The Merry Spinster: Tales of Everyday Horror(5)
“You’ll need a great deal more skin than you’ve got now,” she added, “and you’ll be dried out all over, and you’ll get two limbs on the top half of you and two on the bottom and no more than that, and if you lose one, that’s the end of it. There’s no growing those back; no one up there abides by the blessed mandate of Radial Symmetry. Cut one of them in half—in either direction!—and they just fall apart stupidly, never to move again.”
“That will be novel,” the girl managed to say, although she looked more than a little pale at the prospect of losing Radial Symmetry, which she had been catechized in from her earliest memory.
Then the witch laughed so loud that she fell to the ground and wriggled about. “I will prepare a drink for you, with which you must swim to land tomorrow before sunrise, and sit on the shore and drink. All manner of things will happen to you: you’ll grow a hard plate of bone that will split the vaults inside your head; two soft cysts to force the air out of your chest; sprout studs of bone all in a line down your back; you will be mammalized, and it will hurt, and it will hurt until you are back here with all of us, in your own form again. But all who see you will consider you lovely, and you will be able to open your eyes wide against the sun. If you can bear this, then I can help you.”
“I can bear this,” the girl said. “Most likely,” she added, for she had never actually had to bear anything as yet and was only guessing.
“Well, I’ll give it you, then,” said the witch, “but you should be careful, because I don’t know much about the undoing of it, and once you’ve become human all over—instead of just partway, as you are now, and might I say, I like your present form much better—you might become particularized and believe you belong to yourself only, instead of in the normal way—you belonging to all of us and we all to you—and never return to the water, or your sisters, or your father’s house, or mine. And if you were to fail in winning the prince or his soul, if he were to join with another or hoard his own soul to himself, then you might die, and turn into nothing useful at all, and I should have wasted an afternoon, and gone hungry to boot.”
“Just the same,” the girl said, “I don’t think I’ll fail.”
“Another thing,” said the witch. “I can’t do voices. I mean that I can’t make you a new mouth that makes sounds. Not the kind they could understand, anyhow. I can make you a mouth that can suck in air and blow it back out again, and a mouth that can eat the right kind of food and swallow it, but I can’t make a mouth that can do all that and put a voice in it, too. So you won’t have one.”
It was a disappointment, but like any good administrator, the girl never held anyone responsible for their natural limitations. “No voice, then,” she agreed. “I’ll make up the difference somehow.” It was getting to be a great deal of trouble for a single prince, but there was a great deal to be said for doing something unprecedented.
At any rate, everything happened exactly as the witch said it would; the girl beached herself in the dark, drank from her little cup, experienced a fair bit of discomfort as her skeleton made itself known in new and distressing configurations, tested out her voice, found none, and assessed the situation, along with her assets (alive, conscious, in possession of a singleness of purpose, also in possession of eyelids) and disadvantages (unable to change color, one-way joints, a sudden and profound sense of isolation). Then the sun came up. The prince was there, which was remarkably convenient.
His eyes were so fixed upon her that she decided she must have uncommonly attractive legs, or else somehow the principle (if not the reality) of Radial Symmetry was visible in her new form. She found, somewhat to her surprise, that she was rather put off by his obvious approval, given how much trouble she had gone to just to split so much of herself apart. He had not, it had to be said, asked her to suffer this for him, and so could not strictly be blamed, but she found herself doing it just the same.
The prince asked her who she was and where she came from, and she looked at him with not a little disgust, that he did not know her. No point in suffering for someone who hasn’t asked you to do it, the witch had said, but please yourself; he won’t recognize what pain looks like on your face, that’s for certain. He evidently couldn’t recognize disgust, either, taking it for a softer emotion and guiding her inside a nearby building. She couldn’t help feeling, even in the midst of everything, a little thrill at the prospect of stepping through her first front door. She walked through it as easily as anything, although every step she took was as painful as promised.
As far as all that goes: the girl was not from the sort of people who took much interest in cataloguing various types of pain. Nor would she be interested in the sort of person who was, chiefly because knowing more about something one cannot change is not especially useful. So as far as the girl was concerned, things either hurt, or they didn’t, and you could either make them stop hurting, or you couldn’t. Walking hurt, and the sun boiled hot and furious over the horizon every morning, and the food she ate was bloodless and dry and made her stomach twist up, but she couldn’t help any of that, and that’s all there was to say about it.
At any rate, she couldn’t say anything about the pain, and so no one noticed, least of all the prince, who brought her home with him in a careless sort of way, and covered her in clothes and smiled at her and gestured broadly at a small stuffed sort of bed that was evidently meant for her use and not to be shared. He seemed to have a frenzy for clothes shared by all members of the administration; the girl could scarcely walk from one room to the next without being frantically presented with clothes by someone or other.