By Jonathan Perreira, Staff Writer
To new and astonished looks, I say, “I’m just passing by; not staying long.” The faces turn to smiles, and sometimes I’m welcomed into inns or stranger’s beds.
The dinners I’ve had in mysterious homes makes quite the extensive menu. I’ve had a variety of soups and stews of varying thickness, most body parts of a pig, most of the middle body parts of a cow, entirety of chickens.
All these dinners had one thing in common… one thing coming…
The strangest village I’ve ever entered held a peculiar sight from miles away. A shape in the sky, a large one that blocked portions of a sunset. It wasn’t a mountain, it was funnel like, and bulbous at the top.
I had visual conversations with this abstract shape, and sometimes I would try guessing what it truly was, and it always told me it was wrong. A giant balloon?
No, too wide. A massive statue? No, too massive. And not structurally sound. That thing was a fucking marvel. What was it?
The day I stepped foot on the land, the day was overcast and the shape still wasn’t much clear.
I could make out large lines, flaky texture. I walked through the roads where children didn’t recognize me and neither did the adults.
I found myself staring at the shape, drawn to it, walking in its direction, until I realized I was in the village’s center.
There were quiet shops, an empty inn. Some people. Most didn’t care about me. The feeling was usually likewise.
But… I gotta know. There was a woman who was sitting against the wall of a bar, maybe waiting until it opened. She was eating an apple.
I approached her and said, “Excuse me? Could you tell me about… that?”
Without even looking to see where my finger pointed, she said, “That’s the Sky Onion.” She said those two words like they belonged anywhere near each other.
“Excuse me?”
“A big, giant Onion. In the sky. Some say God planted it and forgot he did. Stopped growing in the ground and started moving up, and will keep growing until God sees it. And picks it, or something.”
Knowing the shape that called to me was as something as silly as the Sky Onion was as a good of a resolve to my personal adventure as any.
I laughed a little, but my resolve didn’t quell my curiosity. “Has anyone ever tried to, I dunno, chop it down? Its size is kind of ridiculous.”
“Its stalk is too thick. It’d be like sawing through a boulder. Besides, just about everyone is fond of it. Some even consider it a religious symbol.”
“No way?”
“It’s true. The only problem, I s’pose, is that when it rains, the constant downpour sheds the Sky Onion a bit, and everyone can’t stop crying until the rain stops.”
“That’s sorta gross.”
“Only sorta. The smell? Very gross.”
I smiled at her comment. I wonder if everyone in this town had the same nonchalant attitude about the Sky Onion. “What’s your name?”
“Uhh, it’s Harp.”
“Thanks for telling me all this Harp. I’m passing through, and for miles I couldn’t tell what the hell it was.”
“Yeah, no problem.”
The conversation ended, but it wasn’t the last time I saw her.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.