Cenvallian Tales

Day 2: Nocturne - @monthlywritingchallenges

For Moon June, I’m going to be writing excerpts from a current project of mine, The Language of Wolves. These are all out-of-order and -out-of-context; They’re mostly just to get my creative juices flowing. Keep in mind that they’re also unedited.

Niv continued to duck her head long after she had slipped out of the tent, keeping her gaze fixed on the ground. She wasn’t trying to hide; Everybody in the village knew whose lodgings were whose. But it felt as if even the sky would judge her.

She made to lift the hood of her cloak, but her hands brushed against her hair. She hissed, then cursed herself for the noise. Ever since the incident, she had forgone the uniform. She didn’t deserve to wear it. She wasn’t her grandmother. And she was starting to realize that that wasn’t anything to be proud of.

Her feet tapped lightly on the cobblestones, beating a hesitant, deferential path. The village was starting to come back to itself. Vendors sat at their markets in the town square, waiting patiently, more cognizant than they might have been that there were worse things than spoiled goods. Children ran around in aimless circles. A man sat at the base of a tree with his lute, strumming out a soft, mournful nocturne. She slowed down. He paused in his music just long enough to spit at her.

So from then on whenever one of us called something problematic, he would make us talk it out until we could name the “bad” thing we were hinting at. In this particular class, 7/10 it was some type of oppression, and the remainder was like, “I’m uncomfortable because this is very new/confusing/pushing boundaries that made me feel safe.”

Once we stopped calling things “problematic” and stopping at that, class got way more interesting and... we all had to say, like, “that’s racist” or “that’s misogynistic” or “ew capitalism gross” out loud, which a lot of us had never done in a classroom before. Or we had to be like, “Uhhh... I’m not sure what’s so bad?” and confront our own beliefs and that was maybe even more useful.

Today I was reading a legal text associated with his family, and in the introduction I learned that that scribe died nine years after he wrote that first message, when he was thirty years old.

The Annals of Ulster writes: "Aedh son of Concobur Mac Aedhagain, who was to be chief professor of jurisprudence, died." (This is under the entry for 1356, but its dates are consistently a little off; the plague is first mentioned under the entry for 1346, which is a couple of years before it actually reached Ireland, and Aedh told us he was writing in the second year of it – hence "c.1359".)

And then all the other Sesame Street character accounts joined in:

And now I’m thinking maybe we’re gonna be okay… 💗

"So, boss... I may have messed up."

"What did you do, Ray?"

"Well, I made a post for Elmo saying 'Hi, how's everybody doing?'"

"I mean, that's kind of what we pay you for."

"Yeah, but.... <sigh> it turns out pretty much everyone is hanging on by a thread, badly enough that they needed to tell Elmo."

"Oh."

"God help me, boss, I think Elmo needs to be there for them."