December 12, 2010

The Tale of Pacifies by Riley

One moonless night somewhere far off in the range of the western sea, there was a little remote island.  A small tribe lived there.  One night there washed up on the shores a strange creature.  No one can be quite sure what it looks like.  But they can be sure it was there because it left the most peculiar of tracks.  At the end of the tracks lay a little baby swaddled in seaweed.  The baby had the bottom half of a horse and the upper half of a girl.  But the thing that made it most truly peculiar is that growing up out of the body of the little horse was also a boy.  

A fisherman was walking back from his late night crab hunting expedition when he came upon what seemed to be a boy and a girl swaddled together in seaweed.  So expertly had the seaweed been arranged, he couldn't tell there was the bottom half of a horse underneath.   He murmured to himself, "Oh my, I have found two children abandoned on a night like this."  He  picked them up and muttered to himself, "Whoa, heavy for two young children."  He carried them back to his small hut.  And gave them some warm milk with honey.  Then laid them down on a makeshift bed on the floor.  But never once did he remove the seaweed.

Pacifies grew at a remarkable rate in the night.  Becoming much stronger and able to break the seaweed and wander out of the hut.  That night the fisherman had a strange dream:  A storm was raging; the sea seemed almost angry.  In his dream a mysterious girl had come out of the ocean.  She had long tangled blue green hair and starfish clung to her body.  She was calling at the top of her lungs, "PACIFIES COME BACK.  THEY ARE GETTING ANGRY."  She wandered up and down the shore calling PACIFIES.  

When he woke up the next morning the children were gone.  There was a pile of broken seaweed on the ground, human foot prints up and down the beach as though someone had been looking for something,  and horses hoof prints leading off into the water.  The fisherman told everyone in the village how he rescued two small children and dreamed that night of someone calling: Pacifies.  Not even the elders in the village could understand what Pacifies meant.  The closest thing they could translate it to was "a child of the sea."  

The fisherman wondered: how could it have been a child of the sea when he had seen two children, not knowing they joined underneath.    They searched far and wide around the island calling for Pacifies.  But they never found the Pacifies.  They named the spot where they looked the Pacific Ocean.  And to this day the fisherman believes it was a blessing from the Gods.  

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