This Week's Theme:
"a letter arrives from an old circus performer who has found an undiscovered island"
Week: Zero
Due Date: January 5, 2009
A Letter to Bartleby
James Dunlap
Of all the comforts that man has learned since climbing down from the trees the two most lavishly adored were fire and walls. With walls came the solace, the buried reminder of the comfortable womb before the days of light, and work, and money, and burden. Here in his refuge from the world could a man sit and recollect, gather himself for the inevitable return to the smoke and noise of the modern age. It did not take much to be considered a wall, for Bill Bartleby it was a sheet of cotton fabric with a desk and lighted mirror that transformed a patch of dirt in a vacant lot to a circus man’s den.
Before this mirror he sat, drying the beads of sweat from his hairline that each year retreated further up his skull, a fifty something man of greasepaint and rubber noses, garish wigs and squirting flowers, a tired man, yet full of electric energy, rejuvenated with every performance by the squealing delight of children, the symphonic laughter of the crowd. But it was only the mask of him that was renewed, and as he wiped the white grease and painted frown away he recognized Bartleby staring back at him, a tired old man without a wife or family to love and one foot edging towards a black grave somewhere in the world
For some spell of time he sat, staring into the tired gray eyes of this stranger, listening to the pooping capor of the calyopy, when suddenly, behind this facsimile that stared back at him with such pity, he saw a white rectangle of a letter pinned innocently enough to the wall of his room with a clothespin. With the trembling rush of children on Christmas morning Bartleby turned on his stool and saw indeed that he had received a thick envelope, slightly weatherbeaten and yellowed. Hesitantly he lifted his bony hands to the letter, unclipped it from the tent wall and turned it over. There had been no mistake, it had been addressed to him in the tight and tidy small blockish letters that he vaguely remembered as belonging to someone familiar yet couldn’t recall and went by the mysterious moniker: Blackpaun of the Raft, Ocean Current Road.
Who was this person, this Blackpaun of the Raft? Some distant relation, some bastard conceived in the heated throws of liquor with some raven-haired woman of the night? With the ivory handled letter opener he sliced the envelope open and what poured out from within was a lengthy narrative, several pages from start to finish, written in that same tidy curvy print.
Bartleby let out a blast of glee as he remembered the owner of this print, why the wrestler, of course! The one that had sought the sea after several years of performing with him, a stout, stocky fellow with a savage’s dark hair and a philosopher’s mind. Such misbalanced skills had never been dolled out to one man as Arych Blackpaun, aka, ‘The Mad Bumbler,’ who’s combatitive gifts were only outweighed by the perceptiveness of his mind and his open love of all things that lifted him from his earthly dirt, the sweat and grease of the ring, into the incense-scented reading chambers of the master’s library or to the orchestra pit where he would sit on the earthen floor and just listen to the creak of strings and whistling flutes with his eyes closed and a jolly open mouthed smile on his face.
This man had broken Bartleby’s heart by leaving, although he did not know it until months afterwards, he had been a light in an otherwise bleak world that he had failed to see it for what it was until the one ray of sunshine had passed. Having spoken to this man only a scant few occasions he was surprised, both by being the recipient of his tale and his own emotions at his leaving for the sea. Yet the gods have ways of toying with the notions of men, and the lesser-evolved powers of the psyche that manifest only in freaks, fortune tellers, and the occasional prophet. Somehow he had been saddened, feeling that in their silent nods they had formed a brotherly bond of comradery, a sense that he had dismissed as being only a longing to stand one with such a curiosity. Yet this letter confirmed that they had shared something beyond the banal, and with no small amount of joy he read.
Before I divulge any further of my tale, know that I am well. The sea provides and providence proves itself to my favor. We are come upon a small island and in the water-tight chest which served as our meat locker against the flargging gulls and blasted sharks for full near thirty days I am putting this letter. If my luck stays with me just a little longer it will find you.
As is the curse of my nature, to make all occupations a brief episode in a lengthy adventure, so too came the end of my days as a circus performer. In turn it was to the sea I was drawn, by the promise of danger, excitement and the romanticized legends of pirates and old salts. Let me tell you now that the sea is a treacherous place, and the men of the waves a hardened stock. Among them I lived for ninety days, scurrying about the leaky hull of a frigate like a bilge rat, dancing among the ropes and jigs and building the leather of my palms until they could hold hot coals and still feel no pain.
