Earnest Art!
Click on the art itself to see it enlarged. I'll re-post the story it illustrates, "The Town Elders," below.
Artwork copyright Daryl Earnest. Visit Daryl's Facebook page at http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100002237918033&sk=info#!/profile.php?id=100002237918033&sk=wall
[image error] Herding Ravens
The Town Elders
copyright © Christopher Conlon
In their wisdom the town elders decreed that an ice skating rink would be built, and it was. Hundreds of happy skaters, loving couples, single men and women, teenagers, families with small wobble-walking children, came from miles around bundled in their snow clothes to enjoy gliding about on the ice under blue and white winter skies. Unfortunately the rink had been built, for reasons only the town elders might have been able to explain, over the top of a small lake, and as the weather turned from winter to spring skaters began to notice cracks which were at first no more than tiny pencil-scratches in the ice but which soon expanded to highly dangerous crevices and chasms. Skaters began to disappear under the ice into the lake, at first occasionally, and then on an alarmingly regular basis.
When blossoms began opening all over town and the weather had turned the warm of sandals and shorts, the ice rink was dismantled entirely and the same persons who had enjoyed the winter skating, that is, those who still survived, came to the lake, disrobing almost completely and allowing the sun to bronze their skin for hours on end. They ate from picnic baskets and cooked hamburgers on small barbeques. Many of them swam delightedly in the lake, paddling this way and that and playfully splashing each other. One problem, which the town elders failed entirely to solve, was that at times corpses left over from the fiasco of the skating rink would suddenly surface, and at the most inopportune times. It became an embarrassment and something of a public relations problem, never more so than when a young woman dragged a male corpse to shore, proclaiming it to be what remained of her first and indeed only true love, thereupon carrying the disintegrating thing over her shoulders to the local courthouse where she demanded that the town elders allow her to marry it. She was informed that the law did not allow for the marriage of woman to corpse, and this created a small but similarly embarrassing civil rights kerfuffle. The woman ultimately decided to cohabitate with her dearly beloved, a decision which generated some controversy in itself—but not, the town elders were certain, on the level that would have occurred had they allowed the two of them to enter into the state of holy matrimony.
One odd aspect to this entire problem of the corpses in the lake was that the lake never seemed to tire of disgorging corpses onto the shore. After a time it became embarrassingly apparent that far more deceased persons were washing up onto the sands than had vanished from the ice rink during the winter. The town elders formed a committee to study this apparently impossible problem, but no final report from this committee is known to have been issued, or if issued, it appears to have been lost.
In the meantime winter came again and the lake was once more crusted over with smooth, inviting ice. Again came the young lovers and the men and women and the families with their small wobble-walking children. But now some noticed odd round bumps appearing on the surface of the ice, bumps which slowly split the ice in places through which strange things, at first unrecognizable, began to grow. Some persons believed that the growths might be some new strain of cauliflower or tomato, but soon enough it became apparent that the growths were in fact human beings. One would see the clear ice-encrusted outlines of a forehead, a temple, a set of ears, frost-filled strands of hair. This for the town elders was the ultimate humiliation, and it was quickly decided that something would have to be done. Fortunately there was a course of action readily and even obviously available to them, and they took it. The town elders began to cultivate this unprecedented winter crop. One would see them late at night in their heavy coats tilling the ice rink with shovels and hoes, always careful to smooth the ice again after pulling nature’s peculiar yield from the ice. Eventually the story, which was true, went around that the crops were in fact delicious to eat when prepared properly, and soon the townspeople themselves were tending what was now less a skating rink than a glorious winter garden. Neighbors laughed and joked about this unexpected bounty and exchanged recipes enthusiastically. If you ever decide to go to the town, by all means do so in the depths of winter. Buy one of the readily-available cookbooks for sale at various shops near the garden. And then go and collect some winter crops for your own dinner. There’s more than enough for everyone. Indeed, the supply is ample and even, at times, overwhelming. The heads of teenage girls are said to be especially succulent when stewed for several hours with carrot and onion in chicken stock. Or snap off some baby fingers, which are simple to gather and requite no preparation at all. The town elders assure us that they are delicious straight from the ice, sweet and with an unexpected tanginess.
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