DESPITE ITS HEFT, THIS COLLECTION IS A TINY HALL OF MIRRORS IN the world’s giant house of fairy tales. Fairy tales comprise thousands of stories written by thousands of writers over hundreds of years. A volume published in the mid-twentieth century that purported to catalog every type of folktale in existence had more than twenty-five hundred entries; since then, countless new stories have joyously entered the world via new translations, folkloric research, and artists working in a multitude of forms.

Readers love fairy tales. Even the most virulent critics of fairy tales can’t look away. With their false brides, severed limbs, and talking donkeys, they are hypnotic. “All great novels are great fairy tales,” wrote Nabokov. I would argue that all great narratives are great fairy tales. whatever their shape (novel, novella, short story, poem).

About fifteen years ago, when I began to acquaint myself with the scholarship surrounding fairy tales in order to think about my own body of work within the tradition, I became aware of a fairy-tale resurgence. Soon after that I edited my first collection, Mirror, Mirror on the Wall — essays by women writers about the influence of fairy tales on their work. I also embarked on a trilogy of novels about the influence of fairy-tale books on three sisters. And now I am thrilled to see an even more widespread infatuation with wonder stories — in popular book series like J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter, Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials, and Gregory Maguire’s Oz books; in stand-alone novels such as Donna Tartt’s The Little Friend and A. S. Byatt’s The Children’s Book; on television, whether obviously, as in any number of vampire shows, or quietly, as in the shape and surreal motifs of Six Feet Under; and in film, where Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Alice in Wonderland are but two examples. Magic is in the air.

WE’RE HERE. WE BRAVED THE CROWDS AND BUCKED THE TRENDS AND overcame the obstacles (we located correct change for the crosstown bus) and we made it on time.

No need to try to smuggle a split of champagne past the usher. We won’t need it. We have in our hands only mezzanine-seat tickets to an everyday hullabaloo. No red carpet. This isn’t going to be featured on Entertainment Tonight. It’s not a once-in-a-lifetime event. The domestic fairy tale, never having indulged in a farewell tour, is in no need of a comeback.

Why, then, are our hearts racing?

The excited murmur from the foyer, the boxes, the stalls, the orchestra seats, is contagious. The fairy tale is about to break upon us, once and still and again. We know what we’re in for and, of course, we also don’t, for fairy tale has more than one method by which to cast a spell. Attending, we’ll have to attend. Tolkien, that philologist turned bard and pantocratur of Middle-earth, called it faërie, that which “holds the seas, the sun, the moon, the sky, the earth, and all things that are in it: tree and bird, water and stone, wine and bread, and ourselves, mortal men, when we are enchanted.”

Indeed, with Tolkien’s press release promising so much, we might as well know this place as the Globe Theatre, the way Shakespeare did.

And that’s why we’ve rushed to get here in time for the curtain. We’re anticipating an apparition of faërie promised, herein, as a series of episodes, all alike, all different. Whether they seem archaic or postmodern, conventional or avant-garde, whether their enchantments are apparent or invisible, in some ways they will all cavort without drawing attention to the sleight of faërie itself, which is a conjuring act that relies at once upon theatrical smoke-and-mirrors and upon deep magic.

We hold, in these initial pages, something of a program, one that contains no advertisements, no hint of coming attractions. Makes no suggestion for where to dine afterward. We’re on our own. But, riffling through, from back to front, with curiosity, impatience, perhaps a sense of entitlement — we’re not children here — what might we have come to expect?

In traditional tales the dramatis personae hail from central casting. We’ve a few moments; let’s steal backstage. Let’s open the door to the green room and peek to see who is waiting. A bevy of beauties, each more fetching, more modest, more loyal, more lovely than the next (no matter from which point you begin scanning the room). A gossiping group of grand dames, as kindly as godmothers or as corrupt as witches, or both by turns. Hags and harridans, huntsmen and hunchbacks. Kings and kings and kings, a congress of kings. Also, a sample of simpletons.

That’s not all. An evanescence of sprites and pixies and guardian angels, in shimmering gossamer threads. An abundance of adversaries (in ascending order) from dwarves to giants. A passel of princes, mostly charming, occasionally brave and clever besides. Some equally stout-hearted steeds nickering nearby; and cats watching with moon-phase eyes; and the bear who can speak and won’t is curled up next to the bear who can’t speak and will. The cock of the roost, the lark of the morn, the owl who issues the midnight summons, and the goose that lays the golden eggs. (This goose may be Mother Goose herself, fixing her eye on the proceedings, but she keeps her own counsel, delivering her elementary bounty but not her vital statistics.)

As for the setting, take a look at the interchangeable flats, the painted scrims, the wing-and-drop sets hoisted in darkness above. Most likely the settings are modest and indefinite — the garden, the kitchen; the castle, the hovel; the sea, the cave; the market, the meadow; the well, the woods; the prison tower, the island sanctuary. That’s a lot of world to be stacked backstage. But “To make a Prairie it takes / One Clover and one Bee / One Clover, and a Bee / And Reverie. / The Reverie alone will do / If bees are few—” as Emily Dickinson reminds us. To recognize a fairy-tale castle, we need little more than a Styrofoam throne. A woods is conjured by a single branch suspended on transparent Mylar fishing line. A cottage is conjured up by anyone onstage who utters the word cottage. Almost every spell begins with the conjure: “Now listen. ”

Props? Already on the ready. The slipper, the spindle, the seashell, the sword. The coach, the comb, the cauldron, the cape. The apple, the bread, and the porridge. And look, even simpler things in the dusty shadows, from earlier iterations of these tales. The feather, the stone, the bucket of water; the knife, the bone, the bucket of blood.