In this adventure I found not the romance, but hard, back-breaking labor. Work that stripped a man clean to his bones and rebuilt him with salted briny beef and put sea foam in his blood. This was what I needed, what I desired, to lose a certain softness of character and be tempered by the forces of nature in their open elements. In my labors I found myself hardening, my skin thickening, and it was my joy beyond joys to discover that I had joined a fraternal brotherhood, a seafaring clergy, if you will, that subscribe to the ancient bonds of his brother man, and the raw testimony to the works of god that lay for a hundred miles in any direction. Alone in all this nature we come to understand that we men are but a handful of brave fools cast in an endless sea with some primitive sense of direction but no knowledge of the dangers that lurk ahead. So truer a picture of the lives of man could never be analogized better by even old longbeard himself.
Being witnesses to this great architecture we subscribe to our fates, and knew that death was always a lurking shadowy form in the waters in our wake. Yet it was not from the sea that death did come to us.
On the ninety fifth day of our voyage we became aware of another vessel, beginning as a speck along the horizon and continued to close the distance for the next three days. At first the captain made no alarm, no mark of danger in this innocent presence, and continued on course. On the fourth day however it was discerned that this was no friendly vessel, and through the spy glass he and the first mate discovered the tell-tale wind-sock sails and black tar hull of a rogue warship of savage pirates.
The remaining hours were spent bolstering for the attack, such an odd uncanny feeling it is to watch death encroaching upon you with slow inevitability, once more the comparison to the grand epic of a man’s days on earth could never be made more clear. We tightened hatches, cleared the decks of all that may burned, and prepared our traps, and yet we knew that the seasoned rust-speckled metal of these men would take our lives, surely as days will turn foul and stormy in the months of winter.
They attacked on the fifth day, arriving to the meeting point calculated by their captain upon first sighting us. Being a freighter we had no guns, and they being pirates, had no desire to risk sending us to the bottom with their prize still on board. So it was by rope and ladder they boarded us after a long siege with hunting rifles, keeping our heads pinned down with shots from their riggings while they tossed tow hooks into our works and became latched onto us.
From the lower decks we procured a crate of rifles, destined for some hunters in the far away wild continent who our insurance company would no doubt wail about our violation of yet in this moment were better suited to our use. During this exchange of lead it was my pleasure to watch four of their men fall from their perches with a belly full of musket ball, a foul peach indeed to digest while they sank into the deep to feed the sharks or splattered upon the decks of that foul vessel. Yet there was still the last of them, a very skilled shot, that quite nearly split my head, and a slippery figure that glided like a ghost among the riggings before any of our marksmen could lay irons to him.
The helmsman was killed in the boathouse by this man’s skilled fingers, shot through the eye through the small window that must have been no bigger than a quilt patch to this man from his distance. Imediatey the ship jumped against the pregnant hull of this hornet’s nest and was tethered fast with boarding hooks and the first of these pillagers swung into our midst.
The battle that ensued was a maelstrom of shouting men and belching fire, sparking blades and the hot spray of blood that tainted the holy clean spray of sea water over our bow into a jolly pink mist. Soon the decks were awash with the unholy spillage and our vessel looked sailed from the gates of hell. It was my grave displeasure to dispatch these men, for though my life was in danger, there was a pitiful irony in finding death at the hands of brother men when so worse threat lay in miles all around.
In the grand arena of fighting men I am no gladiator, no Hercules, in truth I am little better than the common man in knowledge of hand to hand combat, my skill lies in luck and speed, and through them I found myself narrowly alive when so many of our men lay dead and dying, cut up like fish bait on our wooden planks. At last we found ourselves facing defeat, ourselves outnumbered three to one by the swarthy crude collection of devil dogs gathered on the port half of our ship while we retreated to the starboard and gathered what implements we could find to defend ourselves.
It would have ended much differently had it not been for our main mast giving way after all this tugging by the chains wrapped about it. The sea, or providence again, sent a wave between our two hulls to tighten these chains tethering the two ships together and with a carnal splintering that felt as devastating as the tree of life itself uprooting, all one hundred feet of the oak mast fell timbered into the sea, crushing the deck and taking a partition of the portside hull with it before sloughing off into the sea and banging holes below our waterline as it was dredged like a battering ram by the lines.
