The Merry Spinster: Tales of Everyday Horror(42)

But as he had not taken the children, I left him his right hand and the right eye in his head. The rest I threw into the sea. All the while he said nothing, only groaned, while his wife bled and glared beside him. When it was finished, he turned his face from me, and rested his head on his good arm, and seemed to fall back asleep.

Then I shoved the boat with my foot and watched it float out across the water for a long time. After a while I could no longer see the woman’s face, although I have no doubt it was still turned toward me. She watched me, I think, for as long as she could. She may have tried to speak her own bible back at me, or she may have only gurgled. I don’t know. I did not hear her again. Eventually the sun came up. I took my fire iron and I went home to raise up those six children. My son Johnnie was very beautiful, and I loved him.





TEN

The Frog’s Princess

In an old time, in an old country, there lived a man whose daughters were all beautiful and unlucky. To be beautiful in this place was to be noticed; it was for this reason his daughters were so remarkably unlucky. Here people prayed to be forgotten, and they prayed with their faces to the floor.

It was the man’s youngest daughter who was the unluckiest of all. He was so beautiful that the sun herself noticed and had in fact fallen quite in love with him, and never let her rays stray from his face for even a moment while she hung above the rim of the world. So the youngest daughter slept with his face jammed into a pillow, and with coverlets piled over his head, but the sun would not let him sleep unnoticed. Every day she found him, and every day she woke him while everyone else was still asleep. Beauty is never private.

“Beauty does not belong exclusively to you,” the man told his daughters. “Beauty is a public good, and you are responsible for it.”

“What does that mean, exactly?” the youngest daughter asked. The sun burned hot on his forehead.

“It means—in a sense—that according to a certain understanding you belong to everyone,” the man said. (The man himself was not beautiful, but he was often covered in beautiful objects, which he considered to amount, more or less, to the same thing.)

“By that reasoning,” his daughter said, “I belong at least partly to myself. Certainly at least as much as I belong to anybody else.”

“Don’t be clever,” his father said. “Go and play outside, where people can see you.”

In this country, a daughter was least safe at the age when they wished to play while other people wished to notice them. When people wanted to notice him, the man’s youngest daughter had learned, nothing could talk them out of it. They noticed, then they offered remark, and then they acted, always in that order.

The land near the man’s house was very old and thickly wooded. In this forest, beneath a linden tree, there was a well full of standing water. In the heat of the day, when the sun’s attentions became unbearable, the man’s youngest daughter would run across the highway and into the woods, where the trees stood so close together that almost no light reached the ground.

(Obviously some light did reach the ground. Otherwise how else could a well have possibly been built there? It had by this time been abandoned, but in order for a well to be abandoned, it must first have been built. There had once been enough light in the woods to make a well feasible there, and enough light now for a brackish layer of organic material to have wrapped long gray-green fingers around it. Enough light too, for the layer to spread itself over old tree throws and root pits, given sufficient time. So let us say there was light sufficient for our present purposes.)

So that was where the youngest daughter went, generally, when he did not feel disposed to belong to anyone, and he would sit at the edge of the well in a spot where the brackish layer had not yet thrown down roots. He would take with him a golden ball, as round and as yellow as the sun. He would throw it straight up in the air, then catch it when it came down; he never threw it in any other direction. In this way, he might throw and catch and fling away the sun as easily as he liked. It was his favorite pastime, and he never tired of it.

On this day, it happened that he threw the golden ball so high into the branches overhead that it disappeared into the spreading darkness, only to drop suddenly far to the left of him and vanish with a smothering sound into the well. He leaned over the edge and looked down, but the water was so dark, and the well so deep, that he could not see the slightest sign that anything had ever been there but scum and mosquitoes. If anyone had tried to console him in that moment, he would have sunk down onto the stone and refused them, but no one did, so he continued to lean over the well, looking down.

(You may be wondering why he did not try to fish the ball out of the well himself; you are only wondering this because you have not seen the well with your own eyes. The well’s only redeeming feature was its solitude. The water within had not run for years and smelled like old coins.)

Also, he was not stupid, and knew better than to dive into water he didn’t know how deep, when there was only one way in or out. Eventually, however, someone came along and noticed his crying (as someone generally did), and called out to him (as someone generally did after noticing him): “What is the matter with you? Yours is a face too beautiful for tears.” Which was patently untrue, but people said it just the same. He looked around to find the voice and saw that a frog had thrust its flat, wet head out of the well. The frog looked like a calf’s heart with a mouth slit across it.