We’ve still time. Glance into the conservatory adjacent the backstage area where techies and roustabouts prepare for the special effects to make the young believe, for nothing is more magical than what is truly alive: potted roses, potted thorny brambles, potted beanstalks. A silver nutmeg and a golden pear, and a talking nightingale in a cage, and a coppery talking carp in a bowl like a bubble. Is that a real or a costumed dragon? In any case he gives no autographs.

We haven’t time to visit the costumier. A dash past the open door: the crown, the broom, the magic wand, the fur tippets, the toga, the shield, the cloak of many colors, the cloak of invisibility, the cloak of respectability. a hundred thousand cloaks on hangers stretching back like a forest we can almost remember. but we haven’t time; on we dash.

Now back to the hall, and not a moment too soon. Now listen! The orchestra pit is bustling, practicing the traditional clarion call of invocation (once upon a time!) and the flourish of finale, nearly always in a major key (happily ever after!). But if Northrop Frye has taught us to read literature as a seasonal progression — spring comedy, summer romance, autumnal tragedy, and winter satire or irony — once again the fairy tale eludes classification, for it can be all of these at once, and more besides. Midrash, parable, griot’s begats; pourquoi, koan, and cautionary fable.

And between these time-honored flourishes of salve and farewell, we’ll hear the many sounds of a story’s spell. The royal procession: a trumpet voluntary. The afternoon of a faun: a flute masquerading as panpipes. The score may include a glockenspiel-and-sitar cacophony or a maddened piccolo tarantella. It may feature the clicking of bamboo rods and harp glissades to suggest transformations, recipes, revelations. The kettledrum for war. The rattle of aluminum sheeting for jeremiad and storm. The cello for lament.

The woodwinds cover everything else — the oboe for the duck, the clarinet for the cat, as we remember. And always die Zauberflöte for the sound of magic. The flute for the mechanical nightingale; the flute for a change in the winds; the flute for the riddle, the rhyme, and the moral.

What moral? What is all this for? The moral, about which we may argue long after we go home — we may argue for centuries — is sometimes a couplet, stapled upon the end like a gospel amen, and sometimes a secret, coiled and arbitrary and encoded within the syllables of the script, the syllables of what is said and left unsaid. Useful to remember what Erik Christian Haugaard, translator from the Danish of the tales of Hans Christian Andersen, suggested: “The fairy tale belongs to the poor. I know of no fairy tale which upholds the tyrant, or takes the part of the strong against the weak. A fascist fairy tale is an absurdity.”

We’ll have to take that on faith until we experience what follows, so hush, settle your coats under your seats. They are tuning up the magic. It’s almost time.

But what time is this? What is the time of the tale? Our program is cunning and obscure on the matter. Jane Langton, writer of evanescent and everyday fantasies for children, holds that the tale takes place sometime between the fall of Constantinople and the invention of the internal combustion engine. Accurate enough, or perhaps I mean vague enough; but the tale itself is a trickster and doesn’t hesitate to lie. It is anachronistic with a vengeance. It emerges always and everywhere, overt or disguised, pureblood or hybrid, and healthy as sin.

Indeed — I’m gabbling now, in a whisper, for the houselights are dimming — the time of the tale, nearly upon us, is perhaps its greatest mystery. For, if anything else about it is dubious or nonessential, faërie’s agency stems from its capacity to be mysteriously non sequitur. It is equally at home when it struts as ancient myth as when it postures as Pre-Raphaelite faux medieval chanson or capers as nonsense nursery rhyme. We recognize faërie from a long time ago in a galaxy far away. We recognize faërie vitally alert on the island of Ariel and Caliban and the magician Prospero. We know faërie even when it goes viral, as we encounter it in Hollywood’s Cindergirl of the hour, caught this very moment on today’s blogs and tabloids. But put away that cell phone and stop Googling her. We’re attending deeper mysteries than Hollywood generally knows how to handle.

For, in faërie, how far are we, really, from the darkness brooding over the water and from the spirit of the Almighty breathed into the clay? How far from mistletoe and blood sacrifice, from the ancient transactions of scapegoating and ransom? How far from the flame-winged angel in a hundred biblical dreams, how far from Marley in chains or the phantom on the ramparts of Elsinore? How far from the savanna where the leopard got his spots or from the night sky of the frozen north, east of the sun and west of the moon, featuring the spangled celestial figures of myth? Faërie is born of the oldest question of our individual lives and of our species: why?

In faërie, how far are we from the golem? the reindeer on the roof? the lilies on the altar? the incense rising to the oculus? How far from the salt thrown over the shoulder, the blessing that follows the sneeze? How far from the presentation of our newborn to the village of life, how far from the presentation of our corpse to the necropolis of the lost? We cannot stop wondering why, and so faërie is nearer than we know.

Faëirie is origin and eschatology, writ cunning and runic. It speaks to darknesses on both sides of the glare of life, that glare brighter than spotlights.

We recognize it still — as adults — because our capacity to appreciate it was honed not only in the childhood of the race but in our own early years.

The stage before us will be shallow, its width limited. But how far from the raison d’être of faërie lies that other infinity of magic, the unmoored tale for children? How many miles to Babylon? How far to the lamppost in the snowy wood, the hole in the ground in which there lived a hobbit, the academies for wizards and witches? How far to the nanny goddess with the parrot-head umbrella, to the white rabbit in its Wonderland, to the tin woodsman on its own yellow road, to the boy clad in oak leaves who won’t grow up?

