I. Mooncalf's Tree

Mooncalf lives under a tree. His head is half bald and his feet are equally bare. His hands are tough from digging in the dirt under his tree. His skin is leathery from the times when the tree has no leaves and the sun comes through the overcast to pummel his face and chest. He has little knowledge of any of these things because they have always been invisible to him. His mother was similarly bald and his father was similarly barefooted. His one brother was tough and leathery as well before he left many years ago to find his fortune out on the road, and since then he hasn't seen his brother, and since then his mother and father have both died, and since then Mooncalf has been living under his tree alone except for when other people and animals pass by on the road.

The road is next to his tree by about twenty five paces. This works quite well for Mooncalf. When people and animals pass by on the road he goes up to them and he asks for food and drink and sometimes they give it to him and sometimes they don't. He can usually receive at least some water and less often he receives wine. In times when they don't give it to him he goes back to his tree and he digs in the dirt for worms. He also howls and brays at the passerby until they are too far away for him to see them anymore. He is not afraid of the people and animals because he is saved from all consequence by cowardice, as are the people and animals who stay on the road twenty five paces away from his tree, making for an ideal situation all around.

One day Mooncalf was digging in the dirt and heard a caravan approach. There had been three others that day already, none bearing any sympathy for Mooncalf, and so his stomach complained of a lack of food and his throat complained of an excess of howling. This put him in a sour mood.

Because of the sour mood, he did not walk the twenty five paces from his tree and had to hear from this distance that the caravan's owner was his brother returning on the road he left on. His brother's skin was still tough and he was still bald but now he wore shoes.

"Will you come and talk with me, brother?" asked Mooncalf's brother, and Mooncalf was excited to speak with him because he may at last be able to get some food and drink by virtue of his relation to this passerby. However, his brother had neglected to bring enough to share with him.

"If I give you what I have, I won't have enough to return to the city without starving to death," his brother said, but Mooncalf was already halfway back to his tree, muttering his contempt and rage at being deprived a fourth time in one afternoon. His brother tried again to call out, but Mooncalf was deaf to him. He tried to approach the tree, and was pelted with sharp-edged rocks and bellows until he had to turn back and return to his caravan, his own mouth full of curses for his ignorant brother, and his mind full of forgetfulness of life underneath the tree.

The brother returned several more times but Mooncalf would not approach his caravan. He, unlike his brother, had a keen memory, and could identify from two hundred paces away which caravans had previously offered him food and drink and which had not. Some of the stingier caravans merited additional attempts, but the displeasure of that first failed fourth attempt, particularly when he had not just hoped for but expected success, made him more callous.

"I brought enough food and drink for you to fill your stomach twice over," his brother called out on his second visit. But Mooncalf continued to obstinately dig in the dirt, and for his own pleasure, slurped worms heartily for his brother to see and hear.

"I know you are hungry, so I will leave this here for you beside the road," his brother said on his third visit. But that day Mooncalf had already received a hearty lunch from a previous group of passerby, and he rubbed his middle and belched as his brother drove away. When his brother returned for his fourth visit, half of the food was gone, but the other half remained rotted and buzzing with flies on the side of the road. He cleared it away and replaced it with a fresh offering.

On the fifth visit, he returned to find the food he left had disappeared, but his brother was still facing away from the road, and was deaf to him. Only upon the seventh visit was he able to look Mooncalf in the face and eat together with him by his tree, as by then all was forgiven.

"In the years that have passed since we last sat beneath this tree together, I have learned many things about the world," said Mooncalf's brother. Mooncalf did not know what a year was, but he said nothing and continued to eat his brother's crust of bread and drink his wine.

"And I have come to understand many of the mysteries at the heart of man, and of man's troubles," continued his brother. "This knowledge comes at no small cost. In all corners of the world man hungers for justice and for truth, and searches for it within his fellows. He lays what he finds upon the hearth of history, and measures it on the scale of time, and yet despite his many and varied efforts he still dies as you live: hungry and alone, a beggar and a fool." Mooncalf continued to drink his wine with noisy gulps. His brother reminded him of many of the people and animals that he had fucked. Very noisy, and very tender.

"It is in this way that I came to seek you out, and to return to this place of my birth, as we all return from life into darkness, in order to seek your wisdom." At this, Mooncalf's brother turned to face him, with his bald head and his wet eyes. "For I believe you possess divine knowledge, in your spiritual simplicity, knowledge I myself once shared. Within your festering body is a kernel of gold, and I intend to capture it, so as to complete my fractured self. As I ascended from a beast, to a beast I must now return, and complete the cycle of transcendence which will open the stubborn virginal gates of Paradise."

At this, Mooncalf's brother lunged at him, knocking loose the tureen of wine from his lips, and set upon him with his hands, teeth, and nails. As Mooncalf shrieked, his brother shouted, amidst his flailing fists, "Thank you for granting me this audience, brother, as with it, you bestow upon me tacit forgiveness of this inevitable act, your acceptance of my offerings proof of your mercy to my plight, though unbeknown in your simplicity! I will quench this drought of holiness with your sacred blood!"

