Mary, Mary, quite contrary, was wondering how her garden grew when, lo and behold, of a sudden, she thought she spotted a little lamb, one that perhaps might become her own.

Nearby, a certain Miss Muffat sat on her tuffet, eating her curds and weigh, while a friendly if somewhat frightening, somewhat hungry and a bit jealous arachnid (none other than the trickster deity known as Anansi), hanging by a silken thread, curiously passed her way.

As Miss Muffat and Anansi looked on, Mary, Mary, quite contrary, fondled what she thought was her new lamb but the ovis aries, in reality the Egyptian deity Khnum, reacted unexpectedly, at least as far as Mary, Mary, quite contrary, was concerned.  Anansi couldn’t help but giggle, which almost gave the game away.

Khnum, at first seemingly young and small, turned out not to have been either, not at all.  He was in fact very, very ancient really, and in reality, quite a bit larger than a lamb, and he had budding horns and, … well …, reacting to Mary, Mary, quite contrary’s soft caresses, seemed unusually amorous for a lamb, at least as far as little Miss Moffat could tell.

Then, slam bam, thank you mam ….  The lamb turned out to be a ram … and …. not just any ram, but the primordial creator of human bodies and of the life force known as kꜣ (“ka”), and Anansi’s giggles turned into guffaws.

Thus, some months later, to Miss Muffat’s surprise and the spider’s strange delight (it loved irony and was as much a contrarian as Mary), Mary, Mary, quite contrary, indeed had her little lamb. 

Which was not just any little lamb at all.[1]
_____

© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2024; all rights reserved.  Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen). Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales. Previously, he chaired the social studies and foreign language departments at the Eastern Military Academy in Huntington, New York. He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review available at Substack.com; an intermittent commentator on radio and television; and, an occasional contributor to diverse periodicals and publications. He has academic degrees in political science (BA, the Citadel, the Military College of South Carolina), law (JD, St. John’s University, School of Law), international legal studies (LL.M, the Graduate Division of the New York University School of Law) and translation and linguistic studies (GCTS, the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies). However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta, cosmology and cosmogony. He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.

---

[1] An afterword of sorts.  It is sadly strange that in this puritanical age, puritanical concerning sexual matters but not bothered by genocide at all, I would feel uncomfortable, perhaps even ironically guilty, in having written this satire on the ancient myth of Leda and the Swan.