How far from faërie to the wild wood, the greenwood, the Hundred Acre Wood; to the riverbank perfect for messing about in boats and to the Flood with its floating menagerie; to Mary Lennox’s secret garden and to the Kensington Gardens, to Primrose Hill echoing with the twilight barking, to the Parisian ascenseur at the old Samaritaine hoisting a green-suited elephant and an Old Lady, to the articulate and articulated spiderweb in the sunlit rural doorway? Every domesticated stuffed bear or bunny fallen beneath your child’s bed is related not only to Piglet and the Velveteen Rabbit but to the animals coiled in marginalia in medieval psalters, and to the animals at the manger memorialized in colored glass and in song, and the animals painted in black and blood on the walls of the ancient caves of the Pyrenees.

Turn off your cell phones, now. Sit back. Sit up. Pay attention or pay none. What will happen happens whether you pay heed or not, but what happens is sometimes called eucatastrophe — Tolkien again — or consolation. “The consolation of the imaginary is not imaginary consolation,” says Roger Scruton, the British philosopher with whom I disagree on many other matters, but not this — but enough of my quoting. The velvet curtains part, side to side, like a parent playing peekaboo.

Luminaires panning, tilting, candlepower intensifying. Color gels shifting: the red of riding hoods, the Turkish blue chalcedony of Ottoman beards, the Lincoln green of Sherwood Forest, the silver of that apple of the sun, the golden of that apple of the moon. Is that Hans Christian Andersen’s face projected on the scrim, with a saying in Danish scribbled in his own hand below? “Life itself is the most Wonderful of Fairy Tales.”

Maybe we should have brought that bubbly; but there’s something being served here more deeply inebriating than champagne. Hush.

The scrim rises into the fly space. An ancient skeleton approaches in a cloak of evergreen. Lean forward to hear what it says. “Now listen…” What will we make of it this time? What will it make of us?

BABA IAGA HAD A DAUGHTER, A PELICAN CHILD. THIS DID NOT PLEASE her particularly. The pelican child was stunningly strange and beautiful as well as being very very good, which pleased Baba Iaga even less. It was difficult to live as a pelican in the deep dark woods, but the pelican child never seemed to think she belonged to any place other than here with her bony, ill-tempered Baba and the cat and the dog. They all lived in a little hut on chicken legs and they were not uncomfortable. Baba Iaga did not care for visitors, so when anyone approached, the chicken legs would move in a circle, turning the house so that the visitor could not find the door. This, too, was acceptable to them all.

When Baba Iaga went away — which she did frequently though she always always returned — she would warn the dog and cat and her beautiful pelican child against allowing strangers into the house. Even if they do not appear as strangers, don’t let them in, Baba Iaga said. And she would go off on her strange errands in her iron mortar, which she would row through the heavens with a pestle. Often she would return with little fishes which the pelican and the cat relished and the dog did not. The dog had his own cache of food which he consumed judiciously — never too much and never too fast — though he did not hoard it. He was generous and noble to a fault really, though he was shabby and ferocious-looking.

One afternoon when Baba Iaga was away, a tall, somewhat formally attired man approached the house. The chicken legs immediately went into rotation so that the door could not be found. (Really, the legs looked as if they weren’t even awake, but in fact they never slept.)

I have heard there is a beautiful bird here, the man shouted out, and I would like to draw her. He waved a sketchbook in the air. I’ll make her immortal, he called. The pelican child and the dog and the cat remained sitting quietly in a circle on the floor where they had been playing dominoes. The man remained outside until darkness fell, occasionally calling out to them that he was an artist and very highly regarded. Then he went away. The cat turned on the lamp and they waited for Baba Iaga to return. There were two lamps in the hut, one that illuminated only what they knew already and another one which Baba Iaga kept locked in a closet that illuminated what they did not know.

Baba Iaga returned and said, I smell something outside. It smells like cruel death. Who has been here? And they described the man and what he had said. If he returns, under no circumstances let him in, Baba Iaga said. The next day she went off once again in her mortar and pestle. On foggy days one could see the faintest trail of her passage through the sky, so she brought her broom along to sweep away any trace of herself. Baba Iaga was usually very careful, though sometimes she was not.

The pelican child and the dog and the cat sat in a circle on the floor with their coloring books. The pelican child’s favorite color was blue, the cat’s black, and the dog pretty much preferred them all, he said. They felt the little house moving and their crayons slid across the floor. Once again the man had appeared and the chicken legs had prevented him from finding the door. He shouted up to them as before, proclaiming his devotion to the pelican child’s strangeness and beauty and promising to make her immortal. My name is synonymous with beautiful birds, he said, waving his portfolio at the windows.

What is synonymous, the dog whispered. He had no idea what it meant and he never would.

Just then the entire forest commenced to rattle, for Baba Iaga had returned and was rushing toward the distinguished gentleman on her bony legs, ready to thrash him with her pestle. Wait, wait, he cried. I only want to create your daughter’s portrait. You cannot keep such a splendid creature locked up here. As a mother you should want her to be appreciated. Others should be allowed to marvel at her. Come, look at the drawings I have made of her avian brothers and sisters.

And Baba Iaga, allowing curiosity to get the better of her and also because she did feel somewhat guilty raising her beautiful daughter in the dark woods, agreed to look at the drawings.

They were beautiful.

Herons and ibis and egrets and roseate spoonbills and storks feeding or flying or resting in their nests with their young or gliding above water that sparkled, so great was the gentleman’s skill, sunlight pouring through their perfect wings.

Let us retire to your home and lay these pictures on the floor inside so you can study them and they won’t be blown about by the wind, he said.

Indeed, a violent wind had come up as though it were trying to tell Baba Iaga something but she ignored it.

So the chicken legs obediently swung the hut around and Baba Iaga and the gentleman, whose name was John James Audubon, entered.

