Xius and his Flying Carpet Emporium by Hermester Barrington

Xius waved at the family driving away in their BMW M3—it had license plate frames from his cousin’s dealership—with their brand new Fénixrolled up and strapped to its roof. He locked his showroom’s front door, hit a switch, and the sign reading “New and Used Flying Carpets!” flickered out. Sighing as he tried to ignore the worn linoleum, and the faded map of the world, marked with places such as El Dorado, Xanadu, and St. Brigid’s Well, he gathered together his receipts—paperwork would take him about two hours, he figured. He smiled as he thought of his daughters nagging him to get a computer, but he didn’t see the point, now—he had been at this for almost forty years, and every day seemed as if it might be the last.

Still, he had made five sales, today, ending the month on a high point—the dealership’s best in over a year. A Murciélago to a middle aged factory owner, trying to impress his twenty-something mistress, from the next town over; an Atlántidato a young couple, hoping to save their marriage by finding something they and their two toddlers could enjoy together; a used Accipiterto a recent divorcee who hinted that it would attract the attention of the young female tourists next year at the local beach town…he gathered their names and faces in his mind and scattered them to the winds, all of them. He couldn’t give any of them what they wanted.

Only the widower with acne who smiled, embarrassed, as he talked about piloting his new Mandeville, silently, through the local rainforests to spy on the capybaras, spider monkeys, and anacondas, and the fourteen year old girl who spoke of flying high above their town on her new Fénix, to see how vast the world might be—they might be happy with their purchases. Them, he may have helped.

It had come down to a predictable pattern: someone came into his dealership and walked out the door two hours later with a flying carpet, their hearts full of fantasies about what it might bring them—love, sex, adventure, knowledge, wisdom, power. Customers returned, usually, about two years later to sell the carpet back. His record for selling and buying back the same carpet was fourteen times—a Sherazade which he sold the year that he bought the dealership and which, just last week, had been returned to him so moth-eaten that the repair shop he contracted with told him that it couldn’t be restored.

Making photocopies of the receipts and attaching them to the International Aerial Conveyance Registration forms, Xius remembered the first time he had seen a flying carpet. The day after his eighth birthday, a carnival had settled on the outskirts of town for a long weekend, and he and his parents, his uncle, aunt and cousins, smelling popcorn, elotes, and candy floss, had all headed there, the adults strolling, the children hurrying ahead of them. Xius was trying to convince his father to take them into a sideshow featuring a boy turned into a snake for laziness, when he was startled by a shadow passing over them. Looking up, he saw the underside of a carpet, with a floral border and a griffin in flight in its center, hovering above them, and he heard the laughter of children raining down on the crowd. “Flying carpet rides!” a barker shouted, “See the 8^th Wonder of the World! Float high above the crowds! You, there, young man!”—this to a boy Xius recognized from his neighborhood, holding hands with another neighbor, Remedio, who made Xius’ heart skip whenever he saw her—“doesn’t your sweetheart deserve a flight through myth and legend with you? Step right up!” The line to reach the platform from which the carpets began their flight snaked in and out of the sideshows and along the edge of the swamp, and his father guessed that they would have to wait over an hour. “We’ll see about that!” his uncle, the third richest man in town, had snorted. After a large sum of money had changed hands, Xius and his cousins were lifted onto the carpet by an old man—he seemed old then, but was probably younger than Xius was now—wearing a hooded cape, and with mustaches that drooped to his navel. Seating himself cross-legged on the carpet, he shouted something in a foreign tongue. Xius’s cousins giggled or shrieked, and the crowd cheered, as the rug rose slowly over the circus tents, then zoomed towards the clouds. The carpet’s tasseled edges lifted up to push its riders toward the center, and so the children were soon sitting, backs to each other, peering down into the swamp where, Xius had heard, sirens had once sung. They laughed as they sailed over the banana plantations, and hovered outside the windows of the only skyscraper in town, where businessmen inside stared open-mouthed, or laughed, at the children making faces at them.

Xius was entranced—“I will buy one of these carpets,” he whispered to himself, “and sail to the lost far magic places—to Maple White Land, and Opar, and the Island of Colossa! La Mancha, the caves where the stars sleep by day, and the round earth’s imagined corners—”

“What are you muttering to yourself, Xius?” his cousin Darío asked.

“Nothing,” Xius mumbled, not meeting his cousin’s eyes.

“Still daydreaming, eh?” his cousin said, “I think there’s a siren waiting for you down there!” and Darío laughed as he pushed Xius off the carpet and into the pond ten feet below. When Xius waded ashore, his father shouted, “Hey, look! Darío’s father is buying him a brand new Lamassu!” while his mother laughed at the pondweed stuck in his hair. Darío asked Xius several times in the following years if he would like a ride on the carpet, but he refused every time.

