The Casting

Afterwards, and contrarily, it was the tawny owl matriarch who gave the definitive history of the miraculous year. First to rise at moonlight, last to retire in the sunshine, the tawny owl – from her perch on the elm, on the border between the garden and the wood – witnessed the whole episode as she went about her business.

Perhaps it was something in the water with which the homeowners watered their garden that year that made the garden animals more restless and prone to bickering than usual. They were filled with a yearning for something new. 

The autumn that followed was warm and wet. The common snails laid plentifully: so much so that the worms and beetles, multiplying, devoured all the snail eggs. All but one: the littlest one. This single snail happened to hatch right next to a half-full pot of thick white substance, pungently fragrant, that had fallen from one of the house windows into the geranium bed.

In all the history of the garden, never had anything like this fallen from any of the windows; nor had there ever been only one snail hatched all season. So, at their next assembly, the garden animals deliberated: what did all this mean, and what were they to do? After much talking and voting, the assembly decided this meant the solitary baby snail would be their chosen one and that the white substance would be his magic potion. So they claimed the snail for the garden, and began rubbing the magic potion into his back.

 ‘He,’ of course, was, like most snails, a hermaphrodite. But, to the animals of the garden, he would always be ‘he.’

They installed the chosen one on a platform at the top of the garden. The children of the house, when younger, had erected this platform for charades and skits. To protect from the sun the chosen one’s pigmentless skin, the assembly of animals wove oakleaves, with moth silk, into a giant awning. To protect the chosen one’s tiny body from the rain, they retrieved discarded bits of cardboard, got tailorbirds to sew them together, and covered them with tinfoil thieved from the kitchen to create a shiny and waterproof alcove. To amplify the chosen one’s dignity, they joined together the wings of dead butterflies into a mantle for his – well, he had no shoulders, so they draped it around his neck. 

Shift by shift, the chosen one, now yclept Grandomagnosnailus – though still undergrown – was tended. The assembly requisitioned from the garden animals all the best flower-petal-tips, just-sprouting grass-stalks, and mushroom heads so tender they melted if the chosen one’s eyestalks did but quiver towards them. 

And, every day, as the hush of dusk erupted into the cricketroar and batscreech of twilight, a subcommittee of the assembly rubbed into the chosen one’s back the sky-fallen potion. And the chosen one’s shell refused to grow. 

Without his shell, all the chosen one’s vital organs, which should’ve grown tucked inside, grew instead on his bare back, causing a massive deformity, viz, the sign and signification, the symbol and stigmata of a chosen one. 

A runt from his very hatching, the chosen one continued sickly. Who knows how his health would’ve fared had he been left to fend for himself? Pampered as he was, and bereft of his shell, he lived from one minor ailment to another. Tended as he was, and bereft of all agency, he showed as a young’un the changeable temper that generally comes with dotage, disability, and dependency. He was even, sometimes, out of sorts with his army of tenders, associating their fussings and ministerings with his string of minor ailments.

But he was no fool. He recognised his special circumstances. From his platform, at the top of the garden, he could see that all the other animals, even those on the various subcommittees assigned to his care, conveyed their own food to their own mouths, and walked themselves to their own toiletplaces. He, meanwhile, never had to move his mouth a millimetre to his food; his waste was coaxed from his body and borne away, raised high and accompanied by chanting, on a bier, many times a day. And the potion that they rubbed into his skin – that, he knew, was unique to himself. Mysteriously, and early, he sensed that the potion had something to do with both his special status and his frequent minor ailments. 

Who knows where such knowledge comes from – and who knows where, so quickly, it vanishes when unheeded. He was scarcely out of his babyhood when his instinctive ideas regarding the magic potion were replaced by the ideas of the other garden animals. And he, too, began to consider himself a lucky one, and did his part to preserve the status quo.

No garden animal, scurrying about their business, passed the chosen one’s platform without pausing to genuflect. And every day at midday, the assembly allowed the garden animals to come right up to the chosen one’s translucent feet, and steal droplets of his slime with which to smear their heads in reverence. And that year, the garden began to draw visitors from far away. 

At dawn, larks and starlings streaked across the sky and through the oak’s branches to lay the day’s first mealworm or mulberry at the chosen one’s feet. At midmorning, when the grass snakes, basking on the rocks beside the lilypond, had been sunwarmed, they slithered like molten jewels through the daisy borders to the platform, to regurgitate last night’s half-digested rats and moles – hunted, of course, outside the garden’s hallowed grounds. These offerings were useless, of course, to Grandomagnosnailus; but they fed the hawks, gerbils, and other assembly members guarding him. And, at dusk, the homewards-bound fruitbats, and through the night the barn owls, brought offerings of their own, to nourish the chosen one and his protectors.