Well, put out some tea and biscuits for our guest, Baba Iaga snapped at the cat, but the cat said, We have no tea or biscuits. The dog growled, but Baba Iaga said to Audubon, Oh, pay no attention to him. This deeply hurt the dog’s feelings.

It’s quite dim in here, Audubon remarked. Would you have another lamp so that we can see the drawings better? I so want you to approve of them so you will allow me to draw your beautiful daughter.

I do have another lamp, Baba Iaga said gladly.

And please, grandmother, he said, could you be so kind as to lock the dog and cat away? The dog does frighten me a bit and I’m allergic to cats.

Baba Iaga put the dog and the cat in the closet and followed them in, looking for the other lamp. Oh, wouldn’t you know, she muttered, I put it on the highest, most-difficult-to-reach shelf. Audubon slammed the door shut and bolted it. Baba Iaga and the dog and the cat were so stunned that for a moment they were completely speechless. Then they heard their beautiful pelican child say, Oh please sir, do not take me from this bright world! and then a sharp crack as though from a pistol, then terrible sounds of pain and surprise, and then nothing. The dog began to howl and the cat to hiss. Baba Iaga beat on the door with her bony hands and feet, which were sharp as a horse’s hooves but the door was old and strong, the wood practically petrified, and they could not break through it. But the dog flung himself against the door again and again and worried a sliver loose with his teeth and claws, and then another sliver. He did not know how long he tore at the door. He had no conception of time. It seemed only yesterday he was a puppy hanging onto Baba Iaga’s sock as she limped across the room, or pouncing at moths, or grinning with joy when he was allowed (before he got too big) to accompany Baba Iaga on her flights across the sky. It seemed only yesterday that his fur was soft and black, his paws so pink and tender, his teeth so white, or it seemed as though it could be tomorrow.

Finally, he had made a hole in the door just large enough for him to crawl through. What met his eyes was a scene so horrific he could not understand it. He began to tremble and howl. The beautiful pelican child was pierced through with cruel rods and was arranged in a position of life, her great wings extended, her elegant neck arched. But her life had been taken away, and her eyes were fathomless and dark. A specimen, the cat screamed behind him. He has made of our sister a specimen! And then he felt the tears of Baba Iaga striking him like hail.

He left. Outside he ran and ran through the forest. He could see the man running, too, clutching his wretched papers and pens. Often the dog stumbled and twice he fell, for his hips had been bad for some time and his poor old heart now pounded with sorrow. At last he gave up the pursuit for the evil one had far outdistanced him. After he rested and caught his breath, he smelled the dreadful scent of cruel death. Audubon’s abandoned campsite was nearby and a fire of green branches still smoldered. Many were the trees that had been cut down, and on their stumps were colorful woodland birds, thrushes and larks and woodpeckers and tiny iridescent and colorfully patterned ones whose names the dog did not know. Long nails thrust through their small bodies kept them erect and thread and wire held their heads up and kept their wings aloft. Even more horrifying was the sight of birds dismembered, their pinions and claws severed for study. Whimpering, the dog fled, and after he had gone a short distance or a long distance, after a long time or a short time, he came to the little hut on chicken legs. The legs were weeping and Baba Iaga and the cat were weeping. Baba Iaga had enfolded her daughter in her arms and her tears fell without ceasing on the pelican child’s brown breast.

In the morning, the cat said, We must do something.

I will go out again and find him and tear him to pieces, the dog said wearily.

I don’t give a rat’s ass about Audubon, the cat said. We must bring our beautiful pelican sister back.

Perhaps we should call for Prince Ivan, the dog suggested.

Useless, Baba Iaga said. He has his princess and his castle. He never calls, he never writes, he is of no use to us.

We will put the beautiful pelican child in the oven, the cat announced.

I couldn’t bear to put my daughter in the cold cold oven, Baba Iaga said.

Who said anything about cold, the cat said. We will preheat it to oh say, two hundred fifty degrees and we will put her in for only half an hour.

Half an hour? the dog said.

That stove hasn’t been used in years, Baba Iaga said.

But they did what the cat suggested for what else could they do?

Carefully, they lay the pelican child in the oven which was no longer cold but not too warm either. Oh her beautiful face, Baba Iaga cried, her beautiful bill, take care with her bill.

Then they waited.

Has it been a half an hour yet? the dog asked.

Not yet, the cat said.

At last the cat announced that it had been half an hour and Baba Iaga opened the oven and the pelican child, as beautiful as she had ever been, tumbled out and tottered into their happy arms, alive.

After this, Baba Iaga continued to fly through the skies in her mortar, navigating with her pestle. But instead of a broom, she carried the lamp that illuminated the things people did not know or were reluctant or refused to understand. And she would lower the lamp over a person and they would see how extraordinary were the birds and beasts of the world, and that they should be valued for their bright and beautiful and mysterious selves and not willfully harmed for they were more precious than castles or the golden rocks dug out from the earth.

But she could reach only a few people each day with the lamp.

Once, seven experienced its light but usually it was far less. It would take thousands of years, tens of thousands of years perhaps, to reach all human beings with the light.

Baba Iaga came home one evening — so tired — and she gathered her little family around her, the pelican child and the dog and the cat and said, My dear ones, I still have magic and power unrealized. Do you wish to become human beings, for some think you are under a hellish spell. Do you want to become human? The cat and the dog spoke. The pelican child had not spoken since the day of her return.

No, the dog and the cat said.

YOU MEET FOLKS WHO REMEMBER WHEN THIS COUNTRY STILL HAD A winter, and one year led into another unhindered. Come the first snow, men would leave the fields for fallow, to chop firewood in the forest. Then not more than a day would go by before you’d hear that one of them had seen her.

