Refreshing the Wells 35: Anna Tambour

Reading anything from Anna Tambour (her World-Fantasy award shortlisted novel Crandolin and her stunning short story collection The Finest Ass in The Universe to name just two) you are tranported to another world. She has a touch of pure magic with words, as you’ll see when you read how she refreshes her well.

 

“There is an unmentionable well—neither deep and therefore talked of with awe as for a sage (though the depths might be full of rubbish) nor shallow and beauteous as a mirrored cloud-frothed sky (or brainless butterfly).

This well is middling.

But being isn’t everything in this law-filled universe. Ever since the Law of Threes was passed, location location location trumps more than most. Even middling’s lack of notoriety.

And so this middling well, being just up a bit and to the left of the mouth of the face of Earth, has been getting more and more noticeable to that planet who is faced, nowadays, with an unavoidable, bewildering array of reflections leering back from skies that were undeveloped as Cretacean airwaves only too short a time ago, Earthtime, to warrant ago.

You would know the feeling Earth feels if, in place of your eyelids, there descends a ‘funfair’ hall of distorting mirrors—that you never escape.

Earth, distraught, could not only see a plethora of goggle eyes, but myriad noses—peaked, sloped, caved, ridged and double-humped.

And as to skin . . . Skin! The smooth places are either dry as dust or shiny and slick. The rough—crags, canyons, crevasses: a great lined -scape.

Nothing bothered Earth as much, however, as the open pore beside the mouth Earth thought “distinguished and still mobile enough to be regarded as attractive” in the firmament of planets Earth would have wished heartily to disregard the judgments of, if only Earth knew who to wish to.

So this perfectly located-to-bother pore (our middling well) has just been filled with a “Miracle Moisturizing Camouflage” Earth saw on the air, in what Earth thought: a News report (for Earth is old old old; and being so, so so sooo naive).

Still, the well has now been filled.

And so now, in the nowest sense of now, in the myriad reflections:—Earth notices, and omg! sees with a myriad eyes wide-opened as if for the very first time, two myriad eyebrows desperately needing reshape.”