There was a monk who was unconditionally interested in fiction. Fiction of all sorts: fresh, forlorn, flexible – even inscribed wacko. Fiction, he also believed, was limited if consumed only by the eyes. How wasteful were those forth and back scans over dribbled scribbles on parchment. Means such as direct digestion through the stomach, sticker patches that diffused fictional molecules through the skin, or an earbud which muttered artificial yarns as one cleaned out their oculars, these were far more satisfying for fictionados like the monk.

The monk’s name was Nikol-Goog.

A particularly spicy spoonful of a fictional stew was Nikol-Goog slurping when a second monk, by the name of Humming-Whey, crashed through the door to the dining hall, knocking it right from its hinges. He addressed Nikol-Goog in mid-munch, not before affixing the door.

“Goog! Goog! Come quick. Make haste! A disaster. A disaster! The town bell!” said Humming, hardly able to keep his feet in front of him as he ran to the table. Nikol-Goog did not reply, for he was so taken by the synthesis of the stew in his mouth that his mind had put him where his body was not. When he finally swallowed and his eyes de-glazed, there he saw Humming-Whey, looking more dejected than a pile of laundry.

“My word. Humming, you look more dejected than a pile of laundry. What is the matter?” Ah, but one more spoon of stew would do, thought Goog’s mind. Before the notional broils met rational lips, Whey grabbed at the air around him and shouted, “Get that artificial gloop out of your gob and listen straight! The bell, do you hear! The bell!”

Goog cleaned his spoon with his napkin and replaced it in his shirt pocket. With equanimity to challenge a sand dollar, he turned to the buzzing Humming and said:

“My brother, dear Humming. Please, I am all ears – all two, and if I had three or four, than I would not hesitate in offering all of them as well. Tell me now. I promise not a drop of stew – though its artifictional flavour I implore you to try – not a drop will I touch while you speak,” and Goog looked at Whey and for a moment he became very interested in how the light caught all the little drops of sweat that had started sprouting from his forehead. It reminded him of the texture of a berry he had eaten last year, on a fictional voyage to the Reimagined Orachard of Dreams.

“So tell me now, what of the town bell?”

Humming, pleased to finally have an audience, really let loose on himself and threw appendages every which way in great angst as if the very calcium of his bones had jellied. He spat words like bullets. “Our bell! Oh, the mighty Ferric Concavity Herself. Lorder Over Many-Mile Bellows. Our Parabolic Spine of Cognitive Sonorousness. Great Timbre Caster of the Twin Tunes. We, but the skin and flesh of a ripe peach, it the shiftless core from which we hang in fibrous orange strands and pray we are not flung north or forth from its dappled and dapper construction. The orifice – the only orifice – for which one can talk and accept a truth or a –“

A forefinger of Goog’s hand appeared, the gesture silencing Humming. Then into the invisible bubbling hot stew it was dipped. Goog licked his finger, and spoke this:

“Two roads meet. The first, called Forid’s Tromp, constructed by a swarm of small entities that could do no work as one, but together could move mountains. These entities we call, Firds. The Firds had a queen, and one particular mountain troubled her, for in the morning it blotched out the sun and the queen was riddled with self-motivation and had to awake early to practise Kli-Pong.”

Goog looked up at Humming. “Do you know Kli-Pong? It is a stretching exercise involving only the eating orifice of an organism while exposed to ultraviolet rays. Elevates the sensitivity to certain root spices, such as ginger – I highly recommend.” Goog addressed the surface of his not-stew. “Anyway, to satiate their queen, the Firds, they deconstructed it – that mountain – slate for slate, stone for stone, and used it to pave a road – that is, Florid’s Tromp – that went from their small civilization to their southern neighbors, the Pungs.

“Now, the Pungs were a civilization of success equal to the Forids, but one of far fewer individuals. Only one, in fact. The one Pung in the town of the Pungs did it all: lorded over the serfs, hauled the hay for the horses, writ the laws of the land, judged the innocent or guilty, and delivered the messages from their god, Gunpy. All this the single Pung could do because where you and I would have one brain inside one skull, the Pung had thousands all throughout itself, exactly like a raisin scone.