Dormice came from the cornfields, sacrificing their feeding hours – their nights – at imminent risk of starvation. Swallows came, postponing migration, braving unseasonably heavy snows. Wolves came from the north, and, during their sojourn in the chosen garden, forbore from eyeing with untoward desires any normally edible creature. From far and wide, animals of all kinds pilgrimaged to sight the chosen one.

They came to seek his counsel: whether to abandon this year’s runts; whether to nest in the crazy man’s warm attic, or in the kindly pauper’s rusted wheelbarrow; whether to challenge to honourable antler duel the harem’s current owner and risk being gored, or to sneak into the harem and risk being caught in flagrante delicto and gored. Living as he did, apart from life, not even really watching it, but rather being watched, the chosen one knew very little. Nothing, in fact. But he knew that he knew nothing. So he would merely repeat aloud his follower’s dilemma. And, lo, the follower would himself, in hearing his ideas repeated back to himself, often discover what he must do, and naturally attribute that discovery to the chosen one, and depart, and laud the chosen one’s wisdom. Many – or, at least, multiple – were the miracles in domestic peace and inter-species understanding that were born at the feet of the chosen one.

So, neglecting their own homes and offspring, his followers came to sit nearby, gossiping among themselves. Occasionally, they glanced towards him to remark how fine he was looking or to brush stray grass seeds and dandelion heads from his platform.

Also, they came to gawk, and to carry home news and speculation: thereby to become little chosen ones, chosen-ones-by-proxy, in their own far-off gardens or woods. 

Also, they came simply to sit at his feet awhile, gazing on him, and then return to their lives, strengthened somehow to fly higher, run faster, or persist a little while longer.

From the house, the people watched as their garden, grown barren and silent of late despite their generous watering, revived. For the chosen one had wrought magic indeed. He had united the garden animals. The people of the house put out water bowls, wooden shelters, and platters full of delicacies for their varied visitors.

Only the tawny owl matriarch, dwelling on the edge of the garden, remained immune to these proceedings. From her roost in the tall elm, she watched and wondered what had happened to drive all the creatures mad. Perhaps it was, after all, something in the water. She’d always found the water funny-tasting and had chosen to drink at the trout stream three miles east.

The chosen one grew used to his special condition. He ceased to think it bizarre to be fed and pooped by committee. He recognised this for an honour. He ceased to think it exasperating to be perpetually watched by shifts of subcommittees, who had their own little sub-shrines on the platform, attracting sub-tributes and sub-pilgrimages. He even reconciled himself to the magic potion which kept his shell from forming, kept him naked and deformed, and kept the pulsing of his heart and the movement of his food visible, through his translucent skin, to all the world. Greatly, the people of the house enjoyed their garden’s plethora of unusual visitors. Greatly, the animals of the garden – who believed themselves, of course, to be animals of the wilderness, free animals – enjoyed their new lease on life. For the something in the water, which had started all this, was affecting them all. It was making them yearn for one last grand thing to lose themselves in. Before what? Before they put frivolity behind themselves, perhaps. Or before the world ended.

Midsummer approached. Preparations began for the chosen one’s first birthday in the autumn. The sun rose steadily higher in the sky.

Perhaps the heat was the proximate trigger, but the magic potion was surely the ultimate cause of the trouble. The white substance, applied every evening, seeped into the delicate, textured skin on the chosen one’s back. It made the skin splotch with pigmentation, thicken with scaly growths, and itch with the potential of all that was repressed in him. The minor ailments that had characterised all the chosen one’s life so far blossomed into a rafflesia of supersized stinking suffering. The chosen one tried to reach around with his eyestalks to scratch his itch. His guardians would not let him. They scratched his itch for him with the tips of the tenderest grass-stalks. They told him this itch was his burden to bear, the burden of his greatness, the proof of his greatness. They rubbed more potion into his back to soothe his itch. The more potion they rubbed, the patchier, scalier, and itchier his skin became.

Loudly, the animals of the garden rejoiced at this new sign of the chosen one’s chosenness. Racking their memories, they assured him nothing like his ailments had ever been known. News of the chosen one and his divine deformity spread further still. Visitors now arrived from worldwide. Toucans and pelicans arrived, bearing, in their beaks throatpouches, tiny pilgrims: rainbow toads and tiny saucer-eyed tarsiers. The people of the house, too, began to invite guests from the city. Taller and wider, they seemed to grow, showing off the unprecedented spectacle in their chosen garden.

But, as the sun climbed ever higher into the summer sky, the chosen one’s itch became unbearable. The skin on his back, hardened almost to rock, cracked. Clear fluid gushed from the crack. 

