Dumped from my to-then best-paid work shortly after having used its income to qualify for a mortgage and buy two homes, I faced a local job market where official figures had unemployment at 18 percent. I needed self-confidence right now, but like a chronic stray dog, mine wasn’t answering. That’s what lead me to write and illustrate this quirky story. Then I embargoed it while pondering why I had so little self-confidence—more than a decade. Things have changed in a big way, signaling time to release this.

It makes little sense to publish a work of fiction and try to dictate a correct interpretation of it. Some readers might, though, question how this tale is relevant to recovery from chronic financial underachievement. My conception for the villages of Upper and Lower Fasa’an came from what I observed in my own attitudes. I tended to focus on what seemed so obvious about me, that my shortcomings and my often-encountered incompetence far outweighed what I might bring of value to an employer or client. My self-doubt was like the overflowing pond in Lower Fasa’an as it appears at the beginning of the tale.

At the same time, the value I could present to an employer or client seemed to me about as scarce as the water in the drained pond of Upper Fasa’an as it appears at the beginning of the tale. There was my opening situation, and showing the interpersonal conflicts and relationships that lend the tale whatever life that it has was a matter of answering questions such as how did it come about that the upper village’s pond had become the merest puddle while the lower village had an overflowing pond?

Fortunately, I also saw this story as a place to imagine a rebalancing, a wish fulfillment in which Upper and Lower Fasa’an have enough water, and neither is affected by flooding, and the immediate action detailed in the story is such a fulfillment.

The character Oscappi reminds me vaguely of Professor Harold Hill in The Music Man. Both have done considerable damage to communities through their respective cons. And my story as well as The Music Man show a process these characters go through in forsaking a past where they derived power through deception. I turn to The Music Man when I want cinematic comfort food, allowing disgust to come up during the mayor’s wife’s melodrama based in US extermination of indigenous peoples. When I reflect on it, however, it seems to me that the story really has a much more powerful sequel in how is the ex-professor Harold Hill’s life once he decides to settle down with his Marian the Librarian in River City? Salesmen who’ve wanted to run him out on a rail of whatever town they’ve found bilked by him but always come too late already know he’s in River City, and the possibility they won’t tell the populace of other towns previously defrauded by him seems remote. Surely a demonstration of his character and his determination to live an authentic life will be forthcoming as such news spreads across river valleys and along rail lines he’d traveled before. And how will Marian cope with a new life with a man wanted through the whole region for fraud?

Likewise, there may indeed be a more important story to write in how Oscappi, Nesrari, and whatever other accomplices emerge fare after they admit their respective roles in Upper and Lower Fasa’an’s water crisis. It could be a tale about healing both of the villages’ vital infrastructure and whatever it was in the hearts of those who set it off balance. Before I can write it, I’ve got a new financial equilibrium to negotiate, to accept, to celebrate, and even to question. If I can experience such abundance at a job where I have little native talent, what might I realize if I were able to trade life energy for money in some way that engages key talents of mine? Now that I’ve gained some insights into what was siphoning my self-confidence into a pond of doubts, that question threatens yet more hair-raising possibilities of change—and healing.