Lappalleppi

Things on the internet happen like mushrooms popping out of mouldering leaf litter. Over on Ello, I encountered this writing prompt: tvs nanofic #25

“…there’s something in the woods. you can’t quite make it out from where you are. in your own post, using 55 words exactly, tell the story of what you do, what it is, or anything you want.”

That actually happened to me last year, that something in the woods. An elusive presence walked through the wild oaks in my backyard, shuffling through the dry leaves. (These are coast live oaks, they are evergreen but they drop their small prickly leaves all the time, along with lichen-encrusted twigs and branches.) T Van Santāna‘s writing prompt seemed to arrive as a bit of synchronicity, a fleeting revelation, an inkling, a glimmering. I started to write: “You were the glimpse of a moment. Not a bird, not a possum, not a raccoon, not a dog. An entity made intangible when perceived. A god, then.”

I wrote more, 55 words in total, except that the words did not feel quite right, they felt… yosorical, which is a handy word the Inultaru borrowed from the Second House, the Otilem Kejik. It is a word that has no English equivalent, meant for something out of place, a mistake, a dodgy occurrence, to the point of being (but not quite) unlawful.

After I wrote what I wrote, it seemed to me that the entity who visited my garden was disinclined to become a god. They were apparently content to remain an unsolved puzzle, a lappalleppi. So I left that story where it was, where it could not become much of anything, and went on to other things. The weeds in the garden grew large and bloomed with health, the roses and the irises flaunted their flowers valiantly, the cactus and succulents were as staunchly ornamental as they always were, the oaks flung their leaves to the wind with fierce abandon (spring is a blustery season here), and all this happened with little help from me.

I am not sure if this is the iris my mother named “Arnold P. Barker”, but if not, it is probably a sister or a brother, starting as a seed from the same pod.

The big flamboyant aeonium was a succulent I salvaged in pieces last year, from a friend’s rubbish heap. In the image below is a handful of chicks from Sempervivum arachnoideum:

Lappalleppi is another word stolen by the Inultaru from the Second House; it can mean both an unsolved puzzle and a solved one, implying that solutions can be doubted. A reminder that maybe you should re-think your answers, double-check your grand totals, reconsider your stories. Remind yourself that myths are metaphors for truth, and truth transforms itself into fiction the moment you put it into a narrative.

I imagine that Yost wrote the words “monkey puzzle dragon spider” on the back of the art for today’s GLP comic. There is a story the Otilem Kejik tell about the monkey puzzle dragon spider, the story of the aneepa lappaleppi lofste tindruspin. I am not sure it is a story I can write down in a language that is not asemic.

It needs to be a good story.

Maybe you can imagine it.