The assembly formed medical subcommittees. The animals of the garden scrambled to collect herbs and minerals: both personally, and by proxy from continents away, via the worldwide network of friends the chosen one had enabled them to make. The chosen one was almost embalmed alive in a pungent patchwork blanket of herbs, unguents, and balms. All were united in their endeavour to restore their chosen one to health. The fight against the chosen one’s illness drew them even closer together than the worship at the chosen one’s altar had done.

All in vain. The clear fluid gushing from the crack on his back turned into thick white pus, then yellowgreen pustulence, and finally into a pungent black bilious substance which corroded the paws, talons, and feelers of his tenders as they tried to slather on more unguent – and more magic potion – onto the chosen one’s back.

The chosen one’s temper, ever brittle, now cracked along with his skin. He hissed and snapped at those fussing over him. He pleaded with them to leave him alone. They would not. To be sick and pustulent, and to have the world crowding him, gawking as the insides of his body leaked outside – this was intolerable. He felt shame at his sickness, rage at their ineffectual attempts to heal him, and, above all, terror: the terror of a sick animal who senses the big formless shadow looming over him and who’s surrounded by strong and healthy creatures who are – so far – trying to help him.

“Leave me,” he begged. “Leave me to die.”

They would not. All through the waning summer they crowded him: tending him, force-feeding him good things, touching him to steal his blessings while he lasted, begging him to grant them the boon of good health for himself, and gathering news of him for those back home. 

They implored and commanded him to get well. But the upwelling from his back only became blacker and more pungent. It seemed to be sapping his very lifeblood. Day by day, the chosen one grew smaller and paler. He was dying before their eyes.

He was barely a year old. He who, so loved and tended, should’ve lived to be fifteen. He who, so privileged and pampered, should’ve been leading the fight for his own health. Instead, he seemed intent on being ill, on repudiating all their help, and on refusing, above all, and with all his tiny might and mighty temper, any further applications of the magic potion. For the instinctive knowledge that he’d had as a baby, of the magic potion originating both his ailments and his special status, returned now that his sickness had rendered dim and distant the ideas he’d absorbed secondhand from the other animals.

As summer waned into autumn, the long frenzy of emergency activity shaded into the silence of grief, and then the uproar of opprobrium. For it became clear that the chosen one must somehow have brought this upon himself. For how could he, who was all-powerful, succumb to any ailment involuntarily? No: the ailment must be of his own choosing. Deliberately he must’ve brought this upon himself. Upon them all. They had given up their lives in his service, and now he was giving up his own life to spite them!

So, they shrank from him, his worshippers and followers, those who had protected him and sought his protection. The assembly stripped him of the trappings of his station: his awning, alcove, and mantle. Finally, a week short of a year from when he had become the chosen one, they cast him down from his platform. With a soft Plop! he fell into the grass. With a deafening cacophony, the assembly of animals exiled the fallen one from the garden.

“Go!” they bid him. “Go and die out of sight. Desecrate not the chosen garden with your death.” 

So, the little shell-less snail began to creep away. At first, he knew not whither he was creeping. Someplace to die alone, perhaps. For what was his life now? All he’d known, for many weeks, was pain: pain waxing and waning, but never ceasing. So he crept away, relieved to be left alone in his illness, but discombombulated too, to be all alone and unheeded for the first time in his life. 

Well, not quite unheeded. Unbeknownst to him, one watcher he had still: a brand-new watcher, who’d never bothered with him before.

In the wood, bordering the garden, dwelt the grand old matriarch, the tawny owl who was later to give the definitive history of that miraculous year. This owl had never deigned to pay homage to the chosen one. All this year, she had continued about her own business: raising her brood, guarding her territory, and hunting rodents. The only concession she’d made to this year’s mania was to forebear from hunting inside the chosen one’s chosen garden. Betweenwhiles, she’d watched, scoffing, from her roost on the elm, while all the other creatures — even her own foolish offspring — paid the chosen one homage. 

Now the tawny owl watched the fallen one creeping away from his platform. She swooped into his path, landed before him, and stooped over him, leaning into the dim and blurry fields of vision of his two eyestalks. 

The little shell-less snail halted. He waited, all atremble, his heart beating through his translucent skin, for the owl to pick him up and swallow him in one gobble. For this, the hammering in his gut told him, is what comes of meetings between owls and snails.

The owl assured him he was safe from her. She had no appetite for a creature oozing black pus. When he had stopped trembling and was fit to listen, and to understand, she directed him which way to go to find someplace to die alone. The top of the garden, she said, was girded on all sides by the compound walls of the house. So, at her advice, the little snail began to creep towards the bottom of the garden, where she said the open road lay. 