She wasn’t somebody any of them knew, at least not personally, by way of an affair or a mutual acquaintance. But long before, they’d made up a name to use when talking to one another, as men will, about a girl. They called her Ardour.

The story was ever the same. Resting alone in a clearing, burning a small flame for warmth, a peasant would sense at first just a breath within the dead trees’ shadows. Then he’d see the sky-gray of two eyes, watching. That was what she was always doing, the girl they called Ardour, and, calling out to her, they’d each compete to draw her closer than any of the others had done. Yet there was a certain distance that she’d always keep.

It was not, evidently, a matter of modesty: Over her bare skin she wore at most a coat of snow, often only a gloss of frost. Nor could she seriously be considered a flirt: Unlike young women in town who hid their flaws by making potential suitors notice only each other’s faults, Ardour had no perceptible imperfection. From behind their fire, they’d call to her, and it was as if she simply wasn’t sure how to respond.

Could she have known their ulterior motives? Each year echoed the one before. As she woke into the first snow, she recalled not what had happened the previous winter, but remembered only an urge that had yet gone unfulfilled.

It had begun as something she’d seen, who knew when, deep in the woods where she’d lived all eternity: A girl like her — breasts as steep as snow peaks beneath a blizzard of hair — came hand-in-hand with a man into an open meadow, where they embraced, and, it seemed, drew into a single skin. Then there were his words, her tears. A rupture, a quiver. They cradled, as if each were the other’s wound.

Had Ardour known the word, perhaps she’d have called it love. As likely, had she known hate, that term would have occurred to her as she watched the couple wrangle. She hadn’t had language to guide her. So she’d clutched her own numb flesh, and dreamed what it would be to—

To feel? To desire? How? Who can be lonely, even, if never not alone? After that, each year, under cover of winter, she hovered on the verge of humanity. And men urged her over the threshold.

They beseeched her all season long until at last she came too close to fire. As the frost thawed from her, she melted with it, into clear water. Then the cold brace of winter would follow her, flowing down-river through closed forest into the unknown. Beneath the snow would emerge a new spring. Work would begin again, the cycle of sowing and reaping that consumed everybody most of the year. There was so much to be done, to bring bread to the table. The only able peasant permitted by the king to remain idle was the man who had tempted Ardour from her forest cover. That was the reward for ending winter.

Every year men worked harder to lure Ardour to her fate. They sang to her, played the fiddle or the flute. If once they’d been attracted to her, after a while you no longer heard them at the tavern talking lustily about her blizzard of hair, those breasts as steep as snow peaks. Each man thought only of himself.

Yet, the more trouble they took, the less their efforts worked to draw her near. The king watched as his subjects flattered and bribed Ardour, tended to her more unctuously than to his majesty. The winter, previously a period of rest, was more trying than a season of sowing, and what did it reap? For all but the man who ushered Ardour’s departure, another nine months of labor.

The wintertime clamor became almost intolerable, each man playing whatever instrument he knew, dancing, tendering bread, mead, gold. Ardour could scarcely choose which way to look, let alone who to let tempt her. One year she was drawn to the peasant who had the loudest horn, which she mistook — simple soul — for the force of his desire. Another winter, she went for the one who danced most gracefully, which she misunderstood — foolish girl — as a measure of his sensitivity. And then came the season that she fell for the man with the greatest goods, which she misinterpreted — dumb broad — as a token of his generosity.

After that, she entirely forgot what she’d wished once to find amongst men. She came back with winter, her annual ritual, and stormed around in search of bigger, better — what? No longer was she shy. She smothered fires, buried farmers under her coats of snow. The people called her cruel — no more dumb fool simple soul — and wondered how she’d come to resemble them.

Winter that year stretched into April, May, June, July. By August they were burning the days of their calendars for warmth. The king ordained that whoever brought about her fall would never work again. But the men who’d once fought so hard to woo her now just begged her to be gone. Horns and flutes abandoned, their voices became one: Curse Ardour! Go away! Leave! Scram!

September, October, November. Winter led into winter. The king’s hunters laid traps to catch her. They shot to kill, sunk their munitions into snow. December, January, February, March. Months lost their meanings, years their numbering. Words were moot. Time was marked only by the aching advance of starvation. Folk looked forward to dying.

At last the king had only his son to send from his castle for firewood to warm his gruel. The boy had been quite young when that interminable winter began, and had heard of Ardour only as a monster, insatiable in her appetite for human life. He knew well to fear her, a beast as immense as his country, her body encompassing mountains and valleys, a woman said to freeze men with her breath. His father didn’t have to tell him to take care.

He wore boots of cowhide lined in fur, laced up to his thighs, triple-tied. His hat and gloves had been crafted from the same, fit to him so tight that there wasn’t even the space for a shiver. The coat, though, was a nobler matter: It had been willed to the king by his father, to whom it had been given by his father’s father — a tradition, in short, that went back to a generation before there was gold to leaf the family tree. What the coat was made of, though, people no longer knew: the skin of an extinct animal — a dragon, perhaps — or even the earth’s own crust? That day, the king laid it on his son.

With ax and saw, the boy made his way into the woods. And it might have been the first time in his sixteen years that he was alone, were there not, he wondered, another set of eyes fixed on his own. They were, at a glance, an overcast gray, but cleared, as he stared, to two open pupils. They belonged to a girl such as he’d never seen before. The snow covered her small body completely, her hair wrapped in the fierce weather that ravaged every inch of bare flesh.

He was not, in truth, especially brave. But had he been moved to rescue the girl from winter, to bring her to shelter, presumably he would have met the same fate as if he had thought to drive the weather away by attacking her. Instead, he approached with no motive other than to come closer.

