Flash Fiction Friday: Gabble

Every Friday, Strange Animal Publications will be featuring a short-short story. Have a lit blog? You should participate, too: let’s do this thing! 

Gabble

The Muttering Monks of Verbal IV, an order of anchorites who worship the local deity Loquacion, have become something of a tourist attraction of late.  The Rule of this Holy Order, actually “The Congregated Solitary Order of Saint Prolix,” concludes that, although their brethren who choose to express their devotions with Vows of Silence are  sound according to Doctrine, a more challenging vow– and one more worthy of their deity, whose purview includes conversation and the exchange of ideas– would be an Observation of Gabble.

“Anyone can stop talking,” St. Prolix had written in “On the Oration of God.”  ”It is,” he continued, “the Natural State of the human to keep silent, as we can illustrate through the sleeper, who very rarely speaks; and when he does so emit a nocturnal converse, we find it meaningless, and an aberration.

“More significant and Holy, therefore,” he went on to conclude, “would be perpetual vocalization.  For, this would require both the facility of the Mind, which formulates words, and the Divine Spirit of Loquacion, which animates the Mouth, and raises us up above the animals.”

Members of the Order are not allowed to cease talking at any time while awake, and it is said that certain Masters who have practiced this Holy Observation for years on-end can even continue their cant through the night, not in the fashion of the occasional sleep-talker, but continuously, and with meaning.

And so, in recent years, now that Intragalactic Travel has become so affordable, the Monastery of the Blessed Laryngopharynx receives thousands of visitors annually, second only to the nearby Sex Fields. Crowded against the walls, gawking, the sightseers point and gape, shouting and waving their arms, trying as a lark to say or do something that will cause one of the Holy Men to break into silence.