What are the documents of Tabat? In an early version of the book, I had a number of interstitial pieces, each a document produced by the city: playbills, advertisements, guide book entries. They had to be cut but I kept them for web-use. I hope you enjoy this installment, but you’ll have to read Beasts of Tabat to get the full significance. -Cat
An Instructive Listing of the Major Gardens of Tabat, being Pamphlet #4 of the second series of “A Visitor’s Guide to Tabat,” Spinner Press, author unknown.
Despite the city’s fierce weather, the cliffs that shelter it on the northwest and western side create pockets of weather that allow its gardeners to coax fruit and flower that normally would not be found here. Additionally, the presence of the College of Mages ensures a perennial crop of young mages ready to earn their coin by turning it to a patron’s use, creating marvels like a moonlight garden whose flowers change aspect according to the positions of the three moons in the sky, as is rumored to be located in the center of the Moon Temples’ complex, unknown to any but their priests.
Accordingly those interested in the botanic, the scenic, or the complete experience of Tabat should allot time in their schedule for the following.
The Duke’s Gardens: Appended to the Ducal castle, the grounds are open to the public on even-numbered days and feast days but are always closed during the Games. Often select Beasts and animals from the Ducal menagerie are brought out for display. Cost is a silver ship per adult visitor, with children at five per ship. Hours are dawn till the seventh evening bell.
Tabat’s Heart: These vast gardens stretch through the middle of Tabat, cutting across all but the top and bottom terraces. Tram lines and staircases line the western edge, allowing access to the paths across as well as the many sub-gardens and fountains. Admission is free and the parks are always open, but are patrolled by mechanicals after midnight until the first morning bell.
The Sea Garden: Built into the western cliffs at the water’s edge is the Sea Garden, full of corals and in the summer tanks of sea creatures and Beasts, including singing Whales and Dolphins, and a display of venomous sea serpents. Admission is free in the winter and a copper ship throughout the rest of the year, with a discount for schools and educational groups. Hours are from the last night bell through the first evening bell. Open all days except Games.
The Gardens at the College of Mages: Filled with plants, animals, and Beasts collected from across the world, these gardens are renowned in scholarly and academic circles. Points of interest include the Fairy hive in their central hall, which also acts as museum, the caged Mandrakes, their Sphinx amid its xeric landscape, and the Hypnotic Garden, which features narcotic and soporific plants and animals and which can only be entered with a guide, who wears a white silk mask and is prepared to wake the visitor if he or she succumbs. Admission is a silver merchant for two, and includes chal in the Dancing Cup across the way from the College’s grounds.
Famous for their aromatic and ornamental plantings, the grounds of the Nettlepurse estate are open every Fifteenth Day. Cost is a Nettlepurse nought. Hours are the third morning bell through the midnight bell. Go in the spring in the evening to see the humming moths that are an all too brief yearly phenomenon or visit the Cypress Maze in order to view the reflecting pool in its center.
If you have additional time, we recommend the flowering tree groves of the Piskie Wood (to be visited only in the daylight hours, and wear bright clothing to avoid the Piskie hunters who practice their livelihood there.)
***
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Bigfoot
(As I’m transferring material over from the old configuration of the site to the new one, I’ll be reprinting a number of stories and articles. “Bigfoot” was written while studying at Johns Hopkins. My spouse at the time and I didn’t have a TV and spent a lot of time in the evening reading aloud to each other. This story owes a great deal to a few weeks spent with Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, the products of Mark Twain, whose works I love.)
Bigfoot twists around in the poolside lounge chair and admires her hairy ankle and the gold choker masquerading as an anklet there. The California sun feels hot and heavy on her shoulders. She thinks of Nair. What would light feel like on those shoulders where long coarse hair has always kept the sun’s touch away? Would the skin sear and blister? Maybe she’d try shaving a small patch; she could buy some sun block at the K-Mart.
“Tell me again how you came here,” the reporter says.