Colder, colder, and colder. He reached out to her. The coat of snow was soft as fur. He brushed it off, and as it fell, her bare hands met his shoulders, to lift away his own shell.

It is said that the last sensation felt by a body freezing is an all-encompassing heat. As the girl drew nearer — frost melting from her breasts and hips, the stretch of her neck, the pale of her belly — he also let go deeper layers of clothing. Ardour then, folk say, led him away.

Winter withdrew into spring, fell fast on summer. The king went in quest of his son. But all he found, in a clearing, was that greatcoat the boy had worn. It wasn’t bloodied by the bite of any beast. There weren’t even bones to bury. Life went on.

That year, the winter didn’t come. None of the peasants met Ardour. They worked clear through December, barely even seeing one another, so relentlessly did the land produce. Prosperous, who had time to rest? Another year passed, two and three more, four. The weather never dropped off enough for the fields to sleep a season beneath a blanket of snow. And so it went that the workers never more were idle.

Till and sow and reap and till and sow and reap and till. Only rarely was the rhythm broken for an hour by the sounding of a distant storm. The king, shut up in his castle, believed that it was the gods above weeping with him over the loss of his son. But the peasants knew that the tantrum came from the forest floor: the noise of Ardour struggling with her lover, the boy who had fallen for her and who made her feel furiously — could it be true? — human.

HOW CAN YOU FORGET THAT FEELING, IT COMES LIKE A BLOW, WHEN life flees from you, and happiness, and love, thought a woman, Olga, watching as her husband plunked himself down and practically inserted himself next to, essentially, a child — everyone here a grown-up and suddenly out of nowhere this girl-child. And then he stood up with her and went over to dance, addressing Olga gleefully on the way, “Look at this little treasure! I knew her when she was in the sixth grade.” And laughed happily. It was the hosts’ daughter — of course. She lives here. How’d she forget that, Olga thought as they rode the subway home, her partly drunk husband, a hearing aid in his ear under cover of his eyeglasses, taking a folded-up newspaper, self-importantly, from his pocket, then squinting morosely under the harsh subway light. They rode, they came home. He settled down with that same paper on the toilet and then fell asleep, apparently, because Olga had to wake him up with a loud knock at the door, and everything was so petty, so embarrassing, though of course everything is always embarrassing in one’s own home, thought Olga. Her husband snored in bed, as he always did when he’d been drinking. “My God,” thought Olga to herself. “Life is over. I’m an old woman. I’m over forty and no one needs me. It’s all over, my life is gone.”

In the morning Olga fixed breakfast for her family. She needed to go somewhere. Anywhere — to the movies, to an exhibit, maybe even the theater. But who’d go with her? It’s a little odd, going alone. Olga called all her friends: one was sitting with a warm wrap — she had a condition she called “a movable feast,” her kidneys were bad. They chatted. Another friend didn’t answer, maybe they’d shut off the phone, another was just about to go out, she was at the door practically, yet another one of her elderly relatives had fallen ill. That one was a lonely spinster but was always cheerful, energetic, a saint almost. Not like us.

She might try cleaning the house — her boss used to say: “When I hit bottom, like when they gave me the diagnosis, the same as my sister’s and she’d just died — well, I came home and just started mopping the floor.” This was always followed by the tale of the diagnosis — magically mistaken! And the lesson was, Don’t give up! Keep the floor clean!

The laundry, the dishes — everything everywhere after last night’s preparations for that idiotic birthday with her husband’s college friends. So Olga should clean up and all the while think about how no one does anything to help her? Her husband will get up, hungover, won’t look them in the face, will nag, yell, brood over the magic vision of the little girl from last night, the daughter, that’s right. Then he won’t be back until evening. No, she needs to get out, get away, hide somewhere. Let them take care of themselves for once in their lives. She’s tired.

And then Olga realized: Why not visit the only place on earth where no one will turn her away, where they’ll always be happy to see her, where they’ll sit her down, make her tea, ask how she is and even invite her to stay over; why not visit their old landlady, from the dacha, where they lived so many years in a row when Nastya was still little, and she and Seryozha still hoped for a better life? She was an especially dear memory, this landlady, for Olga; with her complicated relations with her own mother, Olga had become attached to this stranger, this wise and touching old woman. She even seemed beautiful to Olga, and kind, and clever like a child. Meanwhile Baba Anya had been long divorced, if you can say that, from a daughter who never visited and was sleeping around on a grand scale, and who left the mother something to remember her by in the form of little Marina, a beaten-down creature in black hair who was afraid of everyone.

Yes! When you’ve been abandoned by everyone close to you, do a kindness for a stranger, and you’ll feel the warmth of their gratitude on your heart, and it will give your life meaning. And most of all, you will find a quiet refuge, and that’s all we want from our friends, isn’t it.

Inspired, Olga chuckled to herself, quickly cleaned everything, trying not to wake her family, and then went to look for her stash of Nastya’s old things that she’d been collecting over the years for Baba Anya, knowing that her little girl was being raised without any outside help.

She even found something for Anya, a warm shawl, and just two hours later was running across the square in front of the train station, having almost been hit by a car on the way (now, that would really be something, wouldn’t it, if she died, it would certainly be a solution to all sorts of problems, the disappearance of a person no one needs or wants, it would free everyone, Olga thought, and even paused on this thought for a while, amazed by it) — and a moment later, as if by magic, she was descending from the commuter train at the little rural station that she knew so well, and, dragging her big backpack behind her, walking down the familiar dirt road from the station to the edge of the settlement, in the direction of the river.

