Member-only story
The Authentic Eclectic
The Land of Fables
They gradually traversed the valleys that snaked between the old town and the city of fables. They stopped frequently for the elderly, for him. As he rested on a boulder to suck his waterskin, the lowing cry of a mourning dove resounded.
“Say, Grandpa,” said one of the young men — so many, he couldn’t remember a name for each face. “You ever been here before?”
He squinted at the rolling hills dappled with waving bronze grasses, the bright smears of wild onion stalks, the white flowers that bobbed beside spiky shrubs of rust and red, the swollen mountains capped with green. A flock of white ibis were passing very far away.
“I think so,” he replied, memories swimming with cataracts. He almost placed a toddler, perhaps a daughter, in the shade of a mountain, but she kept jouncing, as does the mind when one marks oneself falling asleep.
“Oh yeah?” the youth replied, grown disinterested or skeptical. A horse whinnied, and he turned away.
They were on the move again. Amidst the jangling of a thousand bits of medal — bridles, scabbards, dishes, jewelry— he listened to a woman he once thought to marry telling some children a story of the land of fables.
