The Idiot Savant

Photographer - Tobi Brun

The Idiot Savant

Nineteen years of eating bats and salamanders. Nineteen years of painting walls. Nineteen years of humping the stalagmites when he was horny. Nineteen years of shitting in the corner by the rocks. Nineteen years.

Yes, nineteen years have gone.

The idiot savant is getting old these days. His head has balded, his feet have splayed, his spine has crooked and bent. At night he cackles. Wouldest thou see him there in the dark, thou would not even recognize him for a man, for a man he is no longer. A creature of the cave he
hath becometh, and with that, he grunts, he has finally done it. Today is the day the idiot savant enters the prime of his artistry. He wakes up and lights his torch with flint and stone and mashes up his berries between two rocks in its light. Then he takes the paste he’s made, rubbing it into his hands, and, going up to an empty wall, he starts painting. His subject, a horse, which came to him in a dream, prancing across a prairie he himself had never been.

“Grhm,” he grunts. The horse is goblin-like. It looks as if it shouldn’t prance. Rather it should romp.

“Grhm,” he grunts. Come to think of it, he doesn’t know what a horse looks like. He only knows what it doesn’t.

“Grhm.” He can’t tell what the painting even is.

“Grhm.”

“Grhm.”

“Grhm.”

He stops, standing back and looking at so far what he’s done.

Am I a brainless lizard? he thinks. A dilettante thug? Do I have any talent at all?

“Grhm,” he grunts once more, meaning no.

. . .

They found him there in the cave fifteen thousand years later, then just a shriveled mummy in the corner by a mound of fossilized shit. According to the lab where they tested him, died of malnutrition. Though, it was also suspected that, due to the phrenologically distorted crown of his skull, there lurked something else, an injury perhaps from his youth, although that they could not determine.

“He’s a savant,” one said, shrugging his shoulders and scratching his head with his micro-pipet.

“Sure.”

And so from then on in the eyes of modern science, he was a savant, the idiot savant. What was more a miracle than the mummy, however, was that, as for the art he made, it was still there, a bit grimy in parts but all still there. Archaeologists documented over two-thousand individual paintings, many of which on canvases that seemed to have been repeatedly scored. In one of their reports, they wrote that the paintings were the most lurid, the most sublime, the most visceral they’d ever seen, this coming from a part-time curator for the Uffizi and the Louvre and the Vatican. Another wrote that the paintings were so much what their colleague had said that, for weeks on end, lions and cave bears lurked in their dreams. They took special note of a horse in a field they said they but dimly recalled as though it was their earliest memory.

And so on and so forth until the hearsay had confounded, the reports had ballooned, and the money, the money, that which pervades all, too, had pervaded this. The company had planned to open the cave for tours to the public.

COME, they said. SEE THE SAVANT. FORGOTTEN DREAMS LIE WHERE HE RESTS.

By the time the archaeologists had searched the cave wall to wall once then twain and the company had opened the cave up, within no more than a single month, that month being February, everybody, everybody in the whole world seemed to have come. Ernest Hemingway,
Winston Churchill, Amelia Earhart, the Dalai Lama, to name a few. Picasso came once too, and when he emerged from the cave’s jaws as if straight from a woman’s womb, grabbing a hold of his wet tan fedora and wet tan suit, he turned to his wife and said, “Fifteen thousand years of
mankind and art.”

“Yes?” said his wife. “Yes, honey?”

He coughed. “And we’ve learned nothing.”

Condor Wrights -- Writer, student, cheeky little monkey with a stick. Lives in Nashville, TN and Oxford, GA. Reads in his spare time and lies around with Billy, his dog. Stokes the fire when he can.

A Solitary Affair

Photographer - Tobi Brun

A Solitary Affair

The man had been a famous writer in his day. He’d won the Booker and the PEN Faulkner and was a consistent bestselling author since his debut. His realm was the short story. They said he brought the form back from the grave. The boy was an aspiring young playwright. He had
boarded the man’s boat, again, seeking his advice.

