Everyday Stories #14
Andoumboulou and Vorfreude
The golden thread
There was a time before time.
A time where gods, animals, trees and streams
they intertwined their stories.
And there was still no word
for human being.
Clotho the spinner, Lachesis the allotter, Atropos the unturnable.
Each thread passed between their hands.
The thread of day and night, of wakefulness and sleep.
The thread of emotions that follow each other.
Even the life of the immortal gods was not an infinite thread
but the beginning, the unfolding and the end of infinite threads,
of infinite lives.
Clotho spun, Lachesis wove, Atropos cut.
Clotho, the youngest, fell in love with Vorfreude.
Vorfreude was a free god,
his joy shone without hurting the eyes,
like the rays of the sun at dawn.
Vorfreude fell in love with everything.
Clotho and Vorfreude began to meet in secret.
Clotho could not leave her seat,
except when Atropos closed her eyes
to sever the thread.
One instant,
yet in that time, one instant was enough to touch each other,
to leave their mark imprinted on the other.
Lachesis also fell in love with Vorfreude.
But she wove destiny,
she feared the end of things,
she was happy only when the thread kept unwinding,
when life kept unfolding,
and so she was silent.
She protected their encounters.
But every thread inexorably reached Atropos’s scissors.
Atropos, the oldest, the unturnable,
cut that thread of love.
She left them free, free to encounter, to cultivate their love.
Clotho and Vorfreude loved each other for the first time,
they rolled on the grass, bathed in the river,
their kisses no longer quivered with fear but only with desire.
And when evening came, Vorfreude became sad.
The following morning,
Vorfreude set out on another journey.
Clotho resumed his seat.
And from her hands came a thread never seen before,
a raw thread
that Lachesis was struggling to weave.
That thread had the name Andoumboulou,
the unfinished.
Andoumboulou grew, learned new things, took new forms.
But nothing about him was defined.
Like fire he blazed in the night.
Like water he slipped over time.
Clotho looked at him with tenderness.
Lachesis took care of him.
Years of that timeless time passed.
Centuries passed.
Andoumboulou aged without aging.
It seemed to have no fate.
He smiled like his father,
like his father Vorfreude, his smile had the colors of dawn.
He smiled like his mother,
like his mother Clotho, his smile was a rising thread.
But his eyes were black and amazed.
And all that he contemplated
it fell into that endless water well.
The time came.
Atropos had to cut Andoumboulou’s thread.
Andoumboulou, the unfinished, watched her.
Black and amazed eyes.
Andoumboulou smiled.
His thread fell to the ground.
It gathered into a kind of clew.
In a spider’s nest.
Clotho picked it up.
Inside was the smile of Andoumboulou.
The only form that had belonged to him.
Clotho began to unwind it.
A golden thread began to spin.
The thread of human being.
The unexpected.
The imperfect.
Thanks to a prompt in this story
by William J Spirdione
who followed Priyanka Srivastava’s prompt:
Andoumboulou and Vorfreude!
Only by assonance, a reference to another story:
