~inspired by combined prompts from Sunday Scribblings...I'm weeks behind and more or less off-topic but I'm all about appeasing the daemon just now.....~
~much love and thanks to Sarah for the beauty and magic of her words; like the Piper's song, she leads me back to the places I long to be....~
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Beauty and the Oracle...a work-in-progress
The Middle Time
They call him the Oracle. If he ever had another name, it's mostly forgotten now. He's been sitting at the corner of Main and Porter for as long as anyone can remember --even old Mrs.Fothergill says he's been there since she was a girl and she has to be about 80 by now.
They call him the Oracle because he know things. Mostly about the weather - he knows when the big storms are coming and when the boats should stay in the cove. A few of the men were lost before folk started to heed him, but he's never been wrong. He knows other things sometimes, although the one's he talks to rarely speak of it again. They're the kind of knowings that make people fidget and change the subject, the kind that no-one admits to believing for fear of the wrath of Father O'Malley and his army of angels.
Anyhow, rain or shine, hail or murderous gale, you'll find him there. Sitting on that up-turned bucket, the violin case open, tattered violin resting on a patched shoulder. He plays the old songs; ancient airs and reels he charms from the strings of that old fiddle, although how it can play such beautiful melodies in the state that it's in defies explanation. Some of the old ones say it's enchanted, that it's best not to linger too long for fear of being stolen by the Fae.
At some point, someone decided he was there to stay - despite, I might add, the best efforts of the new town council and their newfangled ideas - and they bought him an old striped marquis. Not a big one, you understand -- that really wouldn't have gone over well with the young ones and their Business Improvement Area plans -- just a small, open-fronted thing, enough to keep the sun off and the rain out.
You're probably wondering what keeps him there,all those days, in all that weather. Most other folk have stopped thinking about him, he's become a part of the scenery, forgotten the way you forget a particular stone wall or a store front that's just always been there. Speculations on who and why are as many as there are imaginations, most of them more far-fetched than the rest. But there are some folk who believe the old story. You might even know a version of it, it's one of the oldest stories ever told.
The story starts something like this -- it begins with a waiting, and most believe it ends with a waiting. Everyone agrees though, on the somewhere in the middle, which its the part when She comes. It's the somewhere in the middle that this story starts, with the arrival of Beauty and what she did to him and all the rest of us.
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