Soon we were taking on water, and as the second attack was engaged our ship dropped noticeably behind the enemy vessel. This had disaster in its cards. When our ship reached the end of the moorings we became an anchor to this pirate vessel, causing it to veer to starboard and take on a sickening lean. From my position on the poop I watched the sea rushing into the open gun doors, which their captain in his haste had opened prematurely in his desire to empty our coffers and send us to the bottom. Had things turned differently they may have survived the flood, but the enemy vessel had crossed into our path and the solid bow sprit of our ship lodged deep into the hull of this craft and split it open like a hatchet cleaves into the husk of a coconut.
Rising up as if on a wave, our own ship’s bow was ruptured into splinters, the forecastle disintegrating as the two ships became one unserviceable sinking hulk of wood and iron. The pirates abandoned the fight and dove overboard. The men remaining on their decks sought refuge in the lifeboats and were drowned as their vessel capsized even as they were freeing the lines. The remaining of their crew were sucked down into the dark deep by the sinking hulk of their ruined ship. There was no joy in this victory because all of us everyone knew that soon we would join them.
Our captain, made bloody, and with his hand holding a good deal of his intestines from spilling out from a gaping saber wound in his belly, gave the order to abandon ship. With a fury made seemingly slow by our exhaustion and excitement we readied the life boats and boarded for what we hoped would be a short respite before rescue.
Alas there was still among these pirates a single solitary survivor still willing to fight, a mark of a madman or a frothy cruelty lurking in the blackest of black hearts. Surely any man of reason would have quit the fight and fallen prostrate on his knees for mercy at the feet of our captain, beseeched him to spit him on his saber and save him from the chilly death in the slimy belly of the beasts of the sea, yet this man, shall I call him otherwise a beast with a man’s form, continued the attack as if nothing had happened to his crew.
So equally adding to the preternatural nature of his fervor for battle was the method of his entry. Being among the towering masts with his rifle, he fell from the riggings of his vessel like a monkey shaken from a falling tree as they collapsed on our decks and snapped away like broken twigs. At last the face of the skilled shooter that had split the head of our helmsmen was revealed to me as that of a dark-skinned native of our home territory. How any savage had managed to survive carriage in the belly of the most brutally unforgiving bigots was beyond miraculous, yet his skill proved worth.
With a hooked saber he dispatched four of our crew as they fought out of the life boat, cutting them to ribbons as they tried to defend. The bravest and thickest of body of us was a boatswain that tried to engage this monster and was relieved of his fighting arm seconds into the battle. So passed most of our crew in this combat, this man who was less than hell sent into our path, a seven foot behemoth with a double-braided beard and a choker of talismans set about his oak neck. Had he been placed inside a barrel his chest would have broken its bands with a single flex from his pectorals and there was fire in his eyes that would have sent the devil yelping. This was no man, but the dreaded leviathan of the deep sent from the sea to satiate the ancient sea gods’ lust for the blood of man, so sweet, like honey to the beasts.
Our ship, having filled its hold with sea, lifted its keel to the sky and slipped bow first into the cold blackness below. Full five more of my mates were sucked into the wet jaws of death before my very eyes while this savage stranger held himself by the riggings of our aft mast and continued to climb towards myself and the captain as we stood on the back of the helm house and awaited our fate.
We were the last two survivors.
When this beast finally became able to attack I deflected his demon blade with several clever moves and managed to become entangled in a grappling battle from behind his head. Holding that great black melon I suffered backwards elbows into the pit of my stomach and tried as I could to choke the air out of him his veins stood sturdy as mooring ropes in his neck and refused to collapse. He too tried to shake me off with his blows and backwards thrusts with his blade and I paid with my blood for them. Even while the sea readied to swallow us I possessed that insightful piece of mind that seems to speak to us in only the most inorportune moments. In this fight something so greatly terrible was revealed to me, something that has broken me and leaves me questioning the sanity of the world. In this deadlocked battle with this beast of hell I realized that had met my match, something that in my undefeated status I had for so long wanted. The brutal savagery, the butchery of this man, revealed him a tiger among men, and so too was I. A second realization came to me then, that in the battle between tigers one would surely be killed and the other mortally wounded. Therefore there was no winning, no victory to be had, only defeat, yet still it was a battle that once started there was no turning back from.
We were locked in combat still even as the cold sea swelled around my ankles and swallowed me whole. We were pulled deep under the crashing waves, my breath burning in my lungs as I squeezed with all my might to starve this man’s brain of blood before the cold rush of sea water filled my mouth and nose and I felt the burning cruel pains of death by drowning. I would have that final victory, I would not be beaten.
