Kellie Wells

The Crones gathered along the shore, scattered in the moonlight, night tide lapping at their skirts, dressed of course in black, for there was always somethin­­g to be mourned in this world, wasn’t there, and it was a Crone’s sworn duty to meet grief tooth to tooth. They aimed their presbyopic gaze at the silky black ocean and watched as the telltale darknesses afloat in the distance grew ever closer.

When the most recent flotilla of Explorers finally reached the Isle of Crone, a day late and a doubloon shy, a little grayer and more grizzled, armor creaking with rust, they thought they’d arrived in…Canada, and they raised to their shoulders their harquebuses, which saved them the trouble of rummaging around the galleon to locate the long-tattered papal bull that decreed they could lay claim to any rock, river, or maple tree that struck their fancy. The Crones, having never heard of Canada, having never heard of maple trees, blink-blinked at them. The Explorers were, it seemed, in search of a valuable sap, with which they planned to cover their breakfast cakes. The Crones, having never heard of breakfast but well acquainted with cake, were intrigued.

The Crones did not speak Explorer and the Explorers did not speak Crone, but on the island there was an erstwhile man who stowed an untamable chignon of silvery hair beneath a knotted scarf, hobbled along with the aid of a crutch, and who, many moons before, had washed up on their shore, shipless, half-dead, and far from home and harbor: the Ur-Explorer. The Crones fed him borscht and boiled potatoes, cornbread, oily fish and blackberry slump, applied a poultice to his wounds, splinted his bones, and coaxed him back to life, or what passed for life among Explorers. Which is to say he was disagreeable and darkly dyspeptic for quite some time, for he was bereft of property, a state he had not known since paddling his way out of the birth canal. And what is an Explorer in the absence of spoils to hoard and pathogens to spread? Fortunately for them, the Crones had long ago been immunized against any outbreak of interminably dull-witted men. So in these early days, the Ur-Explorer was resentful, there being no gold, no cinnamon, no pearls, no one to take captive (he, like all the career scoundrels and freebooters that would follow in his wake, wildly underestimated the sagging but serviceable brawn and feral wisdom of the Crones). And he sat sulking in the col between Baba and Yaga, the two tallest hills on the island, and pitched stones at wary black cats as they oozed like eels along the beach.

As time passed, the Ur-Explorer began, grudgingly, to study the enigmatic ways of the Crones, which, though he would not have admitted it then, were a source of fascination to him. The Crones labored only an hour or two every day and the rest of the time they puffed on cheroots, told jokes, and farted, sometimes quite musically. With each punchline, their faces, deeply creased with age, unfurled like snapped linens into cavernous howling. As they passed the day in one another’s company, the Crones displayed a mien of supernatural contentment, the likes of which the Explorer had only ever observed on the faces of well-scratched, cream-fatted felines. The Ur-Explorer was secretly riveted, and he began to pantomime the Crones’ inscrutable actions and gravelly speech, and in time, he was as they were, gratified not by things but by their absence. What a burden it had been to be a brooding brigand, anyway! There is no satisfying the bottomless ache of Empire.

The days passed, as days are wont to do, and the Crones made the Ur-Explorer an honorary Crone, and he bathed and smoked and ate among them, sported a shawl and a heavy skirt, which lent his bandy legs and manly dangle a well-ventilated freedom of movement, and which he, after having clanked about in the weighty mail of a pugnacious Explorer forever on the attack, found quite a marvel. He vowed he would make it his mission to liberate the legs of all men should he ever again amble among them. But should he ever again amble among men? One night his mind, like a rabbit who feels the hot and slavering snap of the wolf at its heels, pivoted sharply, and he fell into the shawl’s woolen embrace, allowed it to envelop him like a skin. This transformed Explorer, let us call her Crone-Ex or Crone X, once again served as interpreter between the Crones and the newly arrived, whom she knew better than to trust even a whit.

