The
legend of Full Moon Rising
By
Steve Harrison
A man
of white beard and brown hair crawled across a barren desert in
desperation. Dune after dune of endless
sand lay before him for as far at the eye could see. Making his last stand, the man committed
himself to achieving the top of the next dune; beyond that he wasn’t sure he
would be able to continue. An hour later
the man finally crested the top and peered over into the depression below. With
the sun blazing in his eyes the man could hardly believe his good fortune; a
small wooden structure revealed itself in the duned valley below. Not having
eaten in the last four days he found himself clinging to this one bastion of
hope.
The man, with
renewed purpose and waning energy set out to reach the structure which, as he
got closer, looked more like a shack or a stand of some sort. “Could it be a food stand?”, he thought to
himself. He allowed himself this thought
briefly and then scolded himself for raising his hopes too high. There appeared to be signage on the front
with colors and numbers and pictures of which he could not make out the
details.
Still unable
to walk, the man crawled closer and to his delight, discovered that yes it was
indeed a food stand, a farmers market specializing in the sale of the humble
onion. A large white wooden onion was attached high above the roofline in
cartoon caricature. Not believing his own eyes he rubbed them and re-focused
affirming his discovery.
The man,
reared in a small outpost of fertile lands on the other side of the world, had
grown up on the onions of his region and had developed a deep seeded love for
all variety of Allium Cepa, the
common bulb onion.
“To what deity do I owe my good fortune?”,
he thought to himself. “Not only have I
discovered my only salvation of food for miles around in this forsaken desert,
but they are serving my beloved onion, my best meal. Oh I can almost feel the
crisp crunch on my teeth and the clear juice running down my chin. Oh happy
day, oh happy day!”
He crawled
forth a little faster now but at his current pace it would still be a good
thirty minutes to the shack; His mind turned to all things onion.
He remembered
that his grandfather who had lived to the ripe old age of 100 years old had
been quoted in his village ledger, as attributing his long life to two distinct
things: Hard daily physical work and eating lots and lots of onions.
The hard
physical labor bit had always made sense to the man. The regular exercise, he knew increased
circulation and was good for his heart. But what was it about the onion? Was it
the vitamins and minerals that manifested the fountain of youth in the onion or
was it something more, something intangible or maybe mystical? He didn’t know
for sure, he just knew that he loved to eat them and if it led to a longer life
then it was a good thing. Deep down though, he suspected that even if strong
scientific evidence pointed the other way towards the onion leading to cancer
or other illness, he would probably eat them anyway; he simply loved them.
The man had a
wonderful childhood growing up in a small agricultural town where his mother
and father tended to a bountiful garden yielding everything from rowed corn to
melons of water, and of course his beloved onions. There were no hard times of famine in the man’s
early life such as he was experiencing now. He had grown with a wide variety of
wondrous foods that were available in season, or put up into jars for winter
subsistence. It was this variety of
foods that shaped the diversity of the man’s palate. There was no food the man
did not enjoy as a young lad; sans one, the raisin.
It is not
clear the reasoning or logic behind the man’s aversion to the seemingly
innocuous chewy brown fruit, but it could very well have been that heredity
played a strong role because all three of the man’s children and his seven
grandchildren, to this day, avoid the raisin like the black plague of old.
Prolific
since 1490 BC, the raisin at one time in early Roman times was so valuable that
two jars of them was the equivalent of one slave in trade. To the man though, two jars of them would be
to insult the jars themselves.
Fumbling
through the pockets of his torn knickers the man found what he searched for,
his last gold coin. And with the coin
tucked in his clutches he managed to pull himself upright, however difficult,
to a standing position at the counter.
There was a
lone person unpacking boxes from the back of the onion stand and was unaware
entirely of the man’s presence. Unable to speak due to his emaciated state the
man waited to be waited on with what patience he had left. It was then that the man noticed the small
cardboard sign propped up on the counter no more than an arm’s length away from
him written in what looked like black pen:
Sorry! N O M O R E
O N I O N S.
TODAYS
SPECIAL: RAISINS
The afternoon
sun beat down upon the desert without prejudice or preference. A light gust of
wind stirred and swirled sand around the bottom of the shack but it was no
match for the heat of the sun. The faint creak of a rusty hinge on the shack
shutter was followed by a soft, rhythmic knocking of the plywood each time the
wind came up. A small tumbleweed was
hung up on the back corner of the shack.
Riding the next gust, it wiggled itself free somehow and continued on
its journey. It rolled by a lone
scorpion that appeared to be watching and was seemingly unaffected by sun or
wind.
The Raisin
stand attendant, some ten minutes later, made her way up to the front counter
to wipe it clean. There, not at all
upright anymore, was the cardboard sign with a ball point pen jousted through
the middle like the axel of some strange wheel.
Confused, she looked out to the desert beyond and with a stoic look of
oblivion and genuine befuddlement witnessed a man crawling away with a white
beard and brown hair. The man was slowly moving back up the sand dune hill
adjacent to his own down-tracks; Not at all dead yet, and still of sound mind
he made painstaking headway back into the heart of the desert from whence he
came. His knickers were pulled down just
far enough to expose his entire backside.
