Fiction
Prologue: It was the kind of dream that could fill a book. In all caps the word NINEVEH appeared. Just like that. Straight out of the pit of Jung’s lungs. A menorah was there too, candle-free, out of service. Jonah’s hair is long and black, shiny like the wet skin of a killer whale. He wears sandals and has a tea-towel over his head held in place by a piece of string that I found in the shed. His skin is pale like the eyelashes of the nativity play angel that taunts me with her blonde ambition. The whale blubber in the black and white encyclopedia looks cozy enough, but if it is like the scum that rises from the pan of boiling animal parts that stinks up my grandfather’s house and makes his four dogs slobber, I would not want to live in it for three days and three nights. But a split-open whale is different to a live one ploughing through kelp and creatures, lit up by Pinocchio’s match, water sloshing in and out and up and down its breathy bones. Jonah lives in the whale’s belly for three days and three nights. A miracle! When he emerges he is gut covered, painted the colour of blood, raisined at the fingers and toes. The dream does its job. Then it leaves in its place a hole where a story can burrow in and root itself. An empty skull, shaken free of its weird and hard to explain or remember images, brain stuff scooped out. The unconscious, long whistled back to the collective pool where it can recharge and enter another newborn’s head, houses the dream story. It sits on a mossy mound open to the four winds, the thousand rains, the one sun, open to the once-upon-a-time and happily-ever-after that mate with violent persistence inside the writer’s head.
