The Curse of the Scottish Play
As the wolf hunts down and devours the fawn, so the dolphin the sprightly mullet. No evil abides in this structure for it is the gods' calibration of things universal, ebb and neap, death and birthing, resident in its cosmic redundancy. A traveling troop of thespians we, our momentary stint upon the boards but a comma in the text written of old, read by few and apprehended by less. Yet for that vain moment in the sun we will not reckon forfeiture of purpose a semblance of honor. What then? We, like the wolf or the dolphin, must eat, and to eat we must kill. So it has been since the giant turtle, Ornepha, birthed this lonely orb we stride upon, birthed it in great agony, her brow bedewed with the sweat of aeons, her children scattered throughout the vast ebon firmament. This we countenance, but without fervor. The following chronicle will do much to betoken this enigma.
  
   In the year of 1931, my pilgrimage to the Shrine of the Shrilly Laughing Eremite culminated, I was much in need of a holiday, and following the path predestined in the infancy of the cosmos, found myself on the great Iberian Peninsula, in Portugal, land of dreams, not many miles from her stately capital, Lisbon. As eventide drew nigh, I made my humble camp neath the ancient arms of a hoary oak by which burbled a clear and exhilarating rivulet, its cool waters a balm to my road-weary and olid feet.
   I had but settled in for an hour of meditating on the laws of Solubility, when I heard the sound of many feet and the groaning wheels of a heavily laden cart advancing up the path to my modest bivouac. Suddenly the light of my campfire was playing on the faces of several men and women, who gazed wistfully at me, mingled fear and wonder alternating in their firelit eyes.
   "Welcome fellow travelers, welcome and well met!" I cried. "I am Akiryon Baba Yat! Besit yourselves and join me. Warm your weary scorpions by my fire and tell me of your trouble, for I perceive a great distress has fallen upon you."
   The foremost, a small and neatly-bearded man, raised his bile-shot eyes and cried, "Good fortune has at last found us! For I discern you are a man far-sighted and perspicacious. We are a traveling Shakespearean company who have been engaged to enact The Scottish Play in the fair city of Lisbon, but on arriving there, found that another troop had usurped our engagement. Not only this, but the blackguards pilfered our props and wardrobe and stole my bearskin mantle. My bearskin! I cannot play the Thane of Glamis without a skin nor is there one to be found for love or money in all of Portugal. What shall we do, wise master?"
   I had listened to this sad narrative with a rising horror churning in my bountious spleen. "This", I whispered with measured breath, "this is too dire a situation to render judgment lightly upon. Sleep here then the night. Morning will bring counsel."
   Dawn broke early with portents crimson and puce in the Eastern sky. My distracted guests were already astir. The small, neatly-bearded spokesman of yestereve approached me, saying, "Master, what must I do to play the Scottish King, regain my regal skin, and best these pettifoggers who have supplanted us?"
   To this I said nothing, but lifted a stone from the brook and caressed it like a belly dancer caresses a shekel of silver with her supple and accomplished navel. After a moment of fetid silence I raised my hand and cast the stone at a little polliwog sheltering near the bank, beheading it. I then replied with due solemnity, "Ask me not...ask the polliwog."
  Amazement chased all other emotions from the visages before me. "How, master? A whole and healthy polliwog cannot speak, much less one without a head?"
   "Do you not see that the polliwog has already told you the answer?" I queried with some exasperation. "Give me pen and paper and I shall divine this for you." This I did, writing hastily on the light pink sheet without sight or conscious thought, psychically channeling the message thereon and handed it to him unread. "Here is your answer. Hesitate not. Go and act."
  The next day I made my way into fair Lisbon and stopping briefly on the main street espied the morning's news paper, its lurid headlines to this day a baleful echo in my mind. It read: Murderous attack. Drama company stoned to death. MacBeth to continue run with new cast. I quickly snatched a paper from the rack and read the grisly news. It seems that the first troop of thespians had been waylaid and stoned to death, all fourteen of them. A passing yeoman had abruptly come upon the awful carnage and had reported seeing a small neatly-bearded man running from the scene of the crime. No other clues were the police ever able to discover to solve this baffling and horrid mystery save a crumpled piece of light pink paper lying near the bodies which contained these words hastily scrawled, "Let he who is without skin stone the first cast."

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