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Post by Kaez on Jan 31, 2015 11:22:12 GMT -5
750-word limit Flash Fiction
The Unpredictable Irishman
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Post by James on Feb 6, 2015 17:11:42 GMT -5
BSI Index – Flagged for Review:
> > Prophecy
> > > > Tarot Cards
> > > > > > The Unpredictable Irishman
Tarot decks are in no way uniform. Different dealers use their own cards, many of them customised. To the genuinely talented, it provides a stronger connection between person and deck. To the fraudsters, it gifts a notion of mystique and respect. Only the most gifted of dealers or con artists, though, will include the Unpredictable Irishman in their deck.
No two cards are ever the same, but the Irishman is usually depicted as a red-haired man wearing a flowing white robe. Shamrocks are a mainstay on the image. Beyond that, a cornucopia of iconography is used to build up the particular reputation of the card: fish, skeletons, multiple moons, etc.
The historical basis for the card would appear to originate from Aidan of Lindisfarne. Common and magical historians diverge at exactly how Aidan convinced Northumbrians to convert to Christianity. The former suggests a lot of walking and talking. The latter tells a tale of the end justifying the means. Aidan, despairing at the monastery’s failure to lead England away from paganism, decided to use magic to trick the peasantry into believing his message. He would walk from one town to the next, always arriving with some new feat.
In one village, he entered with five cartfuls of fish, wheat, and fruit. The villagers, distrustful of missionaries, laughed and mocked. They had a strong harvest and plentiful supplies already. Aidan stayed a night, talked about God and his work, then left, leaving the carts. The following night, the harvest burned and their supplies were robbed by roving bandits. Only Aidan’s carts remained. They kept the town alive.
Another story recounts that a village was stunned when the man of God arrived with several walking skeletons. This was necromancy, dark magic; surely God could not have done such a thing. Aidan again stayed for a night, playing games with the children and drinking ale with the men before leaving. To the village’s utter horror, the skeletons remained. Two days later, a dispute broke out. It involved bad blood over five generations and threatened to tear the community apart. Aidan’s skeletons were witnesses of the original event and solved the issue in an hour.
There are tales of Aidan for several years, tramping across the English countryside and spreading the message of Christianity. Towns began to bubble in excitement and fear, wondering what the unpredictable Irishman would bring to them. One town was gifted an extra moon. No one knew why until bandits tried to pillage homes at night and were betrayed by the added light of the second orb. Another village was shocked to see the nearby river flowing closer to them, drawing nearer to the outermost buildings. The water was used to quench the flames that fanned out after houses caught alight a week later.
When faced with such extraordinary power, coupled with Aidan’s good spirit and kind demeanour, the peasantry of Northumbria flocked to Christianity. Obviously, commonly held history has gradually dropped these events until they have been forgotten, but a magically inclined Aidan would go some way to explain how he was able to shift the winds when Bamburgh was about to burn. I think we can rule out divine intervention (at least from this specific divinity).
Tarot decks are notoriously hard to read and the best dealers will weave the story together depending on all the cards on the table. At its base form, though, the Unpredictable Irishman is said to contain two predictions: something bad will happen, but something good will come from it. The people Aidan interacted with faced difficulties, but through them and his gifts, they found God. Perhaps, it is more easily explained by Ronald Weasley in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban: “you’re going to suffer, but you’re going to be happy about it.” Like having your couch break, but discovering a lottery ticket. Or being forced to write comedy but becoming a better writer at the end of it.
Of course, some people object to the interpretation above. They insist the figure depicted on the card is not Aidan but in fact God, himself. He performed the various miracles attributed to Aidan and saved Bamburgh from burning. This seems unlikely, least of all because if God was an unpredictable Irishman, you’d figure alcohol would be cheaper.
(TC: I’d appreciate it, Joan, if you kept this as official as possible. No pop culture references, jokes or religious digs, please.)
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Post by Jenny (Reffy) on Feb 10, 2015 12:44:18 GMT -5
Mr. O’Mulriain
“Com‘n get ‘em. Pot-tay-toes. Best roun’ ere,” Colm belted out as best he could. “Fresh fro’ groun’. Na’ taint on ‘em.” You had to make a racket to be heard over the constant din in the Bizarre Bazaar. Colm knew his produce wasn’t the most unusual but people craved familiar homely food; not squids on sticks or savoury pancakes. “Boil ‘em, mash ‘em, ne-way ye want ‘em. Thay’ll do noice roasties.”
