In Equilibrium - Flash Fiction Story by James Penha

 

In Equilibrium

Flash Fiction Story

by James Penha

 

freely adapted from a North American legend

 

 

Near Pittsfield, Massachusetts a 175-ton boulder maintains its equipoise atop a small rock in a forest littered with stones carried there by ancient glaciers. But it is hardly credible that a sheet of ice moving forth and back could have positioned this great rock with such perfect balance. And so the native American legend we shall recount here, despite its miraculous elements, remains a story human enough for us to embrace and believe.

 

Before colonization, this area of what we know as New England was home to the Oneida people or, as they called themselves, Onᐱyoteʔa∙ká  (People of the Standing Stone).

 

Their Atotarho at the time of our tale, having allied himself with the Evil Spirit of the world, was huge in build and hugely brutal in his desire to conquer tribes desiring to live peacefully in adjacent lands. The Atotarho decorated his longhouse with the scalps and skulls of his victims. When approached with requests of one sort or another from members of his own clan, he wrapped himself in his menagerie of timber rattlesnakes and copperheads and dared the supplicants to plead their cases. The number of petitioners he had to deal with was soon reduced to zero.

 

His son Yuma inherited little of his father’s frame, nature, or bearing. Favored by the Good Spirit of the world, the boy was too beautiful in mien and gentle in mind for his father to accept; the Atotarho treated Yuma as a misfit rather than a prince and banished him from his presence even in the longhouse. Taking their cue from their king, the other youths of the tribe bullied Yuma, pulling on his feathers and loincloth and yelling epithets they invented to question his masculinity.

 

One day, as Yuma wandered alone toward the field of stones where dozens of Oneida boys clambered, a pebble was hurled at Yuma’s feet. Yuma stumbled a bit not only from the attack but from a sort of cramp he felt in his calves. A spray of pebbles and gravel followed accompanied by verbal taunts implying Yuma lacked this or that male characteristic. As each of the boys’ rocks and words assaulted him, Yuma cramped in arms, legs, chest, even in his neck and head. By the time Yuma reached the field of stones, the onslaught had ceased, and the boys cowered amidst the granite rubble for Yuma now towered over them, tall as an oak tree. Yuma realized that the spasms he had felt resulted from the rapid stretching of his body—growing pains! Huge as he had become, Yuma could have crushed his little antagonists in his fingers. He could have smashed them with boulders that had become for Yuma like acorns. Instead, guided by the grace of the Good Spirit within him, Yuma picked up the largest rock he could find and embedded it forcefully atop a small stone as a permanent reminder of this amazing day and of the blessings of the Good Spirit.

 

As Yuma retreated toward the longhouse, he reverted to his normal size. He would never speak of the miracle—not even to his father. But the boys who, once Yuma had departed, tried but failed to topple Yuma’s massive keepsake, talked of little else for months. Never again did they or anyone, including the Atotarho, dare to belittle Yuma who would, in his turn, become a beneficent king to all his people.

James Penha - Expat New Yorker James Penha  (he/him🌈) has lived for the past three decades in Indonesia. Nominated for Pushcart Prizes in fiction and poetry, his work is widely published in journals and anthologies. His newest chapbook of poems, American Daguerreotypes, is available for Kindle. Penha edits The New Verse News, an online journal of current-events poetry. Twitter: @JamesPenha