The Three Explorers yammered on about New World this and New World that, eyes distant as an uncharted landmass, brows dotted with perspiration, a full-bore delirium causing them to shiver and rattle as if with ague. Crone X recognized all too well the fever that gripped them. She also knew they would erupt with snorting derision and cast their eyes skeptically to the clouds were she to tell them that, truth be told and sorry to say, there were no new worlds under the sun. The World, like the Crones themselves, was old as, well, dirt and always had been. Explorers, like gods, inventors, astronauts, grounds zero, ylem, jealous lovers, original sin, dictators, alephs and alphas, solipsists, and the beginning of time could not abide the suggestion that they had been preceded. Like the feathers on the necks of furious parrots, the Crones’ own hackles visibly rose as they spat on the ground and barked objectionably at the very suggestion that they had any truck with newness, shudder! The Crones had not hastened the dropping of their petals and the withering of their stems only to be called daisies! While it was true that the World and everything in it was so old it had passed itself twice on the way here, the Crones were what Pre-primordial Antiquity thought of when it wanted to feel fondly nostalgic. It had taken some time for Crone X to grasp the Crones’ complex Calculus of Being, but now that she understood it, she felt its truth deep in her sympathetically brittling bones. In order to prevent the Crones from making soup of the Explorers, Crone X explained to them that the New World was a joke Explorers told themselves when they were sea saddened, Old World weary, and poorly nourished.

The Crones narrowed their eyes gravely, rubbed their chins, then slapped the Explorers smack on their backs and laughed cacophonously, grinning from wart to wart, and when their mouths gaped with giddy delight, the gold crowns of their teeth shone brightly in the full moonlight, causing the Explorers to fall to their knees and clasp their hands together, hosanna! Oh, how elated the Crown would be to know that there was a rich vein of gold right here in the mouths of hags, blazing brightly as the sun itself and itching to be extracted!

Crone X knew precisely what had buckled the Explorers and struck them soundless with awe, for she, too, had once salivated at the sight. What the Explorers did not yet know was that the Crones were quite gifted at both alchemy and dentistry and had developed sophisticated techniques to preserve their well-worn chompers. You didn’t live to be of a geological age without sturdy teeth to grind your daily cud, a sometimes tough cud made of the bones of your adversaries. The Crones were gifted chewers, could masticate to beat the band, as skilled as wasps at softening wood pulp to paper. The enzymes in a Crone’s saliva could dissolve rocks and whet the blade of an axe so sharp it was a danger even to look at it, even to imagine looking at it. And the rules of the Crones’ dental gold were thus: should a crown ever be plucked from the bite of the Crone in which it had been planted, the abducted crown would first maul the offending hand and then transmute promptly back to its constituent base metals. And anyway, you didn’t want to clash with the mouth of a Crone, for many an arrogant conquistador had disappeared into an ancient maw never to be heard from again. Explorers, their mouths frothing with rot, will come and go, but a Crone’s teeth, click-clacking like castanets, are forever!

Crone X could see she would have her hands full with these Explorers, who, to the detriment of Everything Good, were incapable of even dreaming of a world that had already been discovered. So was it always with these greedy Sea Dogs (when Explorers are infants, their hands have to be covered in sackcloth, lest they plunder their own fingers upon first contact, fact).

So Crone X led the Explorers, stumbling in the delirium of their discovery, each to their guest hovels, not far from which stood some of the more notorious cottages: the dancing hut held aloft by chicken legs and encircled by a hedgerow of bones, the sweetly tantalizing cottage made of gingerbread, the one bubbling deep beneath the dark depths of the sea, and the one frequently menaced by a wolf in drag.

So Crone X had to think about how best to rid the island of the threat that presently imperiled it. There had been many Explorers in the years between the Ur-Explorer’s arrival and that of the most recent Voyagers, and Crone X had learned from these encounters many strategies for evicting the nuisance, but she also knew that once an Explorer’s eye had been infected with the spellbinding glint of gold, there was no easy means of expulsion. Ask any Paradise and it will tell you that it is easier to coax blood from a stone than it is to cast a gibbon out of the garden once it has clapped eyes on the forbidden banana.  

