The Seasoning of Paprika
A song of love, life and beef stew in 5 sonnets
Sonnet I - Paprika Overture
“Push, Blevia, push!!” Torm offered encouragement to his pregnant wife. Her sweating, pain-filled face was warped with exertion.
The slender half-elf struggled, gritting her teeth and planting her feet. “Is it coming!?”
“Yeah! That’s it, just a bit more! Get on, girl! Get on!” Torm nodded with satisfaction as the wagon wheel came loose from the mud with a lurch, the horses (gifts from Sire Bael) suddenly speeding forward.
Behind the wagon, exhausted and off-balance from pushing, Blevia fell face down in the mud.
“Haw! Haw!” Torm fell down himself, such was his mirth. And then, in a typical display of his concise observation, “Thou done fell down in the mud!”
“Torm…” Blevia gasped as she rolled to a sitting position. She clutched her swollen midsection. “The baby…”
“Yep!! We’s guanna have weselves a baby!” Torm wasn’t sure why she felt the need to bring this up. As if he wasn’t aware that they were going to have a child. He dismissed it as a female obsession and got up to trot after the horses and wagon. They needed to get that firewood to the house so he could stack it and be done with work in time to go to the town dance.
“No! Torm… the baby…”
“By tippy I knows we’s guanna have a saplin, women! Thou shouldst be patient until that time dost come.”
“…is coming NOOOOWWW!!!”
Torm didn’t make it to the dance.
Sonnet II - Paprika sings her first song
“Guuuaaaa…. Ahhh…. Aaaaa…. Nnnaaaaaaa…”
“Blevia, thy child dost wail plaintively.” Torm didn’t want to get up from his easy chair and away from the warm fire.
“I know…” Blevia hurried from the kitchen to their bedroom with a smile on her face. “It sounds as though Paprika is singing.”
Sonnet III – Paprika makes her first theft
“Eat thy carrots, Paprika, and mayhaps thou shalst have some beef stew,” Torm nodded sagely at the 3 year old. He felt good imparting the time honored moral of do-boring-stuff-first-then-enjoy-good-stuff taught to him by his own father.
“Torm, dids’t thou check Paprika’s milk?” Blevia from the bedroom.
“All farb it,” Torm grumbled, getting up and pulling the warm milk off of the wood-burning stove. He set it aside to cool and and sat back down to his meal.
He frowned at the plate. His chunk of beef was missing.
Sonnet IV – Paprika finds her destiny
Blevia moved down the row to the good seats, near the center. It was good fortune to find two together. She smiled at that. Otherwise Paprika would have had to sit up in the nosebleeds by herself.
The Tonkerville amphitheater was the only proper outdoor stage in the region. One would have to go to a city proper, probably Merudian, otherwise.
Ten years of age and quite impressionable, Paprika sat wide-eyed as the performance began. This was a rendition of Plubia’s Got No Goats So I Ate The Llamas but it could have been anything. The string music, the myriad of costumes, the changing sets and the bombastic voices and gestures of the actors were all magic to her.
Paprika wanted to do this.
“Mother, oh, mother, you were so right!” the girl gushed. “Twas beauteous it twere!”
“Mm,” Blevia smiled again. It was her mission to cultivate some culture into this child, since her father was dead set on remaining an idiot. “Tis true, dear. And be happy that thou dids’t find such enjoyment, for only those of cultured civility can appreciate the arts as such.”
“Oh, mother, I so want to do that too!”
“Do what, child?” Blevia checked her face in her Gutta-percha pocket mirror. Some cultured, civilized hunks had been eyeing her before and during the performance. Blevia enjoyed being attractive.
“To act like they, upon the stage!”
Blevia dropped her mirror with a gasp. “Paprika! Thou hast misunderstood! The performance is to be enjoyed by us, but the performers themselves are of a low class. We are above that Paprika. I and your grandmother Bael are guiding you towards high class and society. You are an elf. Remember that.”
Paprika frowned, not sure where she had gone astray this time from her mother’s ever winding road to high society. She knew better than to argue though and simply said, “Oh guan, mother, twas just jesting I was.”
But, she wasn’t. Paprika Riverweed knew then and there that she wanted to perform.
Sonnet V – Paprika’s first kill
“Paprika! Paprika!? Farb gob it,” Torm wiped the sweat from his face as he huffed around the barn. The heat of the day had been merciless in the garden but he had persevered. Now, though, upon his return, the stalls had not been cleaned for the horses.
He found the fourteen-year-old idly swinging in the hammock near the water wheel, reading one of Blevia’s books. Torm didn’t trust books. They meant stuff.
“Hey!”
Paprika squealed and sat up, causing the hammock to spill her. “I’m sorry daddy, what time is it? I was guan clean the stalls but started reading I did!”
“Paprika Riverweed, thou dost do naught daily but kill time!”
Thus unfolded the linchpin moments of Paprika’s childhood. As a teen, as we shall see next, she found more tempestuous forms of trouble.
