A Parable of the World

by Christopher Font

The town hall was packed to the brim with residents who brushed against one another, each desperate to hear the orators standing behind their termite bitten podiums. The priest exclaimed, with an outstretched finger, at an interlocutor and jumped over the adjacent ideologies. The philosopher slammed their hand on the podium—sending white ants screeching to the floor, their tarsal claws scouring for any support—and shouted a flaw in the logical framework, added with shallow wit. The scientist held their tongue, waiting for a moment to interject, hoping to establish some sense of common ground and pushed their dirt colored glasses up with their index. The bookmaker took from the farmers and the poor in an indiscriminate fashion. The baker gave day old bread to the children. The sheriff whispered to the teacher a dirty limerick; the teacher already knew it but acted surprised anyway. The mortician sat in the corner not out of fear, but out of the anxiety of the fear the others already had of them. The laundress pushed against the ladrone on her foot, the ladrone mistaking the shove as puerile affection. The butcher wondered if the event was almost done. The windows howled the librarian thought, unaware of the delinquent about to throw a bookish object at them.

The butcher, unfamiliar with how soon the evening would cease. The laundress, nescient of the ladrone’s notion. The mortician, incognizant of the townspeople’s true accounts. The sheriff, clueless of the teacher’s intellect. The baker, uninformed of the mold in the bread. The bookmaker, oblivious to the welsh. The scientist, uneducated in the art of discourse. The archivist, not knowing that their preservation of the situation will make future paleographers deem the orators’ ideological positions worth having. The termites, ignorant of the townspeople. The philosopher, unaware of the impossibility of a logical framework that encapsulates all situations. The priest, unaware of the impossibility of changing a logicaster. The townspeople, unsuspecting that the storm overhead isn’t a storm but an imminent disaster. The winds, apathetic to the townspeople’s plight.

Christopher Font is an undergrad student at UCF and has an A.A. from MDC. He was born and survives in Miami, FL with his parents and cat, who is currently giving him the stink eye. This is his first published work.

The Roadrunner Review nominated “A Parable of the World” for The 2020 Best Small Fictions with Sonder Press.