The Wondermark Gazette

Our story thus far: Having landed on the Isle of Yam-Runners, I have been mistaken by the inhabitants for their sacred ancestor Grenadon, whose signature jade necklace I have stolen.

By the time our entourage reached the central village of the island, word had inexplicably spread to every inhabitant. I could almost witness the frenzied rumours darting from lips to ear to stomach to lips to elbow: Grandfather Grenadon’s back! Hurrah!

I gradually came to realise that old man Grenadon must have been absent from the isle for some decades or more, as it didn’t seem that anybody had retained an actual, visual recollection of the man. Thus it was easy for them to assume from my bearded, salt-wrinkled, be-jade-necklaced appearance that I must be their long-awaited oldfather. And who was I to disabuse them of the notion? I ventured to myself that I should at least ride this tide of honour to see where it might beach me, and after some internal wrangling involving large gouts of questionable logic, I had succeeded in convincing myself of the plan.

As we made for the village square, we were instantly set upon by chattering throngs of children, bothersome, wailing old mothers, and the high-craned necks of countless looky-loos. I perceived a general malaise to the place — this hamlet stunk of poverty, despair, and un-treated foot-odour. I seemed to be the sole attraction in the whole county; before we’d been clear of the jungle two minutes, the mob had made our passage impossible. Held firmly aloft as I was, I couldn’t even make a stab at my own way; wretchedly, I found myself passed from hand to grasping hand through the commotion, hundreds of greedy fingers exploring every crevice of my salt-encrusted form, scrabbling for loose granules as though those fine crystals were charged with some latent power. They wanted me. They needed me. They loved me, and it was a stinky, sweaty, grabby affair. I almost felt at home.

The pinpoint crack of a rifle shattered the air, stunning all into silence at once. Loose words fell limply to the ground, trampled in the sudden confusion; half-formed thoughts melted feebly into gurgled moans of alarm. A fat man with his hand on my loin slipped in a wet puddle of burbled conversation and neatly deposited me at his feet into a muddy morass of abandoned speech, and I slid and fumbled through abandoned participles before coming to rest at a set of wide, shining boots.

A heavy wooden rifle-stock mashed the ground three inches from my skin. A calloused hand reached down from a meaty frame. It hovered at my nose-level, just sitting there, shaking a little bit, the fingers slowly reddening and plumping as Gravity sucked blood towards her heart like a massive, earthy vampire.

I looked up. The hand was attached to a bearish man, smiling widely from three feet above my eyes. I took the hand, and he bore my weight up, holding me steady as I found my wobbling balance. I hadn’t stood upright since the sandbar, and my limbs were still cramped from their long, speeding ride in the salt-barrel — to say nothing of the shocking impact with the sea, which I luckily scarcely recalled. It had probably hurt worse than the jelly-fish venom still coursing its way through my extremities, which now tingled, not unpleasantly, as if I had stood up too quickly, or briefly strangled myself with a cravat in the wash-room.

“We are so pleased that you have, at long last, decided to return,” the man boomed, in a deep voice that reminded me of a bear gargling cough syrup. The sound had a throaty character, but wet around the edges, and it was a bit loopy, with a fake-cherry flavour.

“Happy to be here,” I wheezed. To me, my voice had the rustling squeak of many days on a windless sea, followed by a sudden trip through terrible air in a salt-barrel, followed by a brutal sting from jealous jelly-fish. My utterance sounded pretty lame out of my throat and out there in the world. But the crowd loved it — they cheered as one, sharply and suddenly. I startled at the explosion of sound, but the big man clapped a hand around my shoulder and drew me tightly to his warm, dewy chest.

“You don’t recollect, do you?” he said, softly, his moustache bristling at my ear, the whisper nearly drowned by the tumult.

“Er,” I replied. A moment later, I figured I should add “Sorry.”

“It’s all crackerjack,” he whispered. “We’ll have plenty of time for reacquaintance.” He squeezed my shoulder, powerfully and insistently, and I felt a tingly knob of fear begin to wrestle its way around my spine. The man was certainly attractive, as far as that sort of thing went, but my word! He would crush me, if it came to that!

“Citizens of the Isle,” he boomed at the gathered crowd, and waited a few seconds for the collective voices to calm in anticipation. “I have longed for the day I could make this happy proclamation. As your Mayor, it has rent my spleen in twain to watch poverty and hardship o’er-take this proud community. Decade after decade, we watched our children leave the Isle for the accursed Main-Land. We have bowed to plague, drought, and famine. We have, in dark moments, contemplated the consumption of each other’s meagre flesh, and in the blackest of those times, given in.” This last was met with murmurs of assent from the crowd. “And yet. And yet, we have held fast to the traditions of the Yam-Runners; prayed that the Bearer of the Bright-Jade might one day return to the land of his descendants. Friends, brothers, uncles — our fortunes have been rekindled this day.”

He turned to me, smiling brightly, his skin ruddy and glowing with excitement. “Grandfather Grenadon, have you indeed returned to your anxious children?”

A hundred eyes fixed on me. Snotty kids watched my every move with quivering lips, gooey gravy pooling in juvenile philtra. Red-eyed widows peered through latticed veils at my cringing form. That really cute girl with the black hair — who’d saved me on the beach from rubbing jelly-fish venom into my precious, precious eyes — was hanging back with an aloof coolness, but still seemed pretty into me.

“Yes,” I mumbled.

“Speak up, now!” the Mayor boomed, all toothy grins. “Grandfather, will you heal your children and your island? Will you make the Isle of Yam-Runners once more into the Lourdes of the Irish Sea?”

I didn’t have any idea what he meant by that, so I hedged my bets with a firm “Yes.”

“Grandfather!” the Mayor continued ecstatically, clutching me to his breast with a familiarity normally reserved for fast friends and not necessarily long-lost grandfathers, “will you use your mystical healing powers to give each of us perfect health forever, eliminate sickness and poverty, and bring droves of tourists flocking to our crockery-shoppes and post-card stalls?!”

By now he was choking me in the folds of his neck, and I, still feeble from the barrel-ride and jelly-fish incident, could barely cough out a burbled “Yes, provisionally, however I should tell you that–” before the entire crowd swept me up again in jubilation. I was tossed violently from weakling to weakling, banging about quite a bit along the way, and finally ended up propped against a scratchy tree some hours later once everyone was too tired to bear my weight.

NEXT: The Mayor’s Banquet

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