A Coastal Myth

The clarinet waves touched the moon. He walked like a rooster in the moonlight, bewitched by the music and the light. The caparisoned elephants swayed their heads to the drumbeats. A dozen half-naked virgins danced around a bronze devil. “Human smell!” Everything vanished in the blackout. That escaped fisherman appeased the dark deity… With a wavering voice and goose-bumps, my wizened neighbor recounts thus the myth behind the coastal festival. I enjoy the false beauty. There is no analyzer in his thinking system. Superstition is highly inflammable in his illiterate inland. Such beliefs flourish here in the thick Fantasy Forest, where the reason rays never fall. First published in The Literary Hatchet