She continued: “Even in your world, mans have many languages, but only those fortunate enough to have grown up with oafs and who therefore speak the language of the oaf are considered to be talking mans. But all mans are talking mans, just as all oafs are talking oafs! Don’t you understand? My mother was a talking man. She simply did not speak your language.”
He nodded his head out of politeness, though he found it unbelievable that all mans were talking mans.
This new world that she had escaped to had filled her head with some very strange notions — this new world where mans could marry and be called husband and wife. Hahaha. Could there be such a place? Would the great creator allow such an impossible, upside-down place to exist? A world where mans wore shoes? He tried to picture it in his head, but it was too much like a story for children.
Hahaha.
There was no understanding in him at all.
She continued: “We are the same beings, you and I, so we can have feelings for each other that are greater than master and pet. Thus… you were my first love.”
At last, there was understanding in his eyes.
“I was jealous when you fell in love with that girl, the one with the wicked brother who burgled me and sold me into the mines. But I am happy to know that I loved you. I used to think that it was a monstrous feeling I had for you, but now I know better.”
He nodded his head, but was unable to speak the words — to say that he had loved her too. They had come of age at around the same time, but she was a lesser creature, a pet, and the ideas that he’d had in his head about her back then — they were monstrous, as she had said, simply monstrous. How he had wished for her to leave his room and go live in her proper kennel that he and his father had built with their own hands, but if she had done that then he would have spent all of his time out there with her because he had indeed loved her.
Yet he did not say this, and there was no need for him to say it because she was his elder and she knew these things through having lived an unsheltered and precarious life. He was bigger, but she was wiser, having traveled widely in both the old world and the new. Thus, she was his master.
But he was big and, oh, magnificently beautiful. She gazed unabashedly.
He joked, uncomfortably, under her gaze, “In your world, I see they make shoes small enough for mans!”
It was enough to break the spell. “You silly pinhead!” she said, shaking her head.
“Hahaha,” he laughed.
“And,” she whispered to him, “that one there, the simpleton.” She pointed to the oaf. “He is Mike. He is my son from that oaf general I told you about who had his way with me.”
He looked at the little pinhead again, and then he understood all things. The frecks, he laughed to himself. The frecks!
“He has frecks like his mother,” he told her. Then he laughed out loud. “He is such a little thing for an oaf. What a shorty! Hahaha. They would tease him in school.”
“But in our world, he is considered quite big. And you are so big, Zloty. I had forgotten just how big you are, and so handsome,” said she to him.
“Oh,” said he to her.
His blush was interrupted as just then his mother, Gretjel, looked through the window as did his father, Uulfnoth, and they recognized their red-haired female man. She had returned to them! They came outside, running with arms outstretched.
His children were there, his boys, Tado and Zloty the younger, and his wife who was named Gretjel, as was his mother, but was called Grietjelaia so there would be no confusion.
They all came out and embraced and exchanged stories.
And all were happy with joy and wonderment.
Just before his female man and her family made their return to their world, they lined up and in perfect harmony sang a beautiful song for the boy of her childhood and his family.
And then they sang more songs, and they too were beautiful, for her family was made up of all singing mans, even the oaf, whose name was Mike, a big simpleton, who had the beard and sexual maturation of a twenty-four-year-old man, but the mind and manner of an eight-year-old oaf, for he was both man and oaf.
Gretjel, the mother, ran inside the house and brought out a new small singing harp, as the first was destroyed during the burgling of their home that originated the adventure, and gave it to their long- lost and now returned female man, and she took it.
She bowed to Gretjel. “Thank you,” she said.
Her husband Rufus had eyes that smiled and hands that rubbed together with glee when he saw the gift of the golden harp, which was priceless in their world. More wealth! There can never be too much wealth, he thought.
But his female man wife nudged him and he reached into his pockets, stuffed to bursting with stolen loot, and withdrew all the silver that he had nabbed earlier that day from a miserable old pinhead who lived in the caves near the hidden entrance to the portal between the higher and lower firmaments.
Rufus bowed graciously and gave the silver coins to Gretjel, the elder.
“Thank you,” she said, bowing in her turn. “But this is too much. We are simple people. We do not need this.”
Her husband Uulfnoth, whose eyes had smiled and whose hands had rubbed together with glee when he saw the silver being placed in his wife’s hands, shook his head with great energy and hurriedly spoke these words: “What my wife is trying to say is that she is grateful for your most kind and most generous and most thoughtful gift, which we are most honored to accept.” And he took the silver from his wife Gretjel’s hands and stashed it with a quickness in his pockets.
Everyone smiled knowingly.
After the tearful goodbyes were spoken, the female man and her family made the long journey back to the lighted hole in the firmament, and they descended the many thousands of stairs on what remained of what once may have been a tower built by mans who wanted to join with the gods, and they returned home to their world and all of its problems.
And they were happy.
And her boy, who had become a full-grown oaf with boys of his own and an oafen wife who shared his mother’s name, went back to his bed in his childhood home.
And he was happy.
13
Jack
And on the last day there shall come fire everlasting, and all things in the earth shall be burned, and then great heaven shall rain down her tears as on the first day when all things were born.
Jack made two final trips up to the realm of the oaf. He traveled both times with his stepson, the man-oaf Mike, who as he aged had become less simple and was beginning to show signs of true wisdom. Now at long last they understood that because he was part oaf, his cognitive development had only been delayed and not completely absent as they had previously thought.
The first trip took place six years after the triumphant journey with his wife and family — six years for the man, but only two years for the oaf. Jack returned from the first trip greatly disturbed, despite the large bag of silver he had pilfered.
He was troubled by what he had seen above the firmaments, and he would not talk about it.
A week passed. Then two. Finally his wife, whom he called Rose because of her red hair, pressed him hard until he said to her, “Zloty’s wife is dead. One of his sons is dead. It has been a year of winter. Winter has lasted for a year, but it is beginning to thaw. All of the crops are dead. It was a year with no spring, no summer, no fall. The poor have suffered the worst of it. Zloty’s parents are both ailing. He sent a message for you, and the message is this: