An Excerpt from Ellen in Puzantium

Destiny in a Flowchart — A Bureaucratic Response to Prophecy

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With the Himelforths driven from the abbey premise (though traces of them would remain for some time), the abbot unceremoniously kicked aside a dog tail braided loaf, of which her unlikely traveling companion then stumbled over and tripped, setting the tone for the rest of their voyage to the other end of the abbey cloister. A voyage that would prove painfully and indiscernibly long for Porel as she was eventually forced to adopt her processional walk to accommodate the creature’s muted limbs, while also mercifully putting an end to the incessant wheezing that crept out of the child as it struggled to match the abbot’s long shanked gate.

Finally, journey in terminable sight, Porel threw a glance over her bony shoulder to ensure the child was still following obediently. Which, unfortunately, she was. The abbot was disappointed the thing hadn’t taken the opportunity to scamper back to the quagmire it had birthed itself from. And worse, like all fetid things from the bog, it had attracted flies. Flies that were remarkably similar to the brothers of Geriatris. The gaggle of old men had converged from their various haunts across the abbey and now trailed, with half-munched bread in hand, several respectful tails behind the child.

Now, a “tail” is the standard unit of measurement for the people of Puzantium, somewhat like a foot or a meter, heck, even a cubit. It is the standard length of a cat’s tail, which was first popularized in the manuscript Short-haired Nights in which the hero, Shazzy Nibbles (his continental name), used his tail to measure out and build a tower, which he then climbed to rescue his beloved who had become stuck in a very tall tree. Since then, tails spread across the continent, replacing “stick,” “sleeve,” and “snail trail” as the standard, as those all included too many decimals and fractions for the innumerate to fully comprehend. So, now that you know and have lost all respect for yourself by reading this far, we’ll go ahead and remove feet and replace them with tails to maintain the immersion of our now assuredly beloved tale.

Porel pursed her lips as she approached one of the many doors that lined the covered walkway of the cloister and dug into her robes for a well-worn ring of keys, which she deployed to unlock her office. You could tell it was her office because the little brass plaque affixed to her door said so. It read: “Porel’s Office.” It was shiny and new, and had those little carved flowers on it. While a discerning viewer might wonder why it didn’t read, “Abbot’s Office,” that would be because the previous abbot hadn’t had a plaque on their door (and neither were they named Porel), so this abbot certainly didn’t intend to pay for the next abbot, seeing as how the previous abbot hadn’t paid for her (and likely wouldn’t be named Porel either). Hence the personalization. (I hope that’s making sense, it’s a rather crucial plot point to the series.)

Abbot Porel hesitated before entering, talons clutched tightly around the handle, and turned to view the growing pestilence behind her.

Twenty pairs of elderly eyes encased in wrinkled lids—and one glossy bespectacled pair—stared back at the abbot, blank and expectantly.

A thought crawled into Porel’s mind, one so vivid it could have been a vision from on high. The foretelling of a prophetic scene, one of five humans, two cats, two dogs, a pig, and a… Ellen, bumbling inside, taking up space, making noise, leaving residue, and setting things out of place as they crammed themselves within her big-enough-but-not-that-big, impeccably organized, and immaculately holy office.

Porel turned her hand back the way it had come, quickly re-latching the lock.

“Nope.”

Taking a step back, a movement that was mirrored by the gathering behind her, she instead strode casually to the adjacent door, taloned toes clattering loudly against stone. With the fluid movement of a large bird of prey, Porel unlocked the door and swung it wide.

A cat-ish “Hey!” echoed out from the crowd as Porel disappeared inside and then emerged briskly, a tiny wooden cat-sized chair dangling effortlessly at her side.

“That’s my chair!” Brother J’hay growled.

A protest the abbot ignored as she placed the miniature Western Isle colonial ranch-style chair in the hall and then dipped once more into the open room.

“Hey, that’s my table!” The old gray cat was beside himself.

Porel clattered the tiny and much aggrieved hand-carved gaudy doogveau table down next to the tiny chair, then looked at Ellen and gestured to the expertly configured seating arrangement with an unfurling of fingers.

Ellen rumpled her lips and squinted, her eyes flickering as they followed the illusory line the abbot had drawn. She raised a questioning and slightly crooky finger, pointing first at herself and then the offered chair.

Porel raised her brow while her mouth dripped into a sarcastic smirk, and nodded.

Ellen had seen that look before; she’d overpaid on her heating bill and the gas company was the one this time who owed her a check, or, more likely, that she’d just asked something very stupid. In this case, she took a gamble and plopped herself down into the cat-sized chair, which fit her like a foot in a shoe—a correctly sized one at that—but kept her hands palm up and ready, just in case.

Porel nodded and, in a bizarre twist of events, rather than returning to any of the previous doors she had originally touched or entered, she traveled farther to the right, bringing a third door into the equation—not counting the archway from the courtyard into the covered hall (that doesn’t count… a threshold maybe (it lacks the impeding quality, you see (which would be a door, if we’ve strayed too far from the subject))).

