Panoro

Any traveler would have thought that the most malevolent plague had ambushed the people of Gaska Village if they had unluckily arrived on the sixth day during the sixth month anytime after six o’clock in the evening. Only the unfortunate  denizens of the small village knew that the aforesaid time was when Ol’ Satan would play his meanest trick on the poor and fervently pious people of Gaska. Because the village was said to be haunted by the quare fellow himself, and the inhabitants hardly spoke of it for fear of cursing their family with an unexpected visit from the fallen angel, they cautiously tiptoed around the subject by simply whispering the word Panoro from one person to the other in order to send around an unneeded warning about the encroaching day. Of course, travelers would only be confused by the passing word Panoro since it was in the vernacular and none of the villagers would say anymore about it, but its meaning translated from Gaskanian means trader, which, to the inexperienced traveler, seems innocent enough. One couldn’t be more mistaken. Panoro brought much fear and anxiety among the people of the superstitious village and for good reason. Does one dare believe what these helpless villagers endure during the month of the devil’s games? It is not unheard of for a mocking traveler to have suffered the price of Satan's amusement. In fact, to this ticking second, I regret and am self-diagnosed with shell shock from the day I stepped foot in Gaska Village.

It was in a remote town skirting the village of Gaska that I had first heard of Panoro. Even those who live outside of the village were reluctant to give any detail about what the month entailed, but I happened to come across one elder of the town who had as a teenager chanced his luck on the very day that all Gaskanians deplore. He claimed that he was a young daredevil who fed on the thrill of danger, but his sentence dropped short as silence overcame him. I thought he may have passed at that very moment, but at all once he wheezed heavily then resumed with the story though he could barely speak of the horrors that he had encountered that day. I’m sure his eyes would have told all, and would have saved me much pain, if he hadn’t been wrapped up in a sort of mummified encasement. Only under the belief that his last day was soon to come did he relay to me all the secrets that the villagers kept pertaining to Panoro, and hence I came to know the meaning of the mysterious word.

Would to God I had never come into the company of this man. Only his lips, cracked and flaking badly, were visible, and he drooled slightly as he spat out one word at a time like they were punctuated sentences. It took nearly a full day before I had learned anything, and just as if the man’s madness was contagious, I suddenly felt the urge to witness this doom day myself. I arose to take my leave of my informant, but he must have sensed my excitement and thus grabbed my wrist with a tight grip. I felt scales of something tumbling down my wrist, and before I could come to the assumption of the man’s malady, he shouted out in a crazed voice one word that struck me as revolting, and I cringed as I thought of his fingers, diseased with leprosy, deteriorated against my own skin. I pulled away with some force, and the thing beneath the wrap fell to the floor reaching out for my feet. He repeated the name of his disease in between wheezes until I could no longer bare it and left the man to fight for his life and sanity upon the ground. I made it back to my accommodation and scrubbed my skin until it bled slightly, then I tried for some sleep though in vain. All I could think of was how I could weasel my way into Gaska Village, and then it occurred to me:

Mr. Kully Garris.

© Mikal Minarich