The Explorers rose the next morning before the Crones, who were not by nature early risers, and they sniffed and poked and clanked their way around the island, clamorous as war, as is the way of Explorers everywhere. The Crones eventually yawned and stretched stiffly and creaked into action as the Explorers continued their reconnaissance. Crone X tailed them on the q.t., setting down her crutch gingerly with each step, and watched as they examined the wares on offer at the trading post: brooms and snuff and cauldrons and shawls and salves and bones and yarn and wands and toads and teeth and tubers and hemlock and dried flies and newts and the like. One Explorer put his snout close to a basket of tiny eggs, and the Crone clerk suddenly screeched like a startled barn owl, causing the Explorers to jump and stumble. The great clinkety-clanking racket sounded like a sack of tin cans being dropped to the ground, and this made the Crone clerk howl with uncorked glee.

Eventually the Explorers made their way, as everyone always does, to the shanty of Madame Blavyaga, where a fragrant smoke billowed, plumes rippling around the heads of the Explorers like skulking serpents. Madame B sat at a table atop which rested a bucket of snails, and she nudged it in the direction of the Explorers, urged them on with a nod of her head. The shortest Explorer looked at the other two then removed a gauntlet, passed his hand over the writhing contents of the bucket, and chose a large pink snail in a green shell. Madame Blavyaga, with the keen vision of an owl, spotted Crone X peering into the hut from some distance, and she held her gaze. The Explorer tipped back his morion, gave the snail the once over, then held it to his nose, and as he did, the ancient sibyl narrowed her eyes at Crone X: she did not wish her to warn the Explorer. This island snail, so essential to augury, was now rare as hen’s teeth, hunted to near extinction by the reckless and ravenous members of a previous expedition. Since then, the surviving snails had developed the defense of a fatal toxin, which they would promptly emit upon contact with any tongue. The Crones of course knew better than to eat a creature in whose glistenings the future could be divined, but Explorers were, as everyone knew, a dim lot, and Madame Blavyaga was clearly unfazed by the prospect of there being one fewer snail slayer in the world, so she allowed the Explorer to decide his own fate.

A bemused look passed across the Explorer’s face, as though he were trying to recollect some lesson he’d gleaned from a life spent choosing unwisely, and he opted not to sample the snail. Madame Blavyaga held up a dish of ashes, collected from the Crones’ spent cigars, scooped a handful and sprinkled it around in a nautilus shape, then tapped the table. The Explorer set the snail down, and immediately it began its calligraphic windings through the sooty remains, offering a communiqué from the Great Obscurity, the meaning of which only an oracular Crone such as Madame Blavyaga could interpret (that all Crones are congenital seers is a lucrative myth they seek not to dispel).        

Madame Blavyaga ran her finger along the slime trail as it looped and zagged through the ash, tracing its message as it slowly revealed itself, its grammar known only to her. When the snail came to a stop, Madame B held her hands together as if in prayer, the expectant prognosticator on the verge of revelation, then her scrutiny fell at last on the final spiral. She sighed heavily and gazed out the doorway, her eyes gray and glistening as the granite cliffs after a rain, looking past Crone X, her vision then seeming to falter, unable to find a horizon upon which to alight. She pounded her fists on the table, causing both snails and Explorers to jump, and she bellowed, “Dull! Dull! Dull as ditchwater!”

Though Crone X could not discern the particulars from Madame’s words or stricken look, she understood the meaning of this pronouncement, for it had been the same for all previous Explorers—these three would prove to be a grave disappointment, wanting in precisely the same way as all the others. Although Crones understood instinctively that we are all, at root, the promising detritus of exploded stars, they also recognized that every thermonuclear detonation, be it supernova or apoplectic Explorer, is merely the momentary nexus of All the Things that had preceded it, unfathomably complex to the unschooled observer, utterly predictable to anyone who knew Everything. Nevertheless, Crones were, by design, optimistic, in the way only creatures who foresee every ravening calamity can be, and therefore they are constitutionally obliged to hold out hope for some emancipating quirk inside this bulwark of determinism.