This door was remarkably unmarked in comparison to her office, though was notably noted in the annual end-of-week notice as strictly off limits to all, on penalty of something very itchy and uncomfortable. A penalty which had so far kept the elderly of Geriatris from haunting her stoop.

Unlocking, entering, and then promptly re-emerging, Porel brought with her a large three-ring binder under the crook of one arm, with a pigwhistle caught in the talons of her other, its curly cord snaking back inside to her nightstand. Plopping the pigwhistle onto the little table to free herself for command, she flicked a talon at a monk, shooing him off for what seemed like the practiced errand of retrieving for her a “real person-sized chair.” As the monk marched off, the rest of the brothers shuffled their way around and behind Ellen, hardly able to contain their excitement at what had been, for most of them, the highlight of their careers.

After some loud scrooching and sliding, the abbot’s chair was placed into a position she deemed acceptable. It was only then that she sat, crossing one knobby birdish leg over the other, letting out a squawking sigh as she flipped through the pages of her binder.

“‘Anti-antimaterialism’... hrmmm… ‘Atrial Fibrillation’… ‘Bibulous Monk—’”

Porel paused for a moment to scratch with her quill at the timeworn page.

“‘—Bibulous Monks’… ‘Bashaw at the Gates, see Grand Bashaw at the Gates’… ‘Crisis of faith’… ‘Canis Excommunicātus’… ‘Detritus’… ‘Extortion,’ not yet… ‘Hendecasyllabic Text’… ‘Hypoxia’… ‘Geodesists at the Gates’… ‘Grand Bashaw at the Gates’… ‘Imminent Turpitude’… Loss of Extremities’… Ah! ‘Lost Child.’ I thought that might have been covered under ‘Vagrant,’ but apparently it’s its own thing.”

Porel expeditiously folded A through L across her lap.

“Alright… let’s see here, ‘Lost Child’ subsection… ‘Willfully Abandoned’… ‘Un-willfully Abandoned’… ‘Ambiguously Abandoned’… what do we think this falls under, Crumplegrip?” the abbot asked without lifting her nose from the binder’s laminated page.

“I would say…” Brother Crumplegrip paused as he peered over Porel’s shoulder, sensitive to any harm he might cause the child with his words before offering a delicate reply, “... the last section at the bottom.”

“‘General Orphan’ it is. Ahem,” Porel cleared her throat. “Question one: ‘Is it alive?’”

She raised her beak from the binder to stare at Ellen, who stared back rather dumbly, hands still cupped as if waiting to receive something.

“Questionable…” Porel muttered, “but there’s no middle of the road with a flowchart, so we’ll just have to… go… with…” the abbot’s dark eyes flickered back to the confused child, “... alive?”

The insensitive and, by comparison to everything else, rude remark spawned a grinding of teeth and chewing of lips behind Ellen, a sound she mistook for the general ambiance of ancient brickwork settling in the shifting seasonal temperature.

“Question two: ‘Record of physical description.’”

An irritable sniff propelled the abbot as she tersely flipped to the back of the binder to retrieve, from a convenient pocket, a pre-inked parchment form. Wrinkling her nose at the distasteful formatting, she began scratching out her notations.

“Short…”

Scrctchscrtchscrtch.

Porel’s hidden quill, just peeking over the top of her binder, reminded Ellen of the mating dance of the whispering pepper-pillow. Though, by its movements, a particularly unlucky suitor.

“… cat-sized…”

Scrctchscrtchscrtch.

Ellen looked to Brother J’hay. The cat flashed her a goatee-framed grin as she studied him from ear to paw, her head bobbing into a wobble of unexpected agreement, having never before considered the comparison.

“… does not appear to have knees…”

Scrctchscrtchscrtch.

Ellen looked at the bend in her legs, being left to wonder what they were now, after Porel’s comment.

“... blind... bespectacled… bowl cut…”

Scrctchscrtchscrtch.

The stroke of the abbot’s quill was trailed by a bout of whispers that tickled Ellen’s ear, giving her cause to glance over her shoulder. The chocolate-colored dog she’d seen at the abbey gates and one of the human monks wearing a Schmetterlindon floral patterned shawl (of the Schmetterlindon period) were murmuring excitedly and pointing at her. Upon making eye contact, they tossed up a hand and a paw each, followed by an enthusiastic little wave, which Ellen politely returned before turning back around, not being able to help feeling like they had just been talking about her.

“... farcical, duncical, abapical…” This came rather quickly in comparison to the abbot’s previously thoughtful notations.

“Uhm, Abbot Porel, I believe it said, physical description?” Brother Crumplegrip ventured.

Lolling her head up and to the right in incredulity, Porel stared at the old bearded monk before her eyes moved slowly back to the child, inviting the brother to observe Ellen from her point of view, which at this present moment resembled a fish that had gotten too close to the edge of the bowl and was, for the first time, realizing the larger world outside. Porel’s eyes slowly shifted back to Crumplegrip as if to say, “See?” before she continued with her notations.