Xius continued daydreaming of visits to fantastic places, until he took a class in geographyhis last year at the colegio—here, he thought, were the real marvels! He learned about the vast rivers of ice at the poles, moving slowly but inexorably to the sea, rivers in his own country so wide that the other side could not be seen, mountains so tall and massive that they created their own weather patterns, and oceans deep enough that such mountains could be dropped into them and disappear without a trace. He later majored in geography at the university, and then, not finding a job where he could use his new knowledge, did what his family expected of him and fumbled into a job in a bank. When his father died, he bought this dealership with the money his father left him.

He opened a file cabinet, pulled out the form from the local junkyard, required to dispose of flying carpets, and dropped it back in—it could wait until Monday—and listened for a moment to the sound typical of flying carpet showrooms. Some tension between warp and weft, part of the force which kept them in flight, produced a low hum which was, to most people, pleasant. No one understood how carpets could fly, just yet, but engineers had figured out many of the details. There were only three required materials: magnetic dust, to allow the carpet to align itself to the earth’s gravitational field (or so physicists had hypothesized); the autumn leaves of a sycamore, which, like the carpets themselves, floated gently through the air; and dandelionseeds, or those  of any other plant that disperses its seeds by the wind. For a long time, everyone believed that only the seed of a flower from the Waq Archipelago, Taraxacum mirabilis, would allow carpets to fly, but experiments proved that it didn’t even have to be a dandelion to work. Of course, many of his competitors still spun fabulous tales of the superiority of seeds from the archipelago, and charged accordingly. Xius shrugged, still not certain whether such tales improved the experience of a carpet’s riders. Regardless, Xius had enjoyed reading of this and other discoveries of the mechanics of flying carpets, as they had unfolded during his lifetime.

“Arriba, Salome, arriba!” Xius called, and a Pegaso rose from the showroom floor, unrolled itself, and, with a gentle shake, followed him into the warehouse. Despite appearances, the carpets weren’t sentient, but Xius always felt a bit sad whenever he brought one to the dump to be destroyed.  He remembered selling this one to the parents of a fourteen year old kid with a sullen expression who still had his baby fat—none of Xius’ jokes had made him even crack a smile. He had become a handsome young man who was studying geology at the university—or so he said, when he came to sell the carpet back to him. Xius tsk’ed at the carpet’s condition—holding it up to his nose, he could smell mold on one end, and felt the threadbare patches made by Trichophaga detrita, a moth whose larva fed only on flying carpets, at the other. He should have checked the condition better—but the kid had mentioned expenses for the upcoming semester, so maybe he would put the money to good use. Or maybe he’d spend it at the local tavern, or with one of Madame Alejandra’s girls. “No matter,” he said to himself, “I’m sure he’ll find some way to enjoy the money.”

Settling back at his desk, he glanced over at the photo of his wife Magdalena, her eyes intent upon the lump of clay on her potter’s wheel, wet and shining as it spun between her hands. He had met her forty-five years ago when he had bought flowers from her in the market, as an excuse to introduce himself; now she made pots for the daughter of her former boss, the original owner of that market stall. She spun her creations into existence, then decorated them with marvelous beasts and whimsical botanical fantasies. They sold well. The late afternoon light through her open studio window glanced off the spinning clay, brought out the color in her cheeks, shone through the chestnut curls escaping her kerchief. The slight smile on her Cupid’s bow lips, her left eyebrow raised skeptically, showed her mind at work as the pot took form beneath her hands. If Vermeer had worked with a camera, he might have snapped this photo.

Signing the last of the registration forms, Xius added them to the five piles on his desk, picked up his checkbook and put it down again—the rent check for his cousin, who owned the property where the dealership sat, could wait, if he dropped it off on his way here Monday. That way, he could go hear Magda sing a set at the cantina, and see their daughters there, besides. Margarita, their eldest, was a painter going through a Chagall period, and so several walls of their home were painted with images of various of the town’s inhabitants floating over the houses, the hills, the clouds. Miriam planned on becoming a civil engineer, and already had plans for building a wastewater treatment plant, to prevent the town’s runoff from polluting the marshes. Tomorrow, they all four would go to that marsh to watch the birds—some of the time hovering over the wetlands on the family’s Munchausen—as they did on occasion.

Turning on a pedestal fan, he decided that today had been a good day. Yesterday the account books had been in the red, tomorrow they might be in the red again—but they were in the black for now, which was as good an excuse as any to stop working and go join his family. Putting the five stacks on top of one another crisscross fashion, he promised himself he’d be in early on Monday to file them. Picking them up, he recalled the smile of his last customer, as she turned and waved at him from her parents’ car. The fan caught up one, then three, then two dozen of the pages, and Xius clapped his right hand atop the others as the lost pages scattered. Looking about his office—at the map on the wall, the worn linoleum, the portrait of his wife—he chuckled, and, sighing, threw the entire stack toward the ceiling. Drifting on the fan’s breeze, the papers fell and rose and then came down in drifts on the desk, the file cabinet, the floor’s faded linoleum tiles, skittering about before settling, most of them, in odd places about the room, as tears rolled down his cheeks and he threw back his head, and laughed.

Hermester Barrington

Image by Vedran Brnjetic from Pixabay – The edge of a rolled up carpet showing the backing with a hint of pattern and red wool binding.