Story one. It’s an outright honour and damn intimidating to get to share this with you all.
While Tomorrow Tales will feature the work of many contributors in collaboration, I’m starting with some of my own stories as a sign of preparedness to open up the heart (and as a starting point to pick at and build from).
This was actually the first fairy tale I wrote when I became interested in them back in 2015. It’s based on the lives of certain ancestors and abstractly on my own life’s illness.
It may not achieve everything we want out of Tomorrow Tales, but it felt like a symbolic place to start and an honest place.
We can do worse than to open with honesty.
One of the lessons of The many voices of Dahoum is that the pursuit of perfection is a terrible force that prevents action, connection, and meaning. By putting it up first, I hope to remember this lesson in the pursuit of making the newsletter.
I invite you to also set aside hesitation and the feeling that you need fully-formed thoughts in order to contribute.
Warm regards,
Rastko
Once, there was a young poet who was famous in all the queendoms even though no one knew to recite a single line of his work.
Like so many good stories, his begins before his birth.
You see, although Dahoum’s poor mother kept delivering babies with nearly the frequency that the family would receive wages in the post, none survived to be of speaking age. Such was the fate of the parents, as much as it was the children’s fate.
The mercy was that as the deaths grew in number the births were getting easier. So they kept trying.
When Dahoum was finally born, he simply crawled out of bed where his parents still slept, quietly burdened by dreams of the eleven infant plots in the graveyard and by how they would afford a twelfth. The parents were only half-surprised to see the baby seated at the kitchen table when they got up in the morning. Mother pulled at his cheeks while Father put some eggs on to fry.
They would not get attached to this one, they promised themselves.
A year passed and his heart kept beating. Soon, other murmurings were starting to spout from him: the beginnings of words. This made Mother uneasy. She went to the priest for advice; he tried to sell her another plot, told her the curse was with language and Dahoum’s end was neigh. Unsatisfied, Mother then went to the hodža who suggested that the curse could be broken if the child was separated from the family — he offered to take the boy in as a student. Having already lost so many children, Mother bundled Dahoum up and took him to the last place she knew: to the forest where a Wise Stork was said to live. She had big human ears and listened closely to Mother's woes.
"Death has a taste for your offspring, my darling" she cooed consolingly. Then counseled: "Cut the child’s tongue in two! Only then can you break the curse of language. That way, insatiable death won't recognise the boy as your son.” The Stork flapped her wings in excitement. “He may live yet."
There was a lot of blood but the boy did live. The blood was kept to fertilize soil.
Thanks to the split tongue, Dahoum developed two voices and would argue with himself constantly. His parents held their heads, hoping the voices would one day find peace with one another but, as it must be, other worries eventually replaced these and the boy was left to his wild self-discourse without interruption.
The lands experienced drought one year, floods the next. The Stork demanded her payment, but was wise enough to take it on credit. “One of your kin may pay in another generation,” cooed the Stork.
Mother fell ill around then and doctors had to chop off both her arms at the shoulders. She plowed the fields every day with her teeth; she couldn’t hold her head in worry any more.
Fighting began. Dahoum lost Father in the first war and a good part of his youth in the next. Optimism, hope — what use did they have for these? They lost their land over and over but were required always to work it.
At night Dahoum stayed up reading, which bore a third voice in him from deeper within than the other two. It taught him about the magic of other places and how to enter into someone’s mind.
If Mother spoke, which was rare, it was to say that the only joy she might chance on in this life would be to see one of her children outlive her. Each morning that she found Dahoum at the breakfast table, as on the day of his birth, she sighed with relief. This one is special.
Dahoum did not speak to Mother about the books he was reading, afraid they would put a distance between them. He felt he was outgrowing her.
Neighbors moved away or were killed or married into homes of similar standing — it did not matter, he wasn’t so close with them. In fact the further he got from others, the boy found, the more alive his three voices became. Their confabulation produced a fourth and final voice: Dahoum began to write.
He found new hours in the night he’d never known of and worked very hard on epic poems about birds, about nations, about hunger.
By the end of the first year he had one poem to put his name to. At last, he thought, something of my own! The next day, he did not like it and started another. So it went for some twelvemonths, his craftsmanship always improving with the progress of an inchworm. The farm, with similar hesitancy, was deteriorating.
One new year’s day, he surprised himself: he had written a poem he was happy with — even proud of. He read it to Mother who cried for the first time since Father’s funeral. “You’re a genius”, she exclaimed.
And the word entered him with the weight of a brass bell.
From all his readings, he knew very well what it meant: he would inevitably die of genius in three years or less. It was a fate shared by the very best poets. He was honoured and afraid in equal parts. But he had to be sure. He wrote another poem and to his terror found it, again, sublime. The thing was incinerated immediately.
It was fortunate Dahoum knew about those secret hours in the night because he had a lot of thinking to do. His four voices were incessant. One exalted the fact that he would be in the pantheon of genius poets! Another agreed, but did not want to give up on life which had only recently become rich and magical now that he was a poet. The third voice reminded the others that Mother, being the source of both the life and the talent, must be protected at all costs. The last voice mediated between these others.
To spare his mother seeing him die, he decided to venture out into the world quietly. Dahoum left behind his writing things and books to put death off his trail, told Mother there was a third war, and departed simply without any grand gesture.
He wandered from country to country, along shores and continents, sending letters home without a return address. He told Mother only what was most banal, afraid to incite inspiration by exploring deeper themes. He couldn’t even write that he loved her though that was plainly the message of each letter.
Dahoum went on to find impressive systems of government where workers worked the land like his family had without experiencing poverty, but he did not settle in these regions to enjoy them.
He saw almost every library there was: big ones with steeples, emptied ones, ones on donkeys, ones on abandoned railways carts.
He saw lovers living charmed lives in romantic valleys, but did not look for a partner so that he may live like them.
Dahoum was afraid to ask for any of these things from fear of having them taken away when death caught up at last. He had already lost his Father, Mother, and home — was that not enough?
Years passed, certainly more than three. The boy lived on, becoming a man fated to wander as an outsider to the life that he had savoured so gratefully in youth.
With the years, so too did Mother pass. Her last wish was to be buried, with Dahoum's epistles for her pillow, between all the children's graves and Father's resting place. At the funeral, there was a figure none of the villagers recognized — whispers that it must be Dahoum were spread. The figure cried from an unknown place buried deep in the chest.
He took out a key from that same place and the villagers watched him go to Mother's dilapidated house solemnly. His weeping took on bluer tones as he passed his hands on the breakfast table where the family's fondest moments were shared. There was fruit still in the basket. He went to his old room and found his familiar pens and paper. He was free to die now; genius was no longer a threat. But as he tried to write, words no longer came.
Dahoum looked over the past work and noticed mistakes, poor choices in style. The poems were difficult to understand and lacked melody. They weren’t so special after all. This possibility never occurred to the audacious poet. He really had lost everything to genius, but not in the way he expected.
Dahoum lived many more unhappy years, and death came when it did.
The many voices of Dahoum