In the Beginning
In the beginning of all things we find the mansha, the chameleon, favorite child of the Pleiades, mischievous and cunning. Though slow and deliberate in movement, the mansha possesses a tongue horrid and pencil-like in its swiftness, capable of surprising deeds and endowed with surpassing stickiness. Should we then be surprised when, knowing this, we find him corrupted, enslaved to his star-born ancestors, now just a constellation? Their abandonment is complete; their sojourn final, ended.
   But what of us? Are we to wait, like sheep in frozen time, oblong and craving so little, yet so vital a remedy as this? Perhaps. But not for long shall we stand knee-deep in our sheepishness, hurling words and gestures like stones at our own reflections, nodding and blinking as we flinch at the echo. They are, and always have been, but words. And like amber, solid, yet enfolding the sleeping wasp that eons before misstepped.
   Would that the comatose should speak. This they would verify. And thus unburdened race ahead, heedless of the formula, casually dressed and remarkably unrestrained. We envy them, yet they see us as mere vertebrates, inebriated by our own indifference, caustic and futile, subject to moonlit desire and folly.
   There the dolphin again shows his mastery. Why not? Swim, dive, eat, mate. That's what we see. They see worlds in blue, green and turquoise, realms of shadow and light. Feathers, if they had them, would be unnecessary. Fly? Of course, but without wings or warfare, useless appendages now just phantom pains, reminding them "we were first".
   Confucious felt this, too. He remarked, on first seeing the children of the sea, that they were very shiny, like adamant sparkling in a shuttered room. His joy was so great he lept headfirst into the ocean, remembering an instant later he could not swim. Fortunately, an eel merchant, who had memorized the currents and all their subtle treachery, bearded the sage to safety, depositing him limp in the eely skiff. Never was Confucious' beard to resume its normal course of growth, but the lesson learned outvalued this cosmetic and vain deficiency. Would that we could say the same.
   Yet weep not as if bereft of comfiture. That same eel merchant who rescued the great teacher from a wet and nebulous fate was later revealed to be the kidnapped infant son of the Emperor, who had abandoned both hope and fables, so long was he sonless. His joy at the return of his son, and the eels he brought with him, filled the land with celebration hitherto undisplayed. A marked man, yes, but not indelibly so.
   So it is with us. We ply our trades, the crafts and laborings that bring us fish to sustain us. Badger-like we contemplate the ocean, at once cold and secret, warm and glove-like. It is here we see ourselves, not as laundrymen, not as elephant trainers and barbers, but as kidnapped children of aging tyrants, returning home, our arms full of eels.

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