Once Upon a Time: New Fairy Tales Paperback(99)

Why must you always al ow your heart to flap as if it does not belong to you but is possessed instead by the wind?”

I wanted to laugh, and laugh I do now, when I think of Lizzie’s

frustration over my displays of emotion. After all, we had been

arguing that day about how it had been she who had stirred my

emotions like a spoon of milk into a cup of tea. “How can you now

wish that I not be stirred after having stirred me?” I had asked, just before I heard the goblin voices. But Lizzie had only shaken her head with disgust and refused to answer.

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“What is it, Laura?” she asked again, with more concern this time, as I stood on the path by the river, entranced as if in a waking dream.

“Over there,” I said, lifting my chin in the direction of the goblin merchants as they set about their queer business. Now they had begun to play music, a bow on a fiddle, with a long reed pipe settled upon the lips of a rat-faced goblin, and as their notes weaved toward us, the other goblins began to dance, arm in arm, with sweat on their brows, circling one another, switching partners.

“They’re horrid,” said Lizzie. “Do not look at them, Laura. Come.

Let us be on our way.”

On our way. I looked at Lizzie, who stood half-turned to me, half-turned in the direction of home, and blinked. It was not our way.

It was her way. It had been her way for the entirety of the summer.

It had been her way since she first kissed me in late spring, when everything was in riotous flower. It was she who held me close in our bed and told me not to say a word of this to her father, for it would break his heart to know his daughter and his oldest friend’s child had been so twisted from what should have been a sisterly bond, as they had raised me in my parents’ stead these last few years since my mother and father had died from consumption. It had been Lizzie who said, “We must never tell anyone what we have done, and we

must stop ourselves from doing it ever again, Laura.”

“But why?” I asked. “It does not feel twisted, as you name it, Lizzie.

Is it not love we are feeling?”

“My father would not call it love,” said Lizzie. “And if your mother and father were still here instead of with the angels, they would not call it love either.”

“What do you call it?” I had whispered in the dark of our room, my hand resting near hers, my fingertips barely brushing her tender wrist.

But Lizzie would not answer. She simply turned her back to me, as

she did now on the path, turning to lead us the rest of the way home.

“No,” I whispered, and turned toward the music instead, turned

toward the goblins and the fruits they had assembled upon their

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tables under the trees in the glen. “This is my way,” I said, and stepped off the path to join them.

Behind me, Lizzie gasped. I could imagine her hand, too, delicately flying to cover her mouth as it did whenever she was shocked or

frightened. “Laura!” she said, but I continued on my way. At the edge of the brook, I took off my shoes, parted the reeds with my hands, and stepped down into the water. It was ever so cold, but on a day as hot as that one had been—both from the sun and from the strong words we’d exchanged—I welcomed the shiver.

The water rose no higher than my knees, and it took only nine

or ten strides before I had reached the other side and could release my dress, which I had bunched within my fists as I crossed over.

Immediately, as I came to stand on the other side of the brook, the goblin’s music came to an abrupt halt, and they all turned in unison to stare at me.

At first I worried they would not welcome my intrusion, so I

began to apologize profusely for interrupting, but even as I unrolled my pleas for forgiveness like a long scroll before their strange faces, the cat-whiskered goblin man lifted his palm and said, “My lady, no apologies! You are our first patron of the evening, and you are welcome to our party. Come, look at our fruits, so succulent, and so deliciously dripping with juices! You will not find such fruits sold in any town. Will you try a pear or an apple or a melon? Won’t you taste this peach?”

He produced a perfectly golden peach in his hand, and stretched

it across the space between us. At first, he had seemed to be standing too far away to reach me, but in the next moment he stood inches before me, the peach already lifted halfway to my mouth. I could