“Hopped a bus, honey. Wrapped myself in an old blanket and pretended to be ill. They wouldn’t have stopped for no bearded lady any other way.”
The reporter nods. She’s a hardened professional, but Bigfoot’s beard startled her the first time she saw it. It must be four feet long and Bigfoot’s braided it, woven in bubblegum charms, and tied it off with golden ribbons. It lies on her chest like a pet python.
The reporter’s not entirely happy. Her editor sent her to cover Bigfoot, promised a two page spread if the article was juicy enough. But it’s not. Bigfoot doesn’t have any scandals in her background, no rendezvous with John F. Kennedy, no secret love triangle with Liz and Dick, no unborn illegitimate children, no meetings in motel rooms with fundamentalist preachers, and no Hustler centerfold (although there have been offers). All the skeletons in her closet are plain unvarnished bones.
It’s not that she’s not colorful. But she’s too darn hard to contain in a single line. She’s larger than life and much bigger than a breadbox. Every time the reporter tries to think of a lead, here comes Bigfoot, all knees and elbows, bending the sentence out of whack and choking it up with that hair of hers.
Bigfoot grins as the reporter pauses and takes a sip of her pina colada.
“This house, this pool,” the reporter says, waving an arm clothed in creamy linen at the short cropped green grass, the white tiles, the three stories and five and a half baths. “How did you get all this?”
“This stuff? Oh, here and there. I always wanted a place like this one. You folks have it so easy here. No idea what the woods are like? They’re a jungle, a life that’s short, nasty and full of brutality. Always looking for something to eat, mushrooms, tree bark, small furry animals, you know. And you can’t light a fire because they’ll see you.”
“Who will see you?”
“The park rangers. They don’t approve of missing links. They say we bring down the overall tone of the park. I always tell them, look around, it’s not us that pitched these non-biodegradable styrofoam cups and beer cans all over the place. If you’re looking for someone who brings down the general tone of the park, I say, you’re not looking at the right species.”
“What are your plans for the future?”
“I’m doing Carson this week and ‘Wheel of Fortune’ the next. I’m going to give that Vanna woman a run for the money. Once they see me in an evening gown, she won’t have a chance. Why, she doesn’t have any more hair than one of those Barbie dolls. Just on her head, and even then not in all the right places.”
“Do you have any name other than Bigfoot?” the reporter asks, scratching away on her pad. She’s pretty hairless herself, but appealing in a skinny sort of way.
“You asking me for my name on a first date, honey?” Bigfoot says, and gives her a bawdy stare. The reporter flushes, and Bigfoot roars with laughter, then apologizes.
“Sorry, I forgot how you folks are.”
The reporter, whose name is Marjorie, goes out with Bigfoot to a bar. They drink 35 life insurance salesmen under the table, and then Bigfoot stands on top of the bar counter and starts to shout:
“Whoop! I’m Bigfoot! I’ve wrassled woolly mammoths left over from the ice age and tamed them until they gave down sixteen hundred gallons of mammoth milk! I’ve hollowed out giant redwood stumps with my teeth to use as a cradle for my daughter, and spit out the splinters to make a rocking chair! I’ve walked over mountains taller than a man could think and I’ve swum seas deeper than sorrow! Whoop! Whoop! I can out-drink, out-boast and out- love any person in this bar, and I’ve got the scars to prove it!”
The bartender tries to wrestle Bigfoot to the floor, but she holds him off with one hairy knuckled hand and keeps on shouting:
“Whoop! Whoop! I’m Bigfoot! I sing so loud that the birds give up and go south for the winter and then don’t come back for three years! I can walk so light you’d swear I was never going to get there and I can stamp so heavy you’d think I was never going to leave! I spin my clothes out of things so fine you can’t see them, flea’s wings and the tears of water and the shadows of fog and I’m so splendid in those clothes that the autumn leaves fall right off the trees when they see me! Step up and try to match me, folks! I’m Bigfoot!”
“You’re embarassing me,” the reporter says.
After the bartender succeeds in throwing the two of them out, Bigfoot stands on the sidewalk and screams and rants and hoots and hollers.
