The Merry Spinster: Tales of Everyday Horror(3)
At once the sea rushed over the deck, sweeping everyone before it. All around her there was a struggling of limbs and gasping for breath, and the girl felt rather sorry for complaining about the weight of a few oysters, now that she could see how thoroughly everyone around her suffered. “I won’t complain about them next time,” she promised herself.
Now and again she had to swim slightly out of her way to avoid the scattered side effects of the shipwreck. It became so dark she could imagine herself on the seafloor, but then a flash of lightning threw the scene into relief, and she glimpsed the prince sinking below the waves. She brightened at the thought that soon he would be down in her father’s country, where she might show him her garden and explain her philosophy of relative value and effective stewardship. After all, she thought, better for him to join us than for us to join him, if he is the only administrator his father has, as having one is scarcely better than having none at all. Then she remembered that humans could live only under the strictest of conditions, that their lungs were quite useless when wet, so that by the time he reached her father’s house he would be quite dead and unable to learn anything about her philosophies at all, much less help implement them. So he had better not drown.
She dove among the beams of the ruined ship, and found him drifting a few lengths below, tangled in a bit of sail. His eyes were closed, and he seemed not to take a bit of interest in the goings-on around him (for there was still a great deal of thrashing going on just under the waves). The girl, being fair-minded, was careful not to attribute this to indifference and so did not hold his lack of curiosity against him, but tucked him squarely under her left arm and made for shore, mindful that his head faced upward. It was a generally clumsy and inefficient form of travel, but like any good administrator, she never held anyone responsible for their natural limitations.
The prince remained similarly useless once they reached the shore, and since his head seemed determined to loll about on his neck, she was compelled to steady him with one hand on either side of his face. His eyes still did not open, but his mouth hung slack, so she closed it.
“You’re very quiet,” the girl told him. She frowned meditatively. “I don’t mind it. You may kiss me, if you like.” The prince said nothing at all to that, so she kissed his forehead, and pushed back his damp hair, and kissed him again. The prince’s assets—silence, introspection, slowness to judgment, pliability—all spoke of good breeding and more than compensated for his lack of seaworthiness. He also had, it seemed, the quality of Loveliness—Or, at least, the girl thought, is recognizably lovely to others of his own kind when he is awake, which was much the same thing.
Soon the morning had scrubbed both storm and ship clean from the horizon, and still the prince’s eyes did not open. She had never seen anyone who lived above water so placid before. It seemed eminently sensible, and so she decided to love him for it. She was delighted that she had been away from home less than a day and already she had found something useful to do.
Considering further delay unnecessary, the girl dove back into the sea and tucked herself just beneath the waves, so that she might not have to see him wake up. A little farther down the shore was a long, low building, and a number of people surged out of its doors onto the sand and busied themselves about the prince. One of them sank next to him and pressed his hand tenderly; he soon opened his eyes and sat up, and the activity on the beach consequently increased. When she saw the prince disappear behind the front doors of the building, the girl considered him unlikely to drown again, so she swam farther out into the waves, flipped over neatly, and made for home.
She had kissed him, and she had kept his lungs from getting wet; this made him hers according to the laws of most commonsensical people. It certainly made him more hers than anyone else’s, which meant there was a great deal to attend to before she was ready to challenge any front door’s claim on him.
Everyone at home made much of her return, and she let herself be fussed over with patient indifference.
“If human beings are not drowned,” said the girl to her grandmother once she had been thoroughly scrubbed and fêted, “can anything else kill them? Are they like sea grass, or like seals? Will the same one return again if I yank it up by the roots, or will it die?”
“Humans die,” said the grandmother, “and humans suffer too, for they lead short lives and when they are dead, no one eats them. They are stuffed in boxes and hidden in the dirt, or else set on fire and turned into cinders, so no one else can make any use of them; they are a prodigiously selfish race and consider themselves their own private property even in death.”
“The prince would never be so miserly as to deny himself to any fellow citizen, whether he is living or dead, I am sure,” the girl said, “for I could never love anyone who was not civic-minded, and I am very sure that I love him.”
“That’s all very good,” her grandmother said, “but if he is to make his home here, you must make him promise to let us eat him when he is dead, as you and I will be eaten.”
“I am sure that he can be persuaded,” the girl said. “He was very persuadable, when I fell in love with him. You know he is the only prince they have at all up there; he has no sisters or colleagues to share his burden or offer him advice. It is a singular place, and everyone seems quite determinedly alone, and I think he will be grateful to learn there are more reciprocal ways of living.”