 “Articulated aroma…”

Scrctchscrtchscrtch.

“… how much do you weigh, Ellen?”

“Oh. Uh, two tails, four claws? No wait! That’s how tall I am, hang on, uh, thixty pounds, give or take a muffin.”

“That was the longest possible way you could have answered that, and there’s no way you’re sixty pounds, soaking wet. Okay, how about this, how old are you? And, do try to be succinct—”

“Bologna!”

The abbot raised a quivering brow.

“Aw, thoot!” Ellen closed her eyes in a grimace, her head rocking back and then forwards to accentuate each word. “I thought you were gonna ask me my favorite food!”

“Why would you assume what I was going to ask?”

“I dunno, ‘cause I got the first one wrong, and I wanted to get the next one wight… tho I tried thinkin’ ahead?”

“You, tried thinking ahead, for questions about your physical description… and came up with bologna.”

“Look, if I don’t plan ahead, you’re not gettin’ that timely answer you wanted!”

“O-K.” The word came out of Porel’s mouth like two stones chipping against each other.

A gnarled finger slowly descended to tap the page, gently interrupting as Crumplegrip drew the abbot’s attention to a rather important absence.

“Oh yes, quite right,” the abbot acknowledged flatly. “Name?”

“Ellen.”

“Yes, we know that already, your family name?”

“My family’s name?” Ellen said, slightly cocking her head and bringing her ear forward like a dog.

“Is there an echo in here?” Porel said, looking up to Crumplegrip before returning to the child. “Yes, your family name, surname, last name, sobriquet if you’re so inclined to arrange things?”

“Oh, I don’t have one of those.”

The soft lamenting of monks could be heard in the background as their empathetic hearts broke at what that most certainly meant for the child.

“Why am I not surprised?” the abbot whispered under her breath. “Well then...”

“I have a middle one, though!” Ellen chirped while popping up in her seat, excited to be able to offer something (and for remembering it in the first place (middle place)).

“... You have a middle name… but not a last name?” the Abbot of Geriapolis said slowly, struggling to comprehend.

“Yep.”

“Are you sure you’re not just bad at counting?”

“Oh, yeth!” Ellen nodded her head vigorously.

“Right.” Porel relaxed. “So your last name is…” The abbot swatted out an open palm, soliciting the elusive name with one hand while the other hovered her quill expectantly over the page.

“No, I don’t have one of those,” Ellen answered, as if for the first time.

“But you just said yes?”

“Oh, I thought we were talking about mafths,” Ellen said, leaning her head in as if to share a secret.

The abbot groaned. “Alright, what is it?”

“It’s this thing where you add numbers together…” Ellen peered up at Porel, pinching her fingers together in nonsequential order.

“Riley on the stoop, no! Your middle name.”

“Puzanne.”

“Eh… Like the continent?”

“More like, Suzanne with a P, but I guess if you add a ‘tium… either way, I don’t know how to spell ‘em.”

“What a stupid name,” the abbot said, followed by a scrctchscrtchscrtch.

Ellen’s eyes narrowed down into needle-thin points.

“Oh yeah, what’s your name?”

“It’s Porel, same as before,” Porel answered, while skimming ahead for the next tedious step.

“Huh… Pohrl...” Ellen let the word plop from her mouth like a sick bubble. “What’s that… some kinda weeed?”

Stifled snickers leaked out through veiled mouths and muzzles as, for some reason, every monk in the abbey now stood with their sleeves pressed against their lips, their stooped bodies gently shaking. The abbot paused her skimming, ignoring the monks to glance at the child as a librarian might over their glasses at a particularly noisy patron, before blinking and staring down at the floor in a moment of ponderance. Then, with a slight purse of her lips, returned to the business of the child.

“Well, now that we have all of that… which will come with a warning,” the abbot scribbled quickly before scraping her talon against the binder’s laminated parchment and flipping the page. A quick skim of its contents led Porel to then gently fold one hand atop the other. Her head came slowly resting down like a mouse sinking in quicksand until their eyes connected at an angle that would have been perfect for a zipline.

The abbot’s lips clicked as they parted. “Do you have any…” her eyes shifted down as hands unfurled in clamish fashion, “parents?”

Before the child answered, Porel shot another confirming glance to the page below and its corresponding flowchart:

“Now, when you say that, do you mean…” Ellen’s hands pedaled back and forth between herself and Porel.

“Parents,” Porel repeated flatly, with an affirming and rattling head shake that sought to wander off and seek its own affirmation of the monks around them but was forced into place by the decorum and authority of its owner.

“And by that… do you mean, do I have them on me?” Ellen paused in a wide-eyed and puckering stare.

Porel wasn’t sure what was scarier. That the child had asked the question in the first place, or that she had been earnest about it. Instead of answering, Porel stared back, blank-faced for a moment as the puckering continued, and then turned back a page, hand skimming where eyes led before flipping to a new section.

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...for more bureaucratic prophecy and flowcharts, Ellen in Puzantium is available now.