“You will never sell any of these. They’re full of rot,” the whippy voice halted everything within a small radius.
Colm cringed. He knew that voice. It was Mother When. She ran the hospital … except they broke more people than healed. The hospital was more commonly known as Torture Grounds. Her spindly hand moved the potatoes, inspecting each with clawed nails, creating pocketed holes. “Best get rid of them all. Start again.”
As always Mother When was accompanied by her Ladies in Hating. The two younger ladies stood like wings on shoulders behind the crone. Each had her eyes hidden behind a role of bandages, with pale skin and dark lips, dressed in the traditional mourning black with a white pinny. They never said anything.
“Sorrie thay ain’t to yer liken, Miss When. Is hard whan ye only got groun’ of Mad City,” he clutched his coin belt closed, hopeful she’d go away. Farming wasn’t easy here. The only ground suitable was out in the Nightmare Lands on the edge of the city where plagues and beasts roamed free.
“We do as we must, Colm O’Mulriain,” she sneered. “How is your arm, by the way? I heard it was hurting again.” Ideal chat was not her forte.
“Tis’ as gud as new, lassie. Na pain ‘ere.” Colm was never good at lying and he knew it. Even as he wiggled his arm he winced. It was an old injury from a long time ago, although he could not remember what it was. The fog of the city had erased the memory.
People around the stall were watching. They knew what was coming. Those who didn’t attend “Appointments” were dealt with personally by Mother When. “We can fix it up. Good as new. Come along, Mr. O’Mulriain,” she snapped. “Assist him, ladies,” she gestured.
“I ain’t comin’. Ye’ll ‘ave ta catch me first, ye hag!” Colm grabbed the first thing that came to hand; a spud covered in eyes, and threw it. The potato bounced off Mother When’s chest, who’d followed its trajectory course with her hawk-like-eyes, and hit the floor with a thud. By the time she’d looked up Colm had tipped his stall over, creating a potato landscape, and was scarpering away as fast as his legs could take him. It was Mother When’s turn to scream this time and she hollered to her Ladies in Hating to follow the damned Irishman.
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Post by Matteo ((Taed)) on Feb 17, 2015 11:01:31 GMT -5
Reffy:
That's awesome.
Building a bit on my last review, I'm going to follow a random thought I had so that you can see where I'm coming from. I obviously have a somewhat different mindset about this kind of stuff, and I hope that it's interesting, if not necessarily useful, to see a different perspective.
So, Colm is a farmer; he is not the City's only farmer; but the only arable land available is poor and hard to access. So immediately I wonder: where's the food coming from to support a city-sized population?
And I'm sure you're thinking, this is a fantasy story, it's a weird, dreamy city, why are you worrying about crop yields and macroeconomics, you weird, boring person? But I actually see those questions as leading to potentially "Mad" answers. If we assume that everybody in the City has to eat, but that farming doesn't really work, we're left with the angle of having to explore weird new options. What odd dreams and stories are being cultivated for foodstuff?
When I hear about the weird stuff you can buy in the Bizarre Bazaar, I want to know what some of that stuff is. It would make good flavour for this story, it would build the setting's tone as a whole, and it would make Mr. O’Mulriain himself all the more interesting, since he becomes more starkly defined as this island of homespun mundanity amidst the strangeness.
Having said that, getting to meet the famous Miss When was cool, and it did some legwork to making the City feel more real. Her exact methods and motivations may still be nebulous, but at least now we have some basic adjectives to pin onto her.
James:
Well this scratched an itch I didn't know I had. Real neat use of the topic; I don't know what drew that connection for you, but the tarot card angle was great, and I love that it was formatted as an internal report. It left me wanting to see more of the BCI Index.
I was ready to dock you twice, and you dodged it both times. First, I wasn't familiar with the real-life Aidan, so when I googled it on a hunch and saw that he wasn't an original creation, I was a little disappointed. But a little more googling seemed to show that all the actually interesting stuff (the fables of his deeds) was invented by yourself. Second, the Ron Weasley reference seemed really out of place, but the final coda tied that loose end up perfectly.
Yeah, great piece, I don't have much else to say. I was a tad dry, but the dryness worked for it.
Winner: James
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