Crone X knew that some Crones had, however—and Madame Blavyaga was among them—grown quietly desolate, beginning to suspect that all Explorers lacked the ability to exceed the rote inhumanity that dictated their every imperialist fart. Whether or not Explorers possessed the capacity for self-awareness and change had been the topic of many a coffee klatch.

In this moment Crone X’s eyes swam, Space-Time grew vague and elastic, tempestuous, undulating before her like an armada of satiny black ribbons, and then she saw smoke draped across every surface like moss, large rusting creatures enrobed in vines, the air stained with ash; she heard animals keening and keening then suddenly silent, and everywhere were bodies turning to liquid, a gelatinous burble enveloping the landscape; all of it at last sucked into a vast cavity, teeming with emptiness. It was Now and Here and Then and There in the spinning ubiquity of the Immeasurable Whole. Crone X felt the quaking tumult move through her, she its medium, and she looked at her hands, her arms, saw wounds open like startled eyes then weep, the ooze drip-dripping from her, her body juddering.

The Crones had fished her sea-battered body from the seaweed and shown her how to live contentedly in a world brimming with unending death. No queen or conquistador, priest or prostitute, soothsayer or sonneteer had ever done as much.

That week Crone X kept her failing eyes and straining ears trained on the Explorers, who plotted to steal from the Crones’ mouths all the gold they could extract. This was the thing about Explorers—they believed themselves so clever as to be an enigma to all the simpletons that surrounded them, speaking a language no one but a brilliant adventurer such as themselves, spilling sagacity from their every orifice, could decipher. In truth, all the Crones knew precisely the villainy the Explorers were hatching, had known it since long before they’d even arrived, but it is not the way of Crones to interfere with even the most dastardly of schemes. At least not until said scheme poses an impediment to lunch. Let it be known that: he who comes between a Crone and her mid-day meal adds a course to it.

The night had arrived when the Explorers would set out from their cabins by moonlight and steal into each of the Crones’ cottages as they slept, but first they would need to visit the mess hall and pilfer the pliers with which the Crones cracked nuts. As Crone X followed the Explorers, an uncanny feeling of recognition assailed her, as if she had performed this very surveillance a dozen times before. She thumped her noodle and tried to dislodge from it a memory of how the encounters with previous Explorers had concluded. Had the Crones killed them and fed them to the island cats? Had they knocked them unconscious and dumped them on skiffs that they instructed the humpback whales, who were exceedingly fond of Crones, to escort back out to sea? Had they stashed them in a cave, sealed it with a boulder, and left it to the little brown bats to prosecute their treachery? Bats, as everyone knew, had a finely tuned sense of justice. For the life of her, Crone X could not recall, but now that she’d seen for herself the pox of devastation the Explorers infected both the Eternal Present and the Foregone Future with, she felt she had finally found her true north. Even if it meant her time among the Crones were shortened, she would find a way to extinguish the lit fuse of the Explorers’ unfaltering rapaciousness, which could only lead, she now understood, to the planetary powder keg of Wrack and Ruin.

The Explorers picked their way quietly across the island, hands adroop in front of them, in the time-honored manner of villains. They opened the door to the mess hall slowly, careful not to activate the creak that would betray their budding malefaction. Crone X stood at the door and listened as the Explorers dimly crept to the kitchen. Perhaps, she thought, she might bar shut the door and set the hall ablaze, but that would mean the Crones would be left without a mess hall, and one thing you never wanted to meet was a Crone with an unsatisfied appetite, so the prospect of an island full of ravenous Crones made Crone X promptly toss this solution into the Dustbin of Bad Ideas. She stroked her pointed chin, as she had seen other Crones do, to help lubricate her thinking. She stumped across the hall and toward the kitchen, mulling over: poison—no; garotte—no; strategically placed banana peel—no; a quickly dug pit covered in fronds, a firkin of angry monkeys, explosives, three-headed bludgeon—no no no no; slingshot? spiked grog? ack! she wished she had settled on a plan sooner.