This I was thinking when at last I felt the body of the savage slacken in my hold, his hands still and his head loll over in the crook of my arms. These were the last thoughts before there opened in the sea a great spreading inky black hole of darkness, the last of the air in my lungs turning toxic and the oblivion of death ready to take me.
Obviously I was not killed, or I would not be writing you this tale. Fortune would have it that this leviathan was a smoker, and being out at sea had invested in a nicotine bag of watertight seal skin which now served as a life buoy. Such irony that a token of an addiction that withered the strongest men into ashes would now resurrect us from the deep to the surface.
There are not enough words to describe what it was like to take that first gasping breath when my head broke the surface. It was pain beyond measure, the sea had chilled my blood and bursting from this primordial womb was like sticking my face to the side of a stove. Instantly I was burned, and my lungs throbbed as I filled them. For minutes I just lay floating on my back, rejoicing at being alive and holding onto the buoyant body of this pirate as if we had been old chums back in the day.
Eventually I found a piece of the foredeck adrift among the wreckage and climbed aboard, dragging the carcass of this savage man with me. Before I let the exhaustion of this ordeal consume me I managed to swoop up what items of the stores that had survived the sinking: a barrel of water, a few harpoons, and the box into which I placed this letter. Piling them on the corners of the deck and tethering them with what rope still floated about, I at last lashed our two bodies to the wooden boards and was asleep before my eyes had shut.
In the dreamless sleep I was startled awake several times, once was by the slapping flap of fins as the sharks devoured the human wreckage afloat upon the waves and the second was by the deep pulsing snores of the savage that resonated through the raft and into my shivering bones. Although an icy chill filled me I was somehow warmed by the presence of another living human being by my side, all be he an enemy to all things good.
I do not know for how long I slept, only that it was full daylight when I retired and the sun shone still when I awoke. With an inspection of my chin whiskers I found a full day’s of fresh scruff had grown and ascertained that I had slept for nearly twenty four hours. Of course my first reaction was of immediate alarm, this madman I had in my company was still my enemy and had I wakened any later I may not have awoken at all. Bolting upright I found myself dry and tethered better to the raft, around the waist instead of the single thigh I had tied to the deck, the neat bow in hand’s reach and no molestation of my wrists had been made to bind me as a captive.
Freeing myself I looked about and found that the raft had been bolstered with floating barrels and a few chests of cargo that had been lashed to the bottom of our plank from underneath. In this genius of improvisation our structure that would have inevitably become water-logged and sank had become a makeshift raft that could survive the waves for a decently long time—outliving our water supply at least. My first thought was that a ships carpenter had survived the battle and was now rejoined with us, yet with a single sweeping glance I saw that we were alone, this dark native and myself.
He sat at the end of the raft and busied with some piece of work of which I could not tell. With his back to me I had a better view of the markings tattooed on the back of his shaven skull. Among the cryptic letters a single mark stood out, a round wheel, barely larger than a coin, with triangular spokes radiating out from a central hub. On closer inspection I realized that this was a flower, the days-eye, or common daisy.
He took no notice of me as I moved, ever so carefully untying my bonds as to not disturb the balance of our craft and reveal my motions to him, for this man may have preserved me only to provide sustenance for the duration of this indefinite voyage. Carefully I picked up a harpoon and readied, for what I don’t know, and it was from that not knowing that the most grievous errors are conceived and executed.
Luckily it was then that I realized what it was this man was doing but either had not the courage or the comprehension to put an end to it. He was sitting with his legs over the edge of the raft, in the right hand he held a curved blade with a bone handle wrapped in leather and was cutting terrible strait gashes into his left forearm. His body convulsed and in a second I heard the deep throaty sobs as he watched his blood drip and diffuse into the water.
To this day I do not know what ailment of the soul suffers itself upon my companion, or what possesses any of the miserable to seek a wrath upon themselves. All I do know is that with this portrait of human wretchedness before me I became all over ashamed of myself for brandishing harm against him. Instead I cast down the harpoon with a clatter and sat and readied myself for whatever may come of it. I cared not to fight any longer, had he desired he could have flayed me alive then and there, yet he did not attack me and only sat irreconciable for some time.
Eventually he withdrew his feet from the water and curling into a ball, slept with a scrap of blanket cloth taken from his pants pocket clutched in his great black paw. While he rested I tended to his self-inflicted injuries, bandaged them up with strips of my shirt and monkey jacket I cut with his bone-handled knife. Then I drank a modicum of water and pondered the emptiness which surrounded us.