Long and arduous that journey would’ve been for any snail, never mind a shell-less and dying one who’d never walked a foot in his life. Four times a day, the tawny owl brought him food and kept him company as he ate. For the little snail was quite desolated to be no longer the centre of the world. The creatures of the garden seemed blind and deaf to him. Sometimes they even seemed to be trying to trample him, as if accidentally, as they scrambled about their lives.

The tawny owl sat with him, her great soft wings outspread over his ever more blackly oozing nakedness. She had raised many broods and had pushed many reluctant fledglings out of the nest. So she was patient with the little snail— mostly. Sometimes, when the fallen one wailed on and on about his sorrows, the owl would fret, and want to fly away. Instead, she’d simply duck her head, frown, and chew on her lower beak. She’d do what the wise ones of the world have always done when confronting the world’s endless follies: make a meal of her own scorn.

As he wailed, and heard himself wailing, the fallen one understood what had happened. With a great pain in his soft and boneless centre, he understood that the animals of the garden were enraged with him. For somehow, without ever uttering one false word, he had given them false hope. Now he had left them all on their own: scattered again, rivals again, prey and predator again. His heart ached to think of the pain he’d inflicted on these creatures who’d done him – or, at least, had wished him – only well.

From the elements, and from the resentment and rage of his former worshippers, the tawny owl protected the little snail on his way out. Nevertheless, the little snail grew every day a little weaker.

One morning, he opened his exhausted eyes to find himself surrounded by the white light that shines at the end of all things. Death was here. Death had come to take away his pain. So much of his body had turned, overnight, to black slime, that he wondered how he had awoken at all. He was reduced almost to pure consciousness. Truth seemed to be entering him, undefended by the body’s opaque and obtuse materiality. For one hour, he seemed to possess the sight of an eagle and the wisdom of a sage.

“It’s they who cast me in that role,” said the snail to the tawny owl, when she came, bearing his breakfast. “It’s they who made me ill. It’s they who cast me out.” He listened to his own little speech, perplexed why he was making it. “They cast me as God. But what choice did I ever make?”

“Well,” said the owl, still indulgent, but growing impatient, beginning to chew her lower beak, “now it is you who chooses to mourn the loss of their esteem.”

The snail ate in silence. He watched the lowering sun rise into the red-and-gold lace of leaves dying, clinging to life. From far away came the fragrance of dead leaves burning. 

But the nip in the air was bracing. His tiny body was flooded by both mournfulness and excitement. For, inside him, noiselessly, tolled the bell of loss and of hope that sounds when the year rolls around again to the season of one’s birth.

“Perhaps,” said the little snail, “to lose the esteem of such as these is no loss at all.”

That night, the owl built him a warm and comfortable nest of dead leaves to die in.

But, next morning, he awoke. The pool of overnight black slime had shrunk around him. The white light of death was gone from him. Dawn was lingering, tender and blue.

On a whim, he hauled himself out of his deathnest, a foot or two up a planetree, and up amidst some lichen. For the first time in his life, he went foraging. He was still savouring his self-found feast when the owl came that morning. She was astonished, then pleased. She stayed till the snail had finished his meal: a great feat of patience on her part. For to scrape lichen from treebark is a tedious job even for an experienced snail.

To while away the tedium, the tawny owl began to tell the little snail of her affairs: the misadventures of her daredevil youth, her greatest triumphs over wily prey and self-destructive children, and her present concerns. And the little snail had only to listen.

In this fashion, several days later, he reached the bottom of the garden. 

Back over his shoulder, he peered at the garden. The sun was rising right behind him. Eyestalks waving, he squinted at what looked like a big black mountain. He blinked. He looked again. A mountain in the garden? His eyestalks readjusted. He pivoted out of the blinding light. Now he saw what the mountain was: the beginnings of a shell growing over the naked hump on his back.

He looked down at himself. He saw no puddle of oozing black slime. Eyestalks frantically clawing the air, he surveyed himself: top to bottom, front and back. The cracks in his skin had dried up. The scaly patches and callused wrinkles on his back had gathered into, yes, unmistakably, the beginnings of a shell. 

Red and radiant, the autumn’s last warm sun rose over the mountain on the snail’s back. The little snail watched the sunrise. Then he turned and crawled onwards, across the open road, towards a life of his own. 

The tawny owl matriarch watched him safely across. Then she flew off, without a backwards glance, to her last year’s offspring – who had spent all year, rapt in prayer and hope, at the chosen one’s feet. By rights, last year’s brood should’ve become independent months ago. But a wise creature never expects others to be like herself: herein, perhaps, beats the heart of her wisdom. So the owl went to help her offspring preen their neglected bodies, feather their nests, and fatten up for the winter.

END