“One morning, the one Pung was working overtime, taxiing the Pungs to the important places they needed to be about the town. A smear, just over the next hill, caught the Pung’s attention and it stopped the carriage, hopped off the top, opened its door, and sat down inside.

‘What’s going on up there?’ yelled the one Pung and the roof answered for his frustration by receiving a good punch.

The one Pung opened the carriage door, stepped out, and clambered back up on the roof. It dusted its coattails and cleared its throat: ‘Sorry, sir. Something over yonder hill took me aback.’

A slam of the carriage door and the carriage guest replied, ‘Well, don’t leave me high and dry. Explain it to me. What do you see?’

‘Some sort of cloud. A cloud, but it’s all fuzzy at the ends.’ And the cloud on the hill was precisely that, looking like it had run itself along a rough carpet for an hour.

The one Pung leapt off the roof and went back into the carriage and then dropped the window to poke its head out of the carriage and have a look.

‘Hmm, very curious. It seems to be growing?’

And then, no longer in the carriage, the Pung was at the front entrance of the bank the carriage had stopped in front of. Out stepped a civilian, who, not before dusting their dress and clearing their throat, saw the cloud and exclaimed, “Oh my great Gunpy! What in gunvens is that revolting smear just over the hill I see. It’s frightful and so revolting I want to dispose of my eyeballs at once!”

The civilian then fainted right on the spot, so hideous was the distant smear. The carriage driver was first to the scene and exclaimed, ‘Madam! You are not well! Water! Someone, get water!’ and the carriage driver looked around for someone nearby who might help. The Pung flipped from front to back, and in the arms of the carriage driver lay immobile and looking rather pale.

A young blacksmith happened to be on his way back from the stream where he had collected water to clean his tools. The Pung now hauled the very bucket, in the arms of the blacksmith, and stopped mid-stride at the cry for help, then rushed to the fainted lady in the arms of carriage driver. The blacksmith dispensed the entire bucket of water as if dousing a rioting flame, and the one Pung was completely drenched by itself. The fainted lady came to, and although dripping at the seams, thanked the blacksmith and thanked the carriage driver.

But now quite a few individuals had taken notice of the cloud on the hill as it grew by the second. A crowd had formed and the one Pung bounced between every one in the crowd like a toad possessed. The citizens of the town of Pung took pride in their politeness and not one stepped over or on top of any other citizen, no matter how large the crowd became.”

Here, Goog stopped and looked around as if coming to from a long-drawn resurrection. He noticed Humming’s face, which upon it had two eyes, a nose, and, to Goog’s disbelief, a hole at the bottom. Goog frowned. Again he took his finger and ran it along the surface of his stew and brought it to his lower lip and licked. It was stone cold. And delicious.

“Goog, I have admired you always for your boundless knowledge of the far-and-wide, the bizarre, the unbridled content of the hot stars. I fail though, to see how this story has any action in fixing our great chime. If your story possessed two good arms, a pair of feet, and a brain ball to run it all, why, I’d put it to work at once. But, being a yarn from your mouth and nothing more, I see no anatomy at all! Useless! This is of no help! This is a tragedy and I cannot understand your dipping and sipping of stew in such a state of equanimity!” And because words sometimes don’t have enough strength, even when someone shouts them, Humming stomped a foot to put some weight behind it.

Goog began to nod, and he did so five times and once more. He looked down at his knees as if disappointed in himself, but it was to study the way the oak bowl caught the flicker of ray from the window. Eventually, Goog looked up and spoke, “Do you know, my dear whistling friend, why the Pung does not act as one Pung instead of thousands? Although it has brains a-thousand, it could just as easily declare that identity is illegal in its land and deal only with clones.”

Humming didn’t reply, but he didn’t make to stop Goog from talking.

“I had the same question, ten years ago yesterday, and I traveled to meet the Pung and asked every one of his cognitive functions this question. And when I got my answers, I spent five days running them through many statistical machines, counting, unwrapping, lexically tip-tapping, and from it I found this response:

‘Life is more fun with a challenge.’”

When Humming heard these words, he held himself like a statue, nodded, and then turned and this time left the door on its hinges on his way out. Goog took a gold spoon from his pocket and stirred the stew as he whistled the hymn of the Bartering Ladder Man.