For endless distances there was only the glittering silver sparkles of the sun upon water. Eerily quiet it was, no wind blew, and with this thought I erected a sail, using the harpoon as a mast and my coat as a sail.
Unfortunately my skills of makeshiftery are lacking and the harpoon only stood as a comical leaning post tethered to the raft with a bit of wire I happened to be carrying in the innumerable pockets of my coat. For hours I struggled to build a construction that would be the engine of our escape from this watery dungeon, but each time I failed I fell more miserable into a state of despair. The prospects of rescue were slim, no one would be coming for us until our ship was delayed for several days and we were not due in port for another half month. That left three weeks of rationing water and eating what dried salted beef had survived the wreckage in the locker before we turned to cannibalism, or simply died and became sun dried husks of bone and tanned leather, dying on the same sea which eons ago had given us life.
Irony was becoming a bad cliché of late.
Eventually sleep once again took hold of me, as if I had not slept enough in my days and now with nothing else to do, the gods of slumber had finally caught up with me. This time I did dream, I dreamt of a great playful dog the color of dark timber and dancing glinting green eyes. Scarred and fearsome he seemed, yet to me was as gentle as a kitten as we ran and capored in a vacant lot with the smokestacks of home somewhere in the distance but close enough to give a general impression of security. It was by no surprise that when I inspected this mongrel closer that among his scars was a wheel, carved with infinite cruelty, into the head of this unsuspecting beast.
Perhaps I gazed too long into these scars, and with an urging growl that was more play than threat, I abandoned my inspections and resumed the game. Then the dream changed, through the grass came a slithering ripple, the mongrel bristled and gave threatening growls as some stygian serpent came sliding ruthlessly on the hunt, a massive black shape, eyeless and hungry, searching us out.
A jolt shook me, the body’s reaction to our dreams that startle us, but something more, and with the second jolt I realized that it was the living raft that was moving beneath us with violent convulsions.
Snatched out of sleep as I was it took a moment for me to comprehend what was transpiring. The serpent of my dreams had somehow managed to press into the waking world and manifested now with slimy threat, except had grown larger and many more heads. When the first tendril cast its dripping shadow over my face I knew we were in immediate danger.
A beast of the deep, drawn to us perhaps by the bloodied arm of the native, had risen from the abysmal depths of the darkest realms of the sea, awakened from its slumber by a hunger activated by the smell of fresh human blood. With an alarmed cry I awakened my companion who’s head bolted from the deck just as the first ropy tentacle wrapped around his forearm. It tugged him up, would have pulled him from the raft and into its waiting beaked jaws had not he been tethered to the deck. With this arrangement the beast managed to lift one corner of the heavy vessel from the surface and would have capsized it had it chosen a stronger of its multitudinous arms to seize its prey.
The savage gave a growling cry of pain as the hooked suckers stripped away some of his flesh along with the bandages, leaving long gashes in his arm that would heal with the knife cuts into a checkerboard cross hatch of lighter scars in the days to come. I watched as the tendril shot back into the water with lightning speed, the beast scarffing the bloody bandages as if thinking this some appetizing strip of the morsel to be had.
With its appetite whetted, it moved in closer, the loathsome purple green splotched carapace of its mantle equal in size to one of the schooner’s life boats, with my front row view I witnessed an eye, an unblinking glass orb as round and large as a massive saucer, inspect me with an aquarium fish’s dumb oblivious stare, then I watched as the larger four tentacles rocketed out of the water, each one a trunk of writhing black leathery flesh with cruel suckers formed like cupping saw blades puckering with hunger.
It was one of these falling logs that nearly smote me against the deck, but as it landed only succeeded in splitting the central beam of the raft and folding it nearly in half. On one half I stood, balanced on the other side by this savage that had drawn his knife and now watched as a second tentacle swung like a ram towards his chest. Almost as quickly as he was struck clear of our vessel I was seized from behind and coiled round by the loathsomely cold ropes of a tentacle.
The power that animal had is beyond description. It is only best surmised of what a child, so small andhelpless, feels in the strength of a fully-grown adult that can toss him about and serve as a living jungle gym of arms and legs; except there was no benign playfulness or loving nature in this grasp; only the cold, cruel, simple, blind machinery of a hungry animal. I was torn from the raft and plunged into the water before I could fill my lungs with breath.
