The Calabash of Origins

n the beginning there was a calabash, and the calabash was full, and what it was full of was stories. Every story that had been told lived inside it, and every story that would be told, and one story more — the one that has never been told and never will be, which is the story that keeps the world turning, because a world that knew its own ending would stop.

The keeper of the calabash was an old woman, or the idea of an old woman, and she sat at the crossroads and let people drink from it. A sip and you remembered a story your grandmother had forgotten. A longer drink and you remembered one your grandmother's grandmother had not yet learned. People came from everywhere, and they drank, and they went home, and they told.

A greedy king heard of the calabash and came with soldiers and took it. He meant to drink it dry and keep every story for himself, so that no one else could tell one without his leave. He raised it to his mouth and drank, and drank, and the calabash was bottomless, and he drank until he forgot his own name, and his kingdom, and why he had wanted the stories at all.

The old woman took back the empty-feeling calabash and walked to the crossroads and sat. By morning the stories had returned, because stories do not live in a vessel — they live in the telling. The king was found wandering the roads, smiling, unable to say who he was, but able, if you asked him, to tell you a story you had never heard, which he could not afterwards remember having told.