Boy, Snow, Bird(14)

I turned the page over, but there wasn’t any more. Mia blew on her nails. “I guess I could start a hotel newspaper.”

“No, you’re going to do this. Got a pen?”

She handed me her fountain pen. “Finish that coat of polish,” I told her. She still had three fingernails to go, but instead of doing as she was told, she read over my shoulder as I wrote.


Here’s a story for you—the kind you find in an old library book with cobwebs between the pages. You know that book; you forget the title after you’ve returned it and over the years you try to look it up a few times, but you never find it again.

Once there was a pretty powerful magician. He spoke to the things around him, and as long as the thing he addressed had life in it, it obeyed him. “Barren tree, bear fruit,” he’d say. And no matter what had happened to the tree, no matter how ravaged its roots, the tree flourished. “Horse, grow wings,” he’d say, and the horse bowed its head as strong, finely plumed wings swept over its back. But that wasn’t how the magician made his living. Mostly he improved women’s looks for a fee. Women came to him themselves, or were brought to him by their ambitious mothers or diffident fathers. He’d look into a woman’s eyes and say: “You are a beauty,” and she heard the words and believed them so deeply that her features fell into either lush, soft harmony, or heartbreakingly strict symmetry—whichever suited her better. He’d say it to her only once, and it lasted the rest of her lifetime, so his fees were high. But the magician could also undo natural beauty, for a greater fee than the one he charged for beautifying. He sort of hoped the high fee would discourage people, but it didn’t. It was well-known that if your wife or daughter was unruly or otherwise deserving of punishment you could bring her to this magician, who would tell her, “Scarecrow, scarecrow . . .” He said it in such a way that the woman who heard him believed him, and the words did their work. It was a shame, and he didn’t like to do it, but business is business.

Mia snapped her fingers. “I remember how this one goes!”

“Great.” I was only too happy to push the paper over to her. I’ve always had a hard time figuring out what the moral of a story is supposed to be, and she was bound to know: She’d been to college.

Mia wrote.


One day a farmer came to the magician. “I’ve hesitated over this decision for many days, because my wife is very beautiful,” the farmer said. “Possibly the most beautiful woman in all the world. Still, I think you’d better make her ugly all the same. She frightens me; she frightens everyone who goes near her.”

“Frightens you?” the magician asked. “Frightens you how? And where is she?”

“She’s back at the farm.” The farmer shuffled his feet apologetically. “I tried to bring her with me, but she wouldn’t come.”

“Wouldn’t come?” The farmer was big and tall, at least twice the size of the magician. He must not have tried very hard to persuade his wife to travel with him.

“Somehow I couldn’t lay a hand on her,” the farmer said, unable to hide his anguish. “I moved to seize her arm, and found I’d seized my own arm. I snatched at her hair and ended up pulling my ear. And if you want to know how I got this black eye . . .”

The magician was interested. He’d met several stunning witches, but none of them had married farmers, and none of them practiced this particular kind of passive resistance. He agreed to accompany the farmer home.

Mia dropped the pen and nodded at me to continue. “You do remember how it goes, right? I mean . . . we’re not just . . . ?”

“Sure,” I said. “I mean—no. Sure I remember.”

I made my handwriting much smaller than usual, in case I was wrong.


The magician found the farmer’s wife kneeling, planting cassava, setting the cuttings up inside little hills of soil. There’s no use trying to describe her in detail; all that can really be said is that she had the kind of beauty that people write songs about and occasionally commit suicide over. The type who seems a very long way away even when she’s right there in your arms. She wiped her hands on her apron, looked up at him, and said: “Hello.”

As a test, he said to her: “Come, woman, be more beautiful.” (Her husband groaned at that.) But nothing happened. The farmer’s wife went on planting. The magician felt uneasy—was it really impossible for her beauty to be any greater? Could she really be first among women, hidden away here on this farm?—and so he told her, “Scarecrow, scarecrow,” in the strongest tones possible. The woman didn’t raise her eyes from the ground. Her hands continued to plant cassava, and she remained exactly the same. “Don’t disturb my life, magician,” she said. “Just leave me be.”

The magician took her chin in his hand and turned her face up to his, though her gaze and the feel of her skin made his flesh crawl. “Scarecrow, scarecrow,” the magician said again. The field itself heard him this time, and three scarecrows appeared at the perimeter. But the farmer’s wife didn’t change. She said: “All I’ve ever wanted is to make things grow, and to feed people. I’ve been doing that for some years now, and I’ve been happy. I don’t want anything more or less than what I already have. I beg you: Don’t disturb my life.”