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“Bored! Bored! I’m madly bored!” shouts the suffering imp. “Tricks and trifles for a hundred hundred hundred centuries. Repetition wrapped in redundancy. Same, same. Same, same. Same, same, same …”
“Boring is as boring does,” chides Cornumsdotter, his windy girlfriend, also winged but bug-bellied in form, a sparkling firefly, and much, much younger.
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He moans. “Listen! Listen to my dreary round. I sour milk and stop bread from rising. I break shoe leather and door hinges, hide buttons that go missing, and when coins are dropped I roll them to where they never get found.”
“Try my games,” offers Cornumsdotter, gaily ignoring her mate’s distress as she has done for five thousand years. “I pinch babes in the cradle so they wail through the night. I unlatch the gate and hide stones in plain view. The cow runs free and when the boy chases her — hilarity! merriment! — he breaks his toes!”
The imps crouch in the stinking straw of a milk barn, just a hut really that shelters one scabby cow. It’s pitiful really, how in this Age imps are diminished. Sarconsson, who once flew on Primal Winds, who poked Life Herself with a pointed stick and tied together the sandal straps of awful Death — today he is a petty thing, a house goblin.
“Humdrum, diddly-dum, dull, dull, dull, dull!” He weeps waterfalls. He gesticulates. “Where is Now? Wherefore is lost the eternal Now-ness of Now? Now is a single glorious, gleaming grain of sand, always and forever one perfect particle. But whatfore? Time multiplies! Time metes out to each and every moment its own grain and I am made to count them, each and every one, always and forever! Sands amass in monstrous mounds, monumental measures — compile into the monotonous mountain of my life.”
Cornumsdotter yawns. “Grumpity-grump, but you are a crosspatch today.”
Sarconsson howls. “I fall upon the thorns of Life! I bleed!”
“Silly love, what ails you?”
“I will dash out my brains!” Sarconsson bangs his head on the stone foundation.
His lady-friend sings:
— dash away, dash away, dash away home
— balderdash
— diaper rash
— eau de cologne
“Cruel female. I dashed my brains before. I’ll dash them again.”
“Oh, do dash your darling brains, dear. We will watch them blow away on the wind, hither-thither. I will chase them down, scoop them up, stuff them back inside your skin. Will I find them all? Your brains, I mean. Did I the last time?”
Not brains, but bowels are said in this Age to be the seat of passions, and within that ardent cavity Cornumsdotter keeps a lamp she now lights. Her nether regions wink and twinkle with a carnal invitation.
She is an alluring bug, or should we say bugge*? As in the word’s archaic meaning of hobgoblin. This impish bugge models herself after the night beetles of summer who glimmer at twilight and lead children further into the dark than is safe to go. The children, if they catch one, wait for its belly to shine, then pinch off the abdomen to wear as a jewel.
Sarconsson puts on his most put-upon face. He announces, “I am too good for this degenerate Age.”
“It’s a fine enough Age for me,” huffs Cornumsdotter. “After all, I am born in it.” Her glow is gone. Sarconsson will not get lucky tonight.
“No, no, no, no,” he laments. “The better Ages are passed, the epic ones celebrated in song. You can’t know. You aren’t in them. The Age of Hot Seas when I am born. The fearsome Age of Dragons. Long, limpid, languorous, spell-cast spans.”
His lady-love says gently, “You were young then, Sweetie. The world looks better through young eyes.”
“The Ages are rapid,” he moans. “They roll like water, always downhill, the one before a bit more vivid, the one after a bit faded. You, my beaming bugge, are made for the Age of Faery. Glamorous and fanciful. There come brutal Ages — of Crashing Ice, of Giants & Heroes, of Deluge, of Lost Nomads. The passage of them spirals ever downward, decay and decline, to this worst of all times, the decadent Era of the Book.” Sarconsson spits. “Enervated. Effete.”
“And the Ages before? Before you are born?”
The imp rises up. He expands as if his aery interior is suddenly super-heated. “Before my glorious birth lie Ages so long gone their true names are lost and we call them by the superior metals — Gold and Silver and Bronze. And beyond even that —” Sarconsson takes a breath to calm himself, such is his agitation. “Beyond even that lies the Primal Eon when there is no World at all. No earth, no air, no fire, no water. An Eon without form, and void. Darkness upon the face of the deep. You can count on the fingers of both hands the Immortals who occupy such hallowed timelessness.”
“Fingers? Hands? Counting?” Cornumsdotter shape-shifts her wings from feathered to veined. Her voice is strident. “There. There is your problem. Over-exposure leads to over-identification. You are too near, too often, to two-legged mortals. Mortals are not our kind.”
The imp deflates. “That’s just it.” He whimpers. “I face frightful facts. I am mortal. I am mundane, mordant, morose. I molder.”
“Not yet,” Cornumsdotter responds cheerfully, and relights her belly to its full luminance. “No moldering for quite a while yet. You are grown arrogant with self-pity, my dear, comparing yourself to that sorry lot. Hominins are the dregs of Life, and you have foolishly let their inferior nature pollute your mind. I’m disappointed in you, Sarconsson. You are made of sterner stuff.”
He sulks. “Why do I listen to your puling prattle?”
“Because I am right and it is true. We must get you away from two-legged mortals and find a better sort of company.”
And that is how Sarconsson will forsake his life on the earth’s surface. He has two options. He can fly up into the steep sky, all the way to the vaulted ceiling of Heaven. Or he can dive down into the hollow center of our globe, into the Chthonic realm under our feet.
Whichever way, Cornumsdotter will go with him, for the fun of it.