rim of the geodesic dome and defend my and your Highnesses from the eventuality of attack by marauding bands of bandits and hordes of princes, seeking to plunder your treasure vaults and your delightful hands.’

‘Will you venture into the wild woods to see that no harm has come to the dryads?’

‘At your bidding,