Peter Beagle - The Line Between

«And I'll never see you again," I said. «No more than I'll see him.»

Molly asked me, «How old are you, Sooz?»

«Nine," I said. «Almost ten. You know that.»

«You can whistle?» I nodded. Molly looked around quickly, as though she were going to steal something. She bent close to me, and she whispered, «I will give you

a present, Sooz, but you are not to open it until the day when you turn seventeen. On that day you must walk out away from your village, walk out all alone into some quiet place that is special to you, and you must whistle like this.» And she whistled a little ripple of music for me to whistle back to her, repeating and repeating it until she was satisfied that I had it exactly. «Don't whistle it anymore," she told me. «Don't whistle it aloud again, not once, until your seventeenth birthday, but keep whistling it inside you. Do you understand the difference, Sooz?»

«I'm not a baby," I said. «I understand. What will happen when I do whistle it?»

Molly smiled at me. She said. «Someone will come to you. Maybe the greatest magician in the world, maybe only an old lady with a soft spot for valiant, impudent children.» She cupped my cheek in her hand. «And just maybe even a unicorn. Because beautiful things will always want to see you again, Sooz, and be listening for you. Take an old lady's word for it. Someone will come.»

They put King Lir on his own horse, and I rode with Schmendrick, and they came all the way home with me, right to the door, to tell my mother and father that the griffin was dead, and that I had helped, and you should have seen Wilfrid's face when they said that! Then they both hugged me, and Molly said in my ear, «Remember — not till you're seven–teen!» and they rode away, taking the king back to his castle to be buried among his own folk. And I had a cup of cold milk and went out with Malka and my father to pen the flock for the night.

So that's what happened to me. I practice the music Molly taught me in my head, all the time, I even dream it some nights, but I don't ever whistle it aloud. I talk to Malka about our adventure, because I have to talk to someone. And I promise her that when the time comes she'll be there with me, in the special place I've already picked out. She'll be an old dog lady then, of course, but it doesn't matter. Someone will come to us both.

I hope it's them, those two. A unicorn is very nice, but they're my friends. I want to feel Molly holding me again, and hear the stories she didn't have time to tell me, and I want to hear Schmendrick singing that silly song:

Soozli, Soozli,

speaking loozli,

you disturb my oozli–goozli.

Soozli, Soozli,

would you choozli

to become my squoozli–squoozli…?

I can wait.

* * *

Four Fables

My father introduced me early on to George Ade's Fables in Slang; later, I discovered James Thurber's two books of Fables for Our Time on my own, and quite loved them.

«The Fable of the Moth» was first published in the 1960s, in Al Young's legendary little magazine Love, and owes something to Don Marquis' tales of Archy and Mehitabel. The other three fables in this set were written specifically for this collection. They tend to suggest a dark — even cynical — view of the human condition, but then it has always seemed to me that fables and fabulists mostly do that. Aesop was lynched, after all, according to Herodotus.

The Fable of the Moth

Once there was a young moth who did not believe that the proper end for all mothkind was a zish and a frizzle. Whenever he saw a friend or a cousin or a total stranger rushing to a rendezvous with a menorah or a Coleman stove, he could feel a bit of his heart blacken and crumble. One evening, he called all the moths of the world together and preached to them. «Consider the sweetness of the world," he cried passionately. «Consider the moon, consider wet grass, consider company. Consider glove linings, camel's hair coats, fur stoles, feather boas, consider the heartbreaking, lost–innocence flavor of cashmere. Life is good, and love is all that matters. Why will we seek death, why do we truly hunger for nothing but the hateful hug of the candle, the bitter kiss of the filament? Accidents of the universe we may be, but we are beautiful accidents and we must not live as though we were ugly. The flame is a cheat, and love is the only.»

All the other moths wept. They pressed around him by the billions, railing him a saint and vowing to change their lives. «What the world needs now is love," they cried as one bug. But then the lights began to come on all over the world, for it was nearing dinnertime. Fires were kindled, gas rings burned blue, electric coils glowed red, floodlights and searchlights and flashlights and porch lights bunked and creaked and blazed their mystery. And as one bug, as though nothing nad been said, every moth at that historic assembly flew off on their nightly quest for cremation. The air sang with their eagerness.

«Come back! Come back!» called the poor moth, feeling his whole heart sizzle up this time. «What have I been telling you? I said that this was no way to live, that you must keep yourselves for love — and you knew the truth when you heard it. Why do you continue to embrace death when you know the truth?»

An old gypsy moth, her beauty ruined by a lifetime of singeing herself against nothing but arc lights at night games, paused by him for a moment. «Sonny, we couldn't agree with you more," she said. «Love is all that matters, and all that other stuff is as shadow. But there's just something about a good fire.»

Moral: Everybody knows better. That's the problem, not the answer.

The Fable of the Tyrannosaurus Rex

Once upon a very long ago, in a hot and steamy jungle, on an Earth that was mostly hot and steamy jungle, there lived a youngish Tyrannosaurus Rex. (Actually, we should probably refer to her as a Tyrannosaurus Regina, since she was a female, but never mind.) Not quite fully grown, she measured almost forty feet from nose to tail tip, weighed more than six tons, and had teeth the size of bananas. Although no

intellectual, she was of a generally good–humored disposition, accepting with equanimity the fact that being as huge as she was meant that she was always hungry, except in her sleep. This, fortunately, she had been constructed to deal with.

Thanks to her size this Tyrannosaurus was, without a doubt, the queen of her late–Cretaceous world, which, in addition to great predators like herself, included the pack–hunting Velociraptor, the three–horned Triceratops, the Iguanodon, with its horse/duck face, and the long–necked, whiptailed Alamosaurus. But the world was populated also by assorted smaller animals — much smaller, most of them — distinguished from one another, as far as she was concerned, largely by their degree of quickness and crunchiness, and the amount of fur that was likely to get caught between her fangs. In fact, she rarely bothered to pursue them, since it generally cost her more in effort than the caloric intake was worth. She did eat them now and then, as we snap up potato chips or M&Ms, but never considered them anything like a real meal, or even so much as hors d'oeuvres. It was just a reflex, something to do.

One afternoon, however, almost absent–mindedly, she pinned a tiny creature to earth under her left foot. It saved itself from being crushed only by wriggling frantically into the space between two of her toes, while simultaneously avoiding the rending claws in which they ended. As the Tyrannosaurus bent her head daintily to snatch it up, she heard a minuscule cry, «Wait! Wait! I have a very important message for you!»

The Tyrannosaurus — an innocent in many ways — had never had a personal message in her life, and the notion was an exciting one. Her forearms were small and weak, compared to her immense hind legs, but she was able to grip the nondescript little animal and lift him fifteen feet up, where she held him nose to nose, his beady red–brown eyes meeting her huge yellow ones with their long slit pupils. «Be quick," she advised him, «for I am hungry, and where there's one of you, there's usually a whole lot, like zucchini. What was the message you wanted to give me?»