Monday, September 3, 2018

The Death of a Cannibal King

Annamaria on Monday

It's a holiday weekend in the United States: Labor Day.  In honor of the many barbecues being enjoyed by me and my fellow American this holiday Monday, I offer this cautionary tale.
Ichoo, the fiercest cannibal king in the jungle, was feared by all explorers who went to Faway Island.  As luck would have it, the only landing spot they could use to gain access to the remote atoll was in front of Ichoo’s thatched hut.
Many potential explorers unfortunately ended up in the king’s stewpot.  The intrepid anthropologist Dr. Niles Source was determined to be the first of his profession to study and write about the last unexamined culture on Earth.  Source decided he might avoid the fate of his perished forerunners by bringing King Ichoo gifts.  The bribes worked.  Soon, His Majesty had many resplendent robes, beautiful shoes, elaborate headgear, and gorgeous frames containing regal images of himself.  Then the canny Doctor began, as a private joke on the gullible king, to bring Ichoo larger and larger stewing caldrons.  Happily for Source, the king pronounced them too beautiful to use.

Ichoo developed a serious lust for luxury goods.  To store all his swag, he added a second story to his dwelling.   At one of Dr. Source' departures, the greedy king warned the anthropologist that on his next landing he must bring a more impressive offering, something really fit for a king.


Dr. Source came back the next time with an elaborate Victorian chair which he declared to be a throne fit for Ichoo.  The king was delighted. On fine days, he would have his lackeys carry the chair outside so he could sit resplendent in front of his hut.  As Source was leaving two weeks later, the king demanded another, even bigger chair on the explorer’s return.

And so it went, with each visit: a chair of carved mahogany, then one with red velvet upholstery, then another brocaded with the royal arms of England, and on and on.  Soon the ground floor of Ichoo’s hut was filled with some of history’s most elaborate chairs.  Finally, Dr. Source arrived with the pièce de résistance.  The back of the chair was taller than Ichoo, taller even than Niles Source, the seat was upholstered with royal purple silk, and the all of the beautifully carved wood was covered  with 18 carat gold leaf.  It shone in the sun like the throne of an all-powerful god.


Ichoo declared that he would never sit in any other chair.  His fellow tribesmen began lining up, hoping to take away the rest of his now distained collection.  But the king did not want anyone but himself to have such luxurious possessions.  He instructed his lackeys to put the rejected chairs on the second floor of his hut.

That night Ichoo’s hut collapsed from all the weight of his possessions, killing the greedy king.
The moral of the story is….


17 comments:

  1. That was fabulous reading Aunty! Thank you for sharing your gift of writing with us❣️♥️❌❌ Love you always have always will

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    1. Love you, Sweet Lizzie Neice. Always have. Always will!

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  2. The moral of the story is that when the king died, the citizens of Faway discovered that they had huge debts with the IMF for all the chairs. Shortly after they discovered that the Chinese now had all the fishing rights so they could no longer catch fish. So the island was sold off to foreign investors who built hotels and other tourist amenities. The only good news was that this provided a steady supply of plump and tasty English persons...

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    1. Michael, you manage to be sad and funny at the same time! Wow!

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    2. Bahahahaha!! Brilliant moral Michael,hilarious!

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  3. Fascinating story. Perhaps the " king" should spared the "engineer" victim and had him design a sturdier dome to house his stash?

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    1. Such thoughts were above Ichoo’s intellectual pay grade. :), Jerry!

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  4. All I want to know, sis, is what happened to the shaggy dog prancing around in the background of this mesmerizing can-a-bull story? :)

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  5. :-) The names, of course, have been changed to protect the guilty...

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    1. Not at all,EvKa. Farsica, the language of Faway Island is an ancient spoken language, which has never been put into written form. Now that travel to the island is safe, Dr. Source’s colleague, the eminent linguistics expert—Dr. Lucy Participle is planning on capturing the Farsica language before the resort developers descend and corrupt its purity. My only decision about names was, consequently, how to spell Ichoo. I toyed with foolproof phonetics, like Eee-chew(the correct pronunciation), to avoid the mispronounciation Eye-chew. But I was afraid our readers here on MIE would think I was joking. “Ichoo” I thought, was the more dignified choice of rendering the dead man’s name into written form. He was a greedy SOB, but he was a King after all.

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    2. Just so long as Dr. Lucy isn't left dangling.

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