The Merry Spinster: Tales of Everyday Horror(24)

The Rabbit was very happy, to think of them all burned, although he was sorry to miss the disinfecting. He rather thought he would enjoy being disinfected, perhaps even as much as being Real.

Just then the nanny caught sight of him and popped him directly into the sack with old picture books and stiff-kneed toy soldiers and a lot of other rubbish, and carried them out to the end of the garden, where they were to be turned into a bonfire. The boy was not turned into a bonfire; the boy was wrapped up neatly and buried facedown in the dirt and, as he was no longer Real, the Rabbit promptly forgot him.

While the boy lay clench-fisted in the dirt, dreaming of whatever it is that not-Real things do, the little Rabbit lay among the old nursery clutter in the far corner of the garden, and he wriggled his head this way, and he wriggled his head that way, and bit by bit he was able to get his head through the opening and look out. Everything around him was going to be burned, all the boats, and the tin soldiers, and the little wheeled dogs on drawstrings, and the Rabbit only wished he could stay to see it.

But there were slick new pink muscles curling under his skin, and lungs unfolding at the end of his throat. He had a forest to visit, and two particular rabbits to see. He shook out his left leg, and that was Real. He shook out his right leg, and that was Real, too. He felt his warm heart beating inside his chest, as strong and as fast as a boy’s.





SIX

The Merry Spinster

A rich executive had three children; she had other things besides, but for the purposes of this story, we will not concern ourselves with the rest of her inventory. Being a woman of sense and careful husbandry, she kept them well, always with an eye on the return of her investments. The two younger children were fine-looking; the eldest had weak eyes. When she was little she was called “the little Beauty” in jest, but she did not seem to notice the insult and answered to the name. Now she would answer to nothing else. She had no sense of when she was being praised or slighted. Instead, she read books, which did her no good whatever. She was twenty-eight and mostly useless.

Her two younger siblings had an instinctive sense of their own value and knew how to enjoy themselves. They went out of the house almost every day to school, to make modest purchases out of their discretionary accounts, to visit friends, to attend parties, concerts, civic engagements, and so forth, and they made themselves happy. They also read books, but only when they wished to and not because they were without alternatives; they answered to their given names. They did not mind Beauty’s being mostly useless. They liked her anyway.

All at once, the executive lost most of her assets—her cash and cash equivalents, her securities and marketable investments—along with most of her inventory. She lost almost everything except for a vacation home she used as a rental property some distance from the city, and so turned out the tenants, who had not thoroughly reviewed their lease before signing, in an owner-move-in eviction.

Beauty was, perhaps surprisingly, more galled at the loss of the family fortune than her younger siblings, who had inarguably made more and better use of it. They, for their part, were concerned primarily with the happiness that money had bought them, and people who are determined to be happy can be happy anywhere. But Beauty had always found that the scarcer she made herself, the less life troubled her, so she began to get up at four in the morning to clean out the front rooms and get breakfast ready for the family. No one remarked on it, and so gradually she ceased to think of it as work and began to think of it as part of her nature. After she had done her work, she read, and continued to profit as little by it as she ever had. She still answered only to Beauty; in fact, she insisted upon it long after her siblings had found it necessary to continue making the same joke at her expense.

“You are determined to drudge,” her brother, Sylvia, said one evening as she insisted on washing his coffee cup for him by hand. The family was all sitting in the same room they had eaten dinner in, and by this time, they had almost grown used to the practice. “We have a dishwasher,” he went on, “and I know you know how to use it as well as anybody.”

“Let her alone,” Catherine said without looking up from the newspaper. “Beauty is determined not to thrive, and if you take the coffee cups from her, she might murder us all in our beds, just to have something to tidy up.”

“I like to do it,” Beauty said. “To clean the cups, I mean, not the bit about murdering you in your beds.”

“What a tedious line that’s becoming,” their mother said. “I wish you would come up with something new to lie about, dearest. But you can take my coffee cup too, just the same, if it’s important to you.”

They continued more or less in the same vein for a year, when their mother, who had been cutting down on expenses by working remotely and hazarding her freelance earnings in speculation, learned that several of her recent investments had paid off handsomely and that the family could expect to reacquaint itself with money. Beauty’s younger siblings nearly lost their minds with excitement as their mother prepared to visit her offices in the city once again.

“You will spit in the faces of all our old friends who turned their backs on us when we became poor, I hope, or else I will do something shocking and disgrace you,” Sylvia said.

“We were never poor; we have a dishwasher,” their mother remarked mildly. “And no one turned their backs on us. You’ve had five weekend guests in the last two months alone.”