Once Upon a Time: New Fairy Tales Paperback(104)

cows. No more did I join Lizzie and her mother to knead cakes of

wheat, no more did I gather honey. Instead, I sat in the nook by the chimney and nursed my sorrow. And never did I fetch water from the brook, for going there reminded me too much of what I could no longer see, hear, touch, taste.

“Poor Laura,” Lizzie said one day in late spring, while I was at my worst. I had stopped eating, because no food set before me tasted of life, and even when I tried to eat for the sake of Lizzie and her parents, I could not take more than two bites before my stomach turned and revolted. “Poor Laura,” said Lizzie, coming to sit beside me. She lifted my cold hand from my lap and held it between her burning palms. “I cannot stand to see you suffering like this, sister. Tonight I will put a penny in my purse and go to the goblin merchants for you.”

I was too feeble in mind and in body to say anything to stop her,

and could only watch as she slid the coin into her purse and went on her daily mission to fetch water from the brook.

What occurred down there, in the glen near the flowing water,

beneath the newly leafed trees and the shadows they cast upon

the ground beneath them, I could only imagine from my own

experiences. But Lizzie was a smart girl, and always prepared to get what she wanted without giving herself over in return. So later, when she returned at moonrise, and spilled into our room, slathered in the juice of goblin fruit from top to bottom, I could not believe the words she sang out to me.

“Laura, oh Laura, did you miss me? Come and kiss me. Never

mind my bruises, hug me, kiss me, suck my juices, squeezed from

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goblin fruits for you. But I did not let them touch me, only you. Only you. Come, Laura. Eat me, drink me, love me. Make much of me. For you I have braved the glen and had to do with goblin merchant men.”

With a start I leaped from my chair, already concerned that Lizzie had tasted fruit that would destroy her. I clutched at her, and kissed her, and held her to me, as we once did with great passion. Tears sprang from my eyes, burning as they fell from me. And as the

juice from the goblin fruit smeared upon my sister’s body filled my mouth, I felt my youth and vigor being restored to me, and tore at my robe, and then at Lizzie’s, and we tumbled toward our bed like two awkward dancers, parting the curtains as we fell onto the pillows, and then began to touch each other as we were meant to.

Life out of death. That long night, after we had made love as we

used to, I slept with the peace I once knew in life. The shades of gray that had colored me for months began to fade, and in the morning when I awoke, it was as if from a nightmare that I returned to the world, where color and scent and the feeling of Lizzie’s skin as I stroked her bare, cream-colored shoulder had returned as well.

When Lizzie rose from sleep as my touch lingered, she yawned,

then smiled, and quickly slipped out of bed to dress herself. “Honey, then butter, then the chickens, then the house,” she murmured, grinning to herself as she sat in a chair and laced her bodice.

“And after the house,” I said, sitting up on one elbow, “the brook.

And after the brook, here again, beneath these curtains, where I wish we could stay forever.”

Lizzie’s grin turned sour the moment I said those words, though.

She lifted her face to me and said, “Laura, it was for you that I did that. It was to save you. But it cannot be more. It cannot be what you are thinking. It cannot go on like that between us forever. I will be married one day. I will have children. So, too, will you, if you know what’s best for you. But clearly you do not, or we would never have found ourselves in this predicament to begin with.”

And at that she rose from her chair and left me there, alone.

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It was like a curse she threw upon me with those last statements, for as the days and months began to grind beneath my feet, it all came to be true. Lizzie married a young man from a farm just down the

way, past the glen; and some time later, after I fully realized we would not be together as I wished, I married too. He was a sweet man, a blacksmith with a sharp black beard and kind blue eyes, and with

him I had two children, a boy and a girl to match Lizzie’s pair. He was not long for this world, though. A spark flew up one day and blinded him in one eye, and soon the skin there turned an awful red, and then began to fester. The doctor said there was nothing to be done but to help ease him out of this world with the least amount of pain possible, which we did.