MARLENE’S MOTHER CLEANED CONSTANTLY, BLEARY-EYED IN MULTIPLE hairnets, on her vigilant search for the impure; as she walked she so often rolled an antiquated upright vacuum alongside her that it grew to seem like an exterior organ, an intravenous device that performed dialysis or another lifesaving function. Marlene had no memory of Mother’s bare hands, for they were always beneath thick, yellow kitchen gloves and had begun, as the years passed, to seem prosthetic. Fearful that dust might see her coming and scatter, Mother crept from one chore to another, hunched over, skulking around on the tips of her toes and raising each knee skyward with every step. What horrible shadows this cast upon the wall! Young Marlene would often shiver in bed and watch a ghastly outline bend steadily larger as Mother advanced down the hallway, the rubber gloves taking on the shape of oversized claws. Marlene’s fright and anticipation usually became so intense that she’d let out an audible gasp when Mother finally appeared in front of the bedroom door. Mother would stop, sniff. “Good girls are asleep by now,” she’d whisper, quiet enough to make Marlene wonder whether Mother even meant for this to be heard.

Father was friendlier, bear-like and aloof. When Marlene and Brother were little, they had delighted in running their fingers through the thick black curls on Father’s chest and back and riding him like an animal. He’d obligingly take to all fours and crawl around the yard, giving in to their wishes for a spirit of manufactured danger. “I’m going to eat you!” he’d eventually growl, and their cheeks would glow pink as pigs.

But Father had always stopped their play if they got too close to the juniper tree, their yard’s curious landmark. Halfway up, its trunk divided into two distinct sections that grew away from each other toward separate futures. Being children, Marlene and her brother always tested the limit — what was the closest they could get to the tree before Father excused himself and cited fatigue, or claimed to be growing old?

“It’s the cremated human remains,” Brother explained. He referred to his birth mother, Father’s deceased first wife, whose urn was buried in the yard under the tree. Marlene had occasionally spied Mother watering its roots with bleach and kicking the tree, stomping atop the first wife’s grave in a peculiar dance. And sometimes Mother picked up the large ax in the basement and spoke kindly to it, as though it were a baby, cradling it in her gloved hands and staring back at her reflection in the blade’s clean mirror.

But Mother hated her husband’s son even more than she did the tree. She beat him often and cleverly, across the body but never the face, with her heavy Bible and household objects made of wood. “I will clean the sin right out of you,” Mother remarked, sweating. “You are not of my loins, wicked thing.” Her own fictive brand of religion had curious rules; she’d stopped attending Mass long ago, remarking that the purification of one’s household was tantamount to prayer.

Marlene wished for a life away from Mother where she and Brother had the home all to themselves. And Father could float in and out as he pleased, a furry satellite.

TACKED TO THE WALL OF THE BARN THAT SERVED AS LUCIA DE Medici’s studio were 144 photographs of the artist having sex with her cat. Some of the pictures showed the couple sweetly nuzzling and snuggling; in some Lucia and her black cat, Hecuba, appeared to be kissing passionately, while still others tracked Hecuba’s leathery rosebud of a mouth down Lucia’s neck to her breasts until the cat disappeared off the edge of the frame and Lucia’s handsome head tilted back…

This was twenty years ago, but I can still recall the weariness that came over me as I looked at Lucia’s photos. I didn’t want to have to look at them, particularly not with Lucia watching. I was twenty-one years old. I had been married for exactly ten days to a man named Nelson. It had seemed like a good idea to drop out of college and marry Nelson, and a good idea (it was Nelson’s idea) to spend the weekend in Vermont at his friend Lucia’s farm. At that time, I often did things because they seemed like a good idea, and I often did very important things for lack of a reason not to.

Lucia de Medici was an Italian countess, a direct descendant of the Florentine ruling family, and a famous conceptual artist. She was also, I’d just discovered, the mother of a woman named Marianna, the love of Nelson’s life, an old girlfriend who, until that afternoon, I’d somehow assumed was dead.

Striped by the sunlight filtering in through the gaps between the barn boards, Lucia and I regarded each other: two zebras from different planets. She was a small woman of about fifty, witchy and despotic, her whole being ingeniously wired to telegraph beauty and discontent. And what was Lucia seeing, if she saw me at all? A girl with the power that came unearned from simply being young and with every reason not to act like such a quivering blob of Jell-O.

She said, “Up here in the wilderness I am working so in isolation, some days I want to ask the cows what do they think of my art.”

“It’s. really something,” I said.

“Meaning what?” Lucia said. I was pleased she cared what I thought, but hadn’t she just explained: when it came to Lucia’s art, the cows’ opinion counted? She frowned. “Prego. Watch out, please, not to back up into the fish tank.”

I turned, glad for fish to focus on after Lucia and her cat. An enormous goldfish patrolled the tank with efficient shark-like menace, while several guppies hovered in place, rocking oddly from side to side. “I am scared of that big fish,” Lucia confided. “He push his sister out of that water, I find her gasping dead on the floor.”

“Are you sure it wasn’t the cat?” I asked.

“Of that I am sure,” she said.

I sensed that Lucia had tired of me, and I thought that now we would leave her studio. Instead, she switched on the stereo and voices filled the barn. Suddenly my eyes watered; it was my favorite piece of music, the trio from Così fan tutte that the women sing when their lovers are leaving and they beg the wind and water to be good to them on their way. Their sadness is a painful joke because their lovers aren’t leaving but disguising themselves as Albanians and seducing the women as a test, a test the women eventually fail, a painful joke on them all.

I listened to the delicate, mournful tones, the liquid rippling of the strings, cradling and oceanic. There was grief in the women’s voices, pitiful because it was wasted, pitiful and humiliating because we know it and they don’t.