"You didn’t say this writing business would be so lonely."

“Yes.”

“Yes? Well what do you mean?”

“Have you ever met a writer?”

“Of course.”

“Have you ever met a socialized one?”

There was a pause.

“I suppose not. I see your point.”

They were sitting in a jacuzzi in Aruba on the man’s boat while a little Guatemalan girl
fanned them with a banana leaf. She had gecko eyes. They blinked from the side.

“Oh, Plata.” Plata was her name. It means silver in Spanish.

“Yes?” she said.

“Will you please stop it with that fan and get me my drink, please?”

“Sir, right away.” She folded in the banana leaf and set it by the corner.

“This feels nice, doesn’t it?” The man was leaning against the tub. His back was against the bubbler. “Ahhhh, isn’t it nice?”

“Yes, I suppose.”

His arms sank into the water. He scratched his stomach, twirling his belly button hair around his thumb. “So what makes you want to be a writer, kid? Is it the women? Is it the money? Is it the fame?”

“No. Not quite.”

“Well, you’re not a writer if you don’t want something.” The man sat up. “Cervezas, niña,” he said. “Pronto.”

“You see what I did there?”

Not long after the girl returned with the drinks. The boy stared into her eyes. She blinked, handing him his glass.

“Thank you,” said the boy.

“Yes. Thanks, darling,” said the man as lifted his glass to his nose then to his lips. “Mmm. Grhhmm. So kid, why do you want to be a writer? Tell me, what is it that truly brings you to such a craft?”

“It’s not that I want to write,” said the boy then took a sip. “I have to. I just have to. It’s in my blood.”

The man shook his head. His jowls jiggled along, “What? Margharitas in your blood, not spirit.”

“Margarita.”

“Yes. Rum is in mine.” To this the man finished his glass. “Welp, kid, you know, I have no real advice this time. Just chase it with a hatchet, and buy your boat in Aruba when you can afford one.”

The boy stood up. He waded through the hot bubbly water, thick as it was, crawling out of the tub. The girl handed him a towel.

“Thank you,” he said.

The towel soaked the water up.

It was evening. He looked back over at the man. The man was chewing ice from his drink, staring off into the sea and the sun. He sat alone.

“Sir, can I get that towel for you?”

The girl was behind the boy. Their eyes met. She blinked.

“No. No, I’m fine,” he said. “Thank you.”

“Really?”

“Really. I can get it myself.”

He threw the towel in the bin by the sliding glass door.

The boy’s room was shaped like the inside of a conk, cavernous, marbled walls, mother of pearl. It sounded like a conk too. When one put one’s ear to the wall, the sea could be heard. He was packing his bags when he heard the knock. It was the girl. She poked her head into the room.

“What is it?” he said, walking up.

“There is dinner. Hermit crab, plantains and wild rice. He is waiting for you. Would you care to join?”

“No,” said the boy. “I prefer not.”

She smiled. It was a sad smile. “That’s too bad.”

He could see the light of the sun shining through the porthole streaked across her face.

“Here. Take this,” he said.

He held out a dollar coin in the palm of his hand. She reached. For a moment their hands clasped as she did. The coin was still there when she drew her hand back.

“I can’t accept this,” she said.

He looked at the coin. It glimmered in the light.

“Right.” He set it against his chest, wiping the grease from it, then slipped it in his pocket. “I best get back to what I was doing
then.”

“What was it you were doing, if I may ask?”

He stood there for a moment, looking down. “I was writing,” he said. Then he turned
back up without looking at the girl.

“Well, it was nice to meet you,” she said.

The boat had shifted. The sun was gone.

“It was—I mean, it was nice to meet you as well.”

She smiled. “Good bye, sir.”

He nodded then shut the door.

Condor Wrights -- Writer, student, cheeky little monkey with a stick. Lives in Nashville, TN and Oxford, GA. Reads in his spare time and lies around with Billy, his dog. Stokes the fire when he can.