“You’re acting inappropriately,” Marjorie says this time and Bigfoot says, “So what?”
Marjorie wakes up in Bigfoot’s bed and doesn’t really quite know how she got there.
But the warm bed is replete with the fragrance of leaves and warm summer grass. Bigfoot’s hair coils around her, a little scratchy, and the beard lies over her breasts as though the snake had fallen asleep.
After Bigfoot’s made her first few media appearances, things start arriving for her at the house. White roses and daffodils, Godiva chocolates and a couple of diamond rings. She ties the rings into her beard and shows Marjorie how to sprinkle sugar on the roses and eat their petals.
But there’s too many roses for two women to eat. They fill the house, and stick out the windows, lie like snowdrifts on the lawn. News reports come in.
Ten thousand women have thrown away their Epiladies and stopped shaving their legs in honor of Bigfoot. Vanna White lets her armpit hair grow and the razor industry’s up in arms over this dangerous trend. Ten thousand other women shave their heads to protest Bigfoot’s dangerous example. The politics of letting one’s body hair grow is discussed on Oprah.
A man with short gray hair says Bigfoot is a crime against nature.
“What do you mean by that?” Oprah asks.
“She’s neither man nor beast,” he says.
“He’s got that right,” Bigfoot tells Marjorie, and pushes the power button. The light on the screen, Oprah’s face, the man’s face, the commercials for depilatories and douches and feminine deodorant all shrink into a dot of brightness which disappears.
More jewels arrive, and Bigfoot throws them into the pool so she can watch them sparkle.
Marjorie is of a divided opinion on all the controversy. She goes into the bathroom, takes out a Lady Schick disposable razor and shaves her right leg and armpit. As long as she’s at it, she trims the pubic hair on her right side, tweezes her right eyebrow and evens up her bangs a little. She stands in front of the mirror naked and looks at herself. It doesn’t seem to her as though there’s a lot of difference. But she knows in two days there’s going to be a lot of uncomfortable, itchy, red pimpled stubble.
Bigfoot howls with laughter when she sees her.
“Poor little thing,” she gasps. “You look like you don’t know whether you’re coming or going.”
Marjorie gets irritated. “You don’t need to feel so superior,” she shouts. “There’s pros and cons. Don’t think I didn’t notice the other day when you got your beard stuck in your zipper! Or when you spilled spaghetti sauce all over it! You come here from the wilderness and think you’ve got the solutions to everybody’s problems!”
Bigfoot smiles.
Marjorie continues. “Well, you don’t, Miss Neo-Thoreau! It’s not that simple!” Her face is red, and her throat is open and loud and screaming out the words like she never has before in her entire life. Bigfoot smiles even more as Marjorie screams and rants, hoots and hollers.
Marjorie can’t stand it any longer. “What are you smiling at?” she yells.
“You’re acting inappropriately.”
That night, the sex is the best they’ve ever had, inappropriate or not, and Marjorie learns to do some whooping of her own. In the morning, she opens her eyes and sees Bigfoot packing.
“Where are you going?’ she asks.
“Going to do some more traveling, hon. This is my vacation, after all. I got mountains to climb, clouds to catch, hearts to set aflame.”
She slips out the door. After a few minutes, Marjorie hears her start to whoop as she goes down the street.
“Whoop! I’m Bigfoot! You’ll never forget me and you won’t ever want to! My fur’s so fine that minks weep with envy and I smell so good I make roses blush. I know five hundred and thirty ways of making love standing up and I’ve forgotten more ways of doing it sitting down than you’ll ever know! Whoop! I’m Bigfoot!”
Sentence from Today's WIP, The Super Hero and the Coffee Goddess
She’s taking over midtown, sending out hyper-caffeinated, zombified office workers, fingers twittering, moving with a flash mob’s speed, spreading faster than a video of a tickled kitten.
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Cat Rambo: Documents of Tabat: Gardens of Tabat http://t.co/KhkGQqG75G