John Emil Vincent
The Parable of the Talents
A canny householder was to leave for a trip of some duration during which time his servants would see to his estate. To one of his servants, the most dependable, he gave his heart. To the butler, his intellect, and to the boy who shovelled shit he gave his intuition. The seamstress of the house received his brain’s executive function. Amply arrayed, the householder asked each servant to make a profit of their holdings while he was gone. And if profits there were, so would the servants profit also. Away he went, merrily even, excited to see the results of his experiment. This householder was a bit of a philosopher; this was, recall, back well before philosophy and science split ways.
When he returned, he found the stable boy hung, the butler hacked to pieces, and the man with his heart drowned in a puddle. The seamstress sat in the middle of the gore and giggled, and giggled. She had convinced the heart that the intellect was selling it out to intuition and from there merely moved out of the way. And after all the murder, the heart finished himself off from grief.
She was truly the canniest servant. And as the householder was discoursing on her virtues she split his head open with an ax she had set aside deliberately for that purpose. The seamstress then went on doing what she had always done in a colorless sort of way from that day to the present. And without heart, head, or worry, fashioned clothes for all her dead friends. And they always fit quite exactly, and looked pretty good given the circumstances. Only the householder went without. Only the householder was not tended to in his decay. He was dishonored by dogs and birds and his bones left in a woeful unmarked mess.
His only legacy: this idiot parable.
John Emil Vincent is the author of Excitement Tax (DC Books, 2018), short-listed for the Quebec Writers’ Federation First Book Prize, and Ganymede’s Dog, forthcoming from McGill-Queen’s University Press in fall 2019. He has published several books of criticism and is a trained archivist. Vincent lives in Montreal and teaches at Concordia University.
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