There was once a man who ate cookies from a jar that he was not supposed to eat from. The jar belonged to a medicine man. The medicine man had warned him that eating from it would bring upon him a severe case of tongues. But he was hungry, and sad, and cross… and the world was bothering him a great deal, as the world was not at all how he had wanted it to be. He felt that a case of tongues could not be so horrible. Then there, in his bed, he woke one morning, with a case of tongues worse than any man had ever had. He returned to the medicine man, all the while trying in vain to hide his many new tongues, but the medicine man laughed and said that he was behaving foolishly. He could do nothing, he said, nothing at all. He pleaded, wept and fell to the floor in bizarre fits. The medicine man could do nothing. At sunset, he returned home. He had not enough food in the house to feed all his tongues and he could not buy any more food from the merchant, as his ailment caused him great embarrassment. He ate what he had and then rummaged around his garden for the melons and tomatoes that grew there. He then spent the night planting various other edibles. He planted strawberries, carrots and grapefruit. He worked until the sun pronounced day and then ate all that was left of the melons and all the ripe tomatoes for breakfast. Then, again, he wept. His limp body fell to the earth in many convulsions and he wept and wept until his eyes became very swollen and his face became wet and pale. He tasted the soil, his dirty clothing, the sweet air, the dew on the leaves and the cold pebbles. One tongue accidentally swallowed a pebble and then another, on his other side, spat it out again. Such astounding accord of organs might have elsewhere evoked pride, but here it caused nothing but a fresh bout of tears. The sun crept slowly up and up until the man was hungry again. The tomatoes that were left were not yet ripe and the sourness made his tongues drip saliva and contort strangely. It was now, while our unfortunate was sitting in his garden with his bereaved face and many wriggling tongues, that a boy walked past and saw. The boy stared and then pointed, and then started laughing hysterically. He then started making rude remarks, all those he could think of, and then ran away to fetch his friends so they, too, could stare and point and laugh and make rude remarks. As he ran off, the man stuck his tongues out at the boy, who, having seen this, would have been able to make a few more rude remarks. The man now stood up and started walking into the open field that lay before his house. He crossed it and encountered a river. He crossed the river and encountered a graveyard. He crossed the graveyard, stepping carelessly on the flowered mounds and encountered a gravelled path. He crossed the path and encountered a small chicken that could speak. He walked past the chicken and encountered the chicken’s children. They could not speak. He walked past the chicken’s children and encountered an old lady’s garden where hundreds of ripe red tomatoes grew. He crossed the garden and reached the jail where the jailor and the angry convicts hung from the windows and pointed and laughed. He passed the jail and encountered the forest and disappeared into its darkness. The animals stared at this strange man stumbling aimlessly forward, but they saw nothing that was bizarrely odd about him, and they certainly saw no tongues of any kind.
An owl noticed the sudden silence, opened one eye and said, “He has gone mad.”
A woodpecker cocked his head to the side and said, “He has driven himself mad.”
The others shrugged and sighed and continued with their doings. The man was never seen or heard from again.
Marie van Rooyen 