Mooncalf clawed against his brother in a mighty mess of dirt and limbs, but a body nourished most often by worms is not equivalent to a body nourished daily by fine bread, wine, and meat, and he was weakened quickly by swift blows to the head and neck. Mooncalf's brother feasted on his essence, and found the flavor to his liking thanks to the meals he had imparted over the past seven weeks.

When he was full, Mooncalf's brother left in his caravan, and died two weeks later of dysentery after a long period spent painfully excreting his brother from a pitifully distended and inflamed colon.

II. Gertha's Things

Rotten old Gertha was in charge of many things. The things she was in charge of increased as she aged. Before she was rotten and old, when she was young, she was in charge of true things, as was the task of imbeciles and children. She was in charge of, first, grinding oat between two stones. She went on to be in charge of turning the ground oat into meal to make food, and from there continued to work with true things until her hands were large enough to deal with animals and living vegetable, which are allowed to some children and imbeciles, as long as the children and imbeciles tasked with them prove that they can manage non-real things in an appropriate way.

The best way to do this is to by behaving as though they are real, and any non-real qualities they display are simple engines. Something non-real like living vegetal and the stupider animals can be explained through a combination of real activities such as moving from one place to the other and the necessity and production of other objects. These are difficult for real things to do alone but if one pretends that the non-real things are composites of multiple real things and forces then it can be made acceptable.

Gertha was one of the children who was able to do so, and so quickly gained new things - real and non-real - to be in charge of, including taking food from animals and turning living vegetable into oat for the meal for the food. She found it very easy, possibly due to her nascent rottenness which helped to facilitate many of the tasks that were more carefully managed by people older than she was, and before long had even acquired tasks dealing with un-real things.

After a while she turned rotten and old. The amount of things Gertha was in charge of was equal to her rottenness. In a way this made her equal to simple engines, so that even imbeciles could understand her.

III. The Adversary

[…]For example, the renowned prophet and adversary John Lee Leeman could see the component tissues binding the universe's component parts together and learned to make special use of this ability. By following these silk-thin threads, he was able to grasp, in its entirety, the crystalized nature of all existence. He could trace back, from any individual he encountered, their last meal; from the animal that produced the meat to the animal's own ancient line of ancestry; to that of the various grasses that fed it, and to each evolutionary pathway leading to the development of these grasses and their predecessors.

Similarly, he could chart new pathways forwards. As they had in the past, each line of perpetuity tangled, twisted, and intertwined, meeting and then parting again. According to several of his biographers, it was through this vision that Leeman learned to spit out the milk from his mother's breast as a baby, because he could see that the milk did not belong exclusively to him - it belonged to something else before, and once digested and consumed, it would belong to something else after. Notably, when Leeman was old enough to walk, he began to retain his feces in secret compartments in his nursery in a child's selfish efforts not to part with any part of himself.

His mother and father reported much difficulty due to these tendencies, which continued to develop beyond infancy. When they attempted to remove something from their son, whether it was a worn blanket, a bowl of uneaten vegetables, or a bee who was chasing and stinging him in the park, he would revolt in anger until he had screamed himself to sleep. When they tried to appease him with gifts, he would reject them with just as much fervor.

Leeman's main preoccupation in adulthood, as well as in childhood, was achieving complete and permanent ownership. His curiosity led him to the church, where he learned that a man named Jesus owned everything there was and would be, including every drop of milk from every breast, and every pool of filth in every dank corner. He learned the many names of god, and thought of him as a great cheater and a hypocrite, two qualities worthy of envy. From youth onward, Leeman shaped himself into a great adversary. He cast a pall over each one that he touched, as if no more than his spectator's glance was enough to chill it and cut it off from the light. He delighted in tangling them into complicated knots, in pruning them, and in twisting them in strange new directions. Time and circumstance, life and death, were the medium through which he etched a great portrait of himself upon the earth - one that he hoped would reach the heavens.

This portrait, however, had an interesting nature. Leeman found himself looking at it often, much like the piles of waste he collected as a young boy. As he carefully refined his portrait, trimming details as necessary, he found himself gazing into a glittering new truth. Looking into his own creation, he was able to see, for the very first time, quite a simple shape indeed: that of a pathway, from one simple point to another. Inside the curvatures of the tangled mess of fates he believed he had crafted was a single through-line. Some might say, and there is sufficient evidence that Leeman himself believed, that he had thus built no monument at all, at least not one whose dimensions were charted long before he was born. The image of his pride was no less divine, no less permanent, and no less his own than the bitter infant squalling that was his first contribution to the world.

Although humiliated by his own foolishness, Leeman was not yet defeated. Life, it seemed, was no place for domination - but as he had long known intimately, influence continues, proliferates, and expands long after the individual self has dissolved into fungal rot. At the base of each vine were ample roots, each reaching deep into the soil, itself the offal of centuries. And from that vine would soon grow an everlasting fruit.