Horribly I found myself drowning in the first seconds of submersion, perhaps a blessing compared to the death I would find when the saber-edged beak of this monster severed my head from my body. Instead I was dashed about, tossed through the water by the powerful dashing limb for an agony of seconds. It appeared that this beast had for the moment forgotten me and in its throws I was tossed free of its grip and was able to wriggle to the surface with my legs, my arms having grown numb from the constriction. Finally breaking the surface I saw the mantle of this creature rising full from the water, its bulbous bubble eyes startled fully open and its clasping beak opening and closing with a sound that reverberated through its hollow mantle with an explosive snap.
Mark my words that by no means am I a wholly honest man, but what I tell to you next is no exadjeration or sensational fabrication of the mystical nature of my spirit. Believe me I was equally flabbergasted to witness this savage mountain of a man balanced on top of the harpoon he had thrust into the soft pulpy flesh surrounding the monsters mouth inside the base of the tentacles and dodging the wildly swinging arms in an attempt to plunge the second harpoon deep into its brain and perhaps end its miserable existence.
I remember laughing, but only in a dream like trance as I clambered aboard our ruined raft and retrieved the one item I had nearly foolishly tossed over in my gathering of supplies when first we were sunk. It had seemed silly at the time to save such a thing as this, that would serve no useful purpose to two castaways lost at sea, yet here proved endlessly invaluable and which is why I write this letter to you and none other.
You may remember once that I agreed to an endurance match against other wrestlers in succession during an eight hour period. As part of my plan to replenish my body without eating was to ingest cubes of salt, a plan that nearly cost me my life as I suffered from poisoning halfway through the day and had to forfeit. I remember distinctly, it was Bartleby, the old masterful clown, the greatest man of magic and laughter I had ever seen, who had resuscitated me and had shared his blood to dilute the salinity of the poison. Bartelby the wise, who had once studied medicine yet abandoned it for the simpler life of a circus clown, thinking himself too unskilled to be a surgeon, to ignoble to be a worthy protector of a family, and yet delivered me twice with his knowledge from the jaws of death.
“One part in a thousand will kill you.” He said, meaning that I had ingested nearly a gram per every kilo of my weight and thus nearly killed myself by accident. These words were what went through my mind as I picked up the item I had so nearly abandoned.
A five-pound bag of table salt, which had been my waterlogged pillow during my sleep, turned out to be the method of our salvation. Without thinking I seized this bag and lobbed it into the snapping beak of the beast that swallowed it whole. With a brief mathematical reckoning I surmised that this beast weighed nearly five hundred kilos, this sack being nearly three thousand grams of salt and well over the lethal dose to its body mass.
Death came soon afterwards, yet we were not witness to it. With a spray of black ink this beast jetted away, leaving us to our broken raft and the will of fate once more. Upon climbing, like a water-logged dog, upon the craft, the savage looked at me, his eyes, green as the tropical seas, twinkled with a rushing surge of glee and tossing our heads back we laughed into the downturned faces of the gods as they scowled upon us.
It was since then that I learned this savage could speak our tongue, although he has difficulties with pronunciation he is far from ignorant and is blessed with a baritone voice on par with mine which we pass away the long tedium in racous old drinking songs. His name I cannot pronounce, since our language has not the need for the throaty spit-filled vocalizations that his does, so I have named him Daisy.
We did not so much find this island, but it has found us with help from the tides. During the night we washed ashore upon beaches that men have yet to spoil and now find ourselves masters of an island with enough game and rain to keep us alive for many days. We do not know what trickery the gods have up our sleeves at pitting once mortal enemies together, but I have learned this: that I have seen a mirror of myself, a darker portal through which I gaze into the horror which lingers within me, and myself serve as the light this savage begins to comprehend lives within himself. I know now that I was never destined for the life of a civilized man, and that I will never return to you.
I hope you are well, and live many more happy years. I hope you continue to make the children laugh and audiences clap in delight. Because of sheer chance or divine fate you have saved my life and opened the doors to a brand new adventure, the greatest adventure, for the journey spent with one’s brother is the one journeyed best.
With Ever-lasting Love,
Arych “Mad Bumbler” Blackpaun
Of the Raft,
Formerly of the Circus.
An island,
Somewhere in the middle of the ocean.
With a slightly shaky hand Bartleby put down the letter and tried to herd the plethora of emotions sliding out of his open cage of a heart. In the end he didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, so he did both at once. Then, folding the letter neatly back up and tucking it away inside his coat, dressed in his best barker’s suit, a shimmering green swallow-tailed coat and went out into the crowd to give balloons to the children and to smile upon the world.