In the late sixteenth century, a certain famous playwright wrote what would
become perhaps his most obscure works. He was two years from death, and
didn’t even get to see his final piece performed on stage. Once
Tarmides of Egypt finally did make it to the theatre, opening night
was riddled with such bad luck that it ruined the show’s future
indefinitely. The lead forgot many of his lines, his co-star had to give
birth halfway through, forcing them to switch to an understudy. The man who
played the grandfather died of a heart attack near the end, and another was
impaled when the stage collapsed due to all the weight of the people who ran
up to tend to the old man. The injury resulted in death a day later. It was
for these reasons that all further showings were cancelled. Years later, a
different troupe tried to put on another production, but it went badly too.
No one else died on the night, but set pieces fell apart, multiple actors
flubbed their lines, and historians believe this to be the probable ground
zero for what came to be known as the relatively shortlived Lurch Plague.
The play was cursed, according to the superstitious majority of the time,
and no one else so much as attempted to produce it again for at least a
century. Since then, rumors of further unfortunate events have spread about
more recent attempts, but most of these claims remain unsubstantiated. The
fact of the matter is that the play has almost certainly been produced
dozens of times without any issue, but that’s not a very good story, so most
students are taught the melodramatically stretched truth that the curse
always takes them in the end. The mystique of this whole thing is only
fueled by the subject matter of the play itself.
Tarmides was born in Greece, but the narrative is about him immigrating to
Egypt to escape his past, only to find himself at the center of one disaster
after another. The playwright was probably trying to demonstrate the
futility of life, having become more nihilistic in his latter years, but
this depressing lesson is lost to the more sensational idea that he was a
prophet, who wrote it in order to prompt destruction in the real world. When
I was a young man, a tyrant rose to power, and waged a war against the rural
parts of my country. Villages were demolished under the weight of his
superior technology. I probably wasn’t truly the only survivor, but again,
that’s not sensational enough, so the media billed it that way. I became
famous, and an international effort formed in order to relocate me to a
safer region of the world. Most of the time, developed world nations fight
over who has to take in refugees, but in my case, they fought
for the honor. Tasmania won, so that’s where I moved. Shortly
thereafter, an undersea earthquake in the Southern Ocean sent a tidal wave
to the island, killing thousands of people, and destroying a great deal of
the infrastructure. Once again, in order to sell papers, journalists began
drawing connections between my arrival, and the completely unrelated and
unpredictable natural disaster. Like most regular people, I hadn’t even
heard of the play myself at the time, but I soon came to be known as The
Tarmides of Tasmania. This nickname followed me for the rest of my life.
Whenever an item fell off of the shelf at the grocery store, or I was around
when it began to rain, I was blamed for it. There was always someone around
who enjoyed pointing it out, especially if something even moderately
inconvenient happened to someone else. I lived the rest of my life
with this mark, and as much as I don’t want to die, I won’t miss it.
