Storytelling: Dead Men Tell No Tales (Week 5)

Veta hanging in a tree by Harshad Dhavale.

I had barely been here more than a day or two before my body was disturbed.  As a spirit, I couldn’t physically feel it anymore, I could sense it.  I looked down from the heavens and watched as a man dressed in fine, ornate clothing struggled to climb back down the tree he was perched in.  Beneath the branches of the tree laid my body.  It was as crumpled as a pile of old laundry!  He must have just cut me down!  It was nearly shameful.

To add insult to injury, he threw me over his shoulder like it was nothing! Even worse than the man was the little goblin that decided to inhabit my body!  Didn’t he know that that belonged to someone?  Couldn’t they have just buried me like any respectable person would have?  Instead, they went on something of a journey.  The goblin talked incessantly.  How ridiculous.  It was rather strange watching the body that you identified as your own talking of its own accord.  Not only that, but he spoke only riddles!  At the end of each story, he would ask the man if he knew the correct answer.  The man seemed confident that he did know the answer several times.  He must have been wrong though, because each time he answered, the goblin would laugh and disappear back to the tree.  The finely dressed man would only shake his head and return to the tree.  He did this time and time again.

Watching the exchange became something of a game for me.  Each time I would guess how far the determined man would get before the goblin used his magic to return my body to its original position in the tree.  Each time the man would answer one of the goblins questions, poof!  I would be right back where I started, with the goblin still using me.  It was dreadful, but I had no choice but to become desensitized to it.  After all, there wasn’t much I could do about it from my place in the heavens. 

I couldn’t decide whether the man for determined or stupid.  Either way, he returned to the tree to cut me down and started back on his way.  I expected this to continue in an endless loop for the rest of eternity, but the goblin surprised me.  He told the man of some sort of monk.  This monk supposedly had planned on using the good, determined man as some sort of sacrifice and planned to become a ruler of some kind.  Not only that, but the goblin had used his magic and his riddles to delay the man (who actually was a king!) from returning to the monk and being killed.  Who knew that goblins had some good in them?  Then the goblin gave the king instructions on how to vanquish the wicked monk.  It was all very convoluted, especially for my tastes.

Finally though, the goblin left me then.  The king continued to carry me until we reached the monk’s lair.  I thought that the king would destroy the monk quickly, but that was not the case.  Instead, he allowed the monk to desecrate my body!  It was quite disrespectful, not to mention extremely perturbing!  Before I could truly process what had happened, the king had outsmarted the wicked monk and was being praised by all, including the stupid goblin!  Whatever, at least someone got something good out of the whole ordeal.  I supposed it didn’t matter too much.  After all, I was already dead.  I just wish the stupid goblin would have told the answers to a few of those riddles…

Bibliographic Information:

Twenty-Two Goblins, translated by Arthur W. Ryder, with illustrations by Perham W. Nahl (1917).

Author's Note: For my story, I used the tale of the Twenty-Two Goblins.  In the original, the reader sees more from the point of view of the king.  It also includes a lot more about the goblin and the monk.  Vishnu is also mentioned, though not as often as the others.  Each riddle is it's own section of the reading.  In my retelling, I chose to gloss over a lot of that and focus on the frame story or the main story.   I did this because I wanted to preserve the essence of the story.  I tweaked the story by creating a new character, the spirit of the man whose body the king has to bring to the monk.  When I first started writing, it seemed a little too heavy, so I tried to write it in a way that wasn't so dark.  In the end, I tried to use a little bit of humor and exaggeration to accomplish that.