A Cautionary Tale

The poet woke in a granite-walled room and inhaled stagnant air that smelled as if undisturbed for millennia.  Despite the motionless sun blazing outside the window, he felt no need to remove his cable-knit sweater.  He sat up on the cot and ran a hand through his shock of white hair.  What had happened?  The last thing he remembered was gasping at the dinner table while his wife looked on in horror.

“Are you ready?” a being with a man’s body and a falcon’s head asked after entered the room.  “You can start by telling me why you deserve eternal life.”

“I published poems in all the major journals like ONTHEBUS, Rattapallax, and such.”  The poet somehow found it natural to relate his publication record to the Egyptian god he’d never believed in.  “I even placed one in Poetry.”

The god Horus led him into a chamber where jackal-headed Anubis sat before a golden balance scale.  Like Horus, Anubis wore a white linen robe that left his right shoulder bare.  A crocodile and a baboon squatted in the corner playing Snakes and Ladders.

“This is the judgment in which we compare meaningful words to empty ones.” Anubis withdrew the words spoken by the poet at public readings from a calfskin bag, placed those from poems on the balance’s right pan, and placed the ones from poems’ introductions on the left.

By intuition the poet realized that if the scale tilted to the right, green-skinned Osiris would embrace him with eternal life and lead him to the field of reeds.  As the indicator needle wavered, the poet prayed for all his iambs and clever metaphors to gain weight but it was no good.  The scale’s needle swung left.

“Condemned!” The baboon wrote the verdict in a notebook.

The crocodile lunged and tore the poet’s heart from his chest.  In the moments of consciousness before entering oblivion a final regret seared the poet’s mind.  If only he’d skipped the bloated intros, his poetry would have lived for eternity.

Bio: Jon Wesick has published stories in journals such as Space and Time, Zahir, and Tales of the Talisman.  He’s also published close to two hundred poems in small press journals such as The New Orphic Review, Pearl, Pudding, and Slipstream.  One of his poems won second place in the 2007 African American Writers and Artists contest.