The Chimera

By David Frankel

The Chimera is a fantastic creature and a configuration of several different human and animal spirits.

In this tale, three women dominate the novella and offer their compelling testimony to the power and the mystery of imagination.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Nov 15, 2014
• ISBN: 9781496949011

David Frankel

David Frankel was born in Salford and raised on the westerly fringes of Manchester. His short stories have been shortlisted in several competitions including The Bristol Prize, The Bridport Prize, The ALCS Tom-Gallon Trust Award, The Willesden Herald, and the Fish Memoir Prize. His work has been published in numerous anthologies and magazines, and also in a chapbook by Nightjar Press. He also writes nonfiction exploring memory and landscape.

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© 2014 David Frankel. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 11/13/2014

ISBN: 978-1-4969-4900-4 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4969-4901-1 (e)

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Contents

Ismadi

Tsetse

Quincetta

Ismadi

I smadi endured the last vengeful stone hurled at her head. The shattering painful impact spread throughout her body like an irresistible cataract which threatened to drown her in the wake of its ferocity.

The sharpened edges of the jagged rocks cut deeply into her scalp. Her forehead, face and breasts bled from a hundred lacerations which glistened crimson in the harsh Sinai sunlight.

The villagers of Hamadi and Harad, the birthplaces of the condemned woman and her lover, meted out the punishment for this transgression of tribal law.

The couple never sought or obtained permission to meet, let alone engage in an intimate relationship. Ismadi’s actions resulted in swift retaliatory punishment for the misdeed of fornication.

Ismadi had always been more adventuresome than her sisters. After college, she volunteered to teach the children of both villages. She did this despite a century old feud that continued to smolder between the clans. She displayed an independent spirit, which she further defined when she chose to dress in Western style clothes and not cover her head in the tradition of the village women. She had always felt her actions were both justified and liberating. However, her estimate of her own behavior was eclipsed by the condemnation of the elders. For she insisted on flouting the orthodoxy and the authority of their binding beliefs.

Her behavior reopened an old feud that existed between the rival villages. Decades ago, a shepherd from the hamlet of Harad had stolen a ewe from the fold of a shepherd in Hamadi. The people of Harad never acknowledged or sought to make restitution for the purloined animal. This century old theft between the adjacent town’s people continued to fester, like an infected wound that threatened to ooze its putrification over the region.

At this time, when the illicit relationship between Ismadi and a man named Amon was brought to light, punishment was demanded and meted out to the miscreants who dared to defy tribal injunction. Ismadi was stripped naked, scourged with a whip a dozen times and then dragged off to the killing field for stoning. It was further decreed that her erstwhile lover who bore incriminating testimony against her, be chosen to cast the first stone. He had under pressure from the tribal counsel falsely confessed that the woman had seduced him.

The elders of Hamadi, ordered that the young man’s left hand be severed at the wrist. His mutilation was so ordered not only for his role in the illicit relationship but also as part repayment for the theft of a ewe that had been stolen by the young man’s tribe many decades before. At the end of this dirge filled day, the dusk mercifully descended upon the desert and the sun shed its excoriating potency. Then in a serendipitous manner, a hoopoe’s trill was heard to pierce the cover of the night sky under an emerging, pale, luminous crescent sliver of a moon. Then, there arose amidst the rock and the rubble of the field a barely perceptible movement on the earth’s surface. It was as if an unknown seismic force had manifested itself.

The woman had not perished in that unrelenting rain of rock. She stirred beneath the shale, on the surface of the earth. When the earth moved a second time, a clutch of matted raven hair pushed against the sand and the small stones. Gradually the tortured head of the accused appeared. Her tom lids barely covered her eyes, which were seen as narrowed, blood rimmed slits that stared unflinchingly and uncompromisingly out at the night sky. Her prominent nose was caked with earth as she attempted to dislodge the detritus from her nostrils.

With the force of her strong, insistent tongue she spat out between her parched and cracked lips the sands of the desert. Beneath this pile of sand, rocks and pebble, the pulse beat of a condemned survivor struggled for life. She had tried to cast off the awful shroud of tribal law, sanctimony and hatred which had attempted to entomb her.

The woman had grimly faced the blindfolded lady of justice with the balances she carried in one hand. But it was Ismadi who snatched the sword from Justitta, goddess of justice. For Ismadi’s will to survive appeared stronger than decree, dogma and man’s absolute and cruel punishment toward one another.

The woman naked and scourged crawled out of the pit of her purgatory toward a solitary tree likened to that of a Baobab; it also had survived, not unlike herself, in the excoriating heat of the desert. The tree stood rooted amidst the barren landscape, which had been known by some traveler’s as the devil’s anvil.

It was a testing ground for an ancient column of priests, prophets and poets who had passed this way millenniums ago.

Ismadi wrapped her scarred and bleeding arms around the trunk of the tree.

The twisted tree displayed its own immutable, ageless dignity.

The woman suddenly glimpsed through half open eyes the orange fruit of the tree, which she greedily snatched from off of one of its limber boughs. She tore at the fruit’s outer casing of skin with her sharp incisors that punctured a hole in the surface of the fruit as she avariciously sucked out the life sustaining juice beneath the rind of the fruit. She repeated this act of survival and rejuvenation a dozen times before she felt replenished. Near the base of the tree,