But just as she reached the entrance of the kitchen, it began to bloom

with the soft light of candles, one after another, like the eyeshine of animals awakening in starlight, until the kitchen resembled a temple, and behind each wavering flame stood a Crone, that collection of time-consecrated relics encircling the Explorers. The tallest Explorer nervously clutched the nutcracker, the three of them blink-blinking in gape-mouthed bewilderment.

The circle arced around to Crone X, who found herself standing next to Madame Blavyaga. The oracle’s face appeared weary, even by Crone standards, wizened not with age but with sorrow, the Crones’ most sacred artifact. She passed Crone X her candle then reached her hand into the pocket of her cloak, and when she pulled it out, she cupped there a handful of powder that winked in the gauzy gold glow of the light. Madame Blavyaga blew forcefully onto her hand, issuing a powerful gale that dispersed the dazzling powder into the atmosphere. The Dust of Forgetting! Known also as the Particles of Revision or the Quantum Sand of Second Chances! Ah yes, now it all came back to Crone X! That was the—

The gust of Madame Blavyaga’s breath had extinguished the candles, and she now tottered among the circle of slumbering Crones, the heap of Explorers, and Crone X, whose snoring brought to mind a pileated woodpecker fiercely hammering the trunk of a tree. This was the part of these serial incursions the Madame liked best, this pause when the collective sleep vibrated with the possibility of dreams. She felt soul-knackered, exhausted as an old bat roused prematurely from its torpor, dismayed that no matter how many times she sent the newly amnesiac Explorers back out onto the high seas, they always returned, greyer, slower, a little rusty, and, worst of all, beset by the same compulsions as before, as though the Crones were for them a lodestone to which they gravitated like metal filings to a magnet, the desire to conquer, subdue, exploit, enslave, plunder and pillage, despoil, tyrannize and terrorize, loot and ravage, swindle and subjugate, so strong in them no spell or potion or magical stratagem The Cronomicon offered was able to rewire them. She had learned from talking with Crone X that there were among these men of conquest many low-born, swineherds and shepherds, tinkers and thatchers, men of mud and sweat, just looking, at first, for a life that demanded no more blood of them than they had to give, and so she had, in the course of trying to free them of their noxious indoctrination, spared as many of the Explorers as she could. Over time, their numbers had dwindled to these three, but they were a stubborn triumvirate, boomeranging back to the island with clockwork regularity.

So she had no choice but to admit that the time had come at last to loose Crone X upon the Explorers, for only she understood the corruption that blazed inside them and only she could extinguish its originating spark. Madame Blavyaga would keenly miss Crone X, who ministered to her when her sciatica flared, made the best potato kugel any Crone had ever tasted, sang sea shanties sweet as a Siren, and who knew how to summon the Madame back when she’d waded too deep into the doleful waters. And Madame had been showing X the oracular ropes, for which—who’d have guessed?—the former Explorer showed a predilection. Yes, Crone X, living if withered proof that enmity needn’t devour the heart forever, she was a favorite among them. But she’d be back, just as soon as she’d bent the iron will of these dour subduers, the Madame was sure of it.

Madame Blavyaga sat next to Crone X and stroked her cheek as she slept. She unknotted the scarf from beneath X’s chin, released her wild mop of curls, and arranged it around her head, a silver nimbus. She touched the jagged scar that stitched her left cheek from temple to chin, a battle wound X would not speak of. Madame held the hand that had held both broadsword and broom, inhaled deeply, and exhaled into the palm, her breath both talisman and benediction. Crone X began to stir, and the oracle fished from her other pocket a handful of snails, lethal and divinatory, and she released them, watched as they circled Crone X’s heart and disappeared inside her pocket, better than a sextant at helping to navigate the choppy waters of the yet-to-come, the pink snail in the green shell the last to go. “A little insurance,” whispered Madame Blavyaga, and her eyes closed and quivered with the intimation of dreaming.

⋆⁺₊⋆ ☾⋆⁺₊⋆

The Crones gathered along the shore, scattered in the moonlight, night tide lapping at their skirts, dressed of course in black, for there was always something to be mourned in this world, wasn’t there…

                               for Joanna, Diego, and my Morbid Anatomy fellow travelers