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L’uomo fiore di Cubber

All’inizio, le era sembrato divertente: dovunque venisse toccato,
l’omino sputava un mazzo di fiori.
La testa sembrava un papavero; lei ne guardava la silouette nera,
esotica, contro la luce del sole.

Quando i bulbi oculari scoppiarono in corolle variopinte, lei rimase
interdetta; addirittura si irritò quando, dopo aver cercato di
travolgere l’omino con spintoni più energici, non ottenne che nuovi
mazzolini, bellissimi, impassibili.

Adesso intorno a lei non ci sono che petali. Sconfitta, cerca di
muoversi il meno possibile: ha imparato che il minimo movimento non
farebbe che generare altra vegetazione; e poi, gli ultimi fiori
esplosi brulicavano di parassiti.

Notes

As you can see, another issue of  A Hundred Word Stories must go with only one story. Unfortunately my time for at least a couple of weeks will be really little, so I’ll do one a week, alternating an English story with an Italian one. Please be patient, after Bolzano Comics is over I should be able to return to my old posting rhythm!

There is an interview with me and Cubber on Lospaziobianco.it, but of course, it’s in Italian. If you still want to check it out, it’s here: link diretto all’intervista con noi

Sorry, this entry is only available in Italiano.

A friend of mine, Valerie, has recently pointed out that I never gave any English translation for the text in Sed Tantum Dic Verbo (like the one in the picture above), and being it quite fundamental for the comprehention of the story, this could be a problem for all of you, who don’t read Italian.

So here is a short synopsis of Cubber‘s text, the comic is based on. I decided not to provide a real translation, because the text is quite complex and I’m not such a good translator.

Synopsis

Cubber’s story is written as a kind of police report, by an imaginary office for “christmas decoration prevention”. It tells about some people who put a figure of a Sphinx into a nativity scene. The spynx then tries to reach the infant Jesus to tell him something (but we’ll never know what). They try to stop the Sphinx by putting the shepherds in its way, but the sphinx would just bite them and eat all their sheep. Then the fisherman tries to catch the mythological animal while asleep (because it’s eaten too much), but the sphinx escapes. As a final resort, they give Saint Mary a holy cleaver while Joseph puts straw and mud into the ears of the infant to protect him against the words of the sphinx.

notes

The text is written so that the distinction between the real world and the miniature world of the nativity scene becomes quite blurred, what I have done in my comic version of it, is to tell the story from a different temporal point of view, i.e. tell the story from the traces the events have left in the world.