“It’s beautiful,” I said.

“So you say now,” Lucia said. “This, too, is one of my projects. I think everything gets boring sooner or later, no? The most fantastic Mozart becomes unbearable after a while. So I have put this trio on a loop that plays over and over until the audience cannot stand it and runs screaming out of the room.”

Lucia’s project depressed me. I felt personally implicated, though I knew: there was no way that she could have had me and Nelson in mind. In the ten days since we’d been married, Nelson had changed so profoundly that he might as well have gone off and come back disguised as an Albanian. You hear women say: Before the marriage my husband never drank or hit me or looked at another woman. But with Nelson there was nothing so violent or dramatic. Before the wedding he’d liked me; afterwards he didn’t.

He had been my lab instructor in a college biology course. He was a graduate student in anthropological botany, writing his thesis on the medicinal plants commonly used by the rain-forest tribes he’d lived among for two years. It was rumored that most of his research was on Amazonian hallucinogens, so it made sense that he was often strange, mumbly and withdrawn — but a perfectly capable and popular lab instructor. He was blond and handsome and tall; he looked lovely in a lab coat. He came from an old Boston family and played jazz clarinet.

Right from the start, our love had been tainted with cruelty. My lab partner was a squeamish boy, a Mormon from Idaho, who refused to cut into, or even touch, anything slimy. I enjoyed humiliating him. I feel I have to confess this, so as not to make myself sound nicer or more innocent than I was. From the other side of the lab table Nelson watched me grab the etherized frog from my partner’s shaky hands and our eyes locked in the candle-like glow of the Bunsen burners. Later, Nelson told me that what had caught his attention was that my lab partner was in love with me and I had no idea. I believe that Nelson imagined this, but even so I was flattered — flattered and guilty and proud, all at once, for having made the Mormon boy suffer.

Nelson was moody, given to brooding silences in which I knew he was grieving over Marianna. He didn’t like to talk about her or about his time in the jungle. I’d never met a man with a past he didn’t like to discuss, or for that matter a man with any past at all. Nothing had ever happened to the boys I knew in college, but they were so touchingly eager to tell you all about it. I was young enough to be enthralled by what a man wouldn’t say, and I believed the glitter dust of romance and adventure would sprinkle on me like confetti if I stood close enough to Nelson.

Marianna had gone with Nelson to the Amazon, but she was demonically restless, she’d left and flown back every few months. Nelson said he always knew the night before she arrived. She used to hitchhike in with the bush pilots who invited her along because she was so beautiful — beautiful and doomed.

“If those pilots knew her,” Nelson said, “they wouldn’t have taken her up in an elevator. Every time a plane took off, she was praying it would crash. She had a death wish instead of a conscience, she was born suicidal, it was a miracle she lasted long enough to meet me. Her suicide attempts got more and more serious until I couldn’t do anything to…” His voice trailed off and he took a deep breath that ended the conversation.

I don’t know why I assumed from this that Marianna was dead. It helped, I suppose, that I was never able to ask the obvious questions: when and where Marianna died, and how exactly she did it. Instead, I went through Nelson’s possessions. I found his journal from the Amazon, and nowhere — nowhere — in it was one word about Marianna. Stupidly, this cheered me; it made her seem less important. I thought I’d learned something new about her, not something new about Nelson.

He told me I made him happy. He said we should get married. He said we shouldn’t tell anyone, not even our parents or friends. I agreed, though it bothered me, not being able to boast that I’d been chosen by a handsome older man, the most popular lab instructor. In City Hall, we ducked behind a door when Nelson saw a judge who knew his father; and that was the last time he touched me, yanking me out of the judge’s way.

For a week after the wedding he paced our hot cramped Cambridge apartment, staying up all night, listening to music: Bill Evans, Otis Redding, Bach — only the slow second movements. I couldn’t ask him what was wrong, if he thought we’d made a mistake. It didn’t take a genius to draw the logical conclusion when someone seemed so much happier before getting married — to you. I was not supposed to notice that I was sleeping alone in the bed that had changed unrecognizably, grown colder and less welcoming since when we used to spend all day there.

One morning Nelson brought me coffee. He said he knew he’d been rotten and he was mightily sorry. He said he’d eaten some things in the jungle that he shouldn’t have eaten, and now he had these episodes, he was gone for days at a time.

“Episodes?” I said. “Gone?” Why hadn’t he ever had one in all the months we’d lived together?

Nelson said we needed to get away: an impromptu honeymoon in Vermont. That morning we threw our knapsacks into his VW Bug. We drove with the windows open, my long hair streaming back, and for a time I felt like we’d left our problems in Cambridge, along with my toothbrush and contact-lens fluid and everything else I needed. I kept wondering about Nelson’s episodes. Did he have them when he was driving?

Early in the afternoon we turned into Lucia’s long, tree-lined driveway, which, Nelson said, always reminded him of the stately avenues of lime trees leading to Tolstoy’s estate.

“How do you know Lucia?” I asked.

“Mutual friends,” he said.

Lucia ran out of the rambling spotless white farmhouse and kissed Nelson three times, alternating cheeks, then grabbed his shoulders and gave him a smacky kiss on the mouth. She eyed me coolly, then smiled flirtatiously at Nelson, as if he’d come to amuse her by showing off his very large new pet.

“What’s this?” she said.

“Polly. My new wife,” he said. “Polly, this is Lucia.”

“Your new what?” Lucia asked, only slightly dimming my pleasure in his finally having told someone. “Welcome.” She embraced me swiftly, kissing my sweaty forehead.

“Guess what?” she asked Nelson. “Just yesterday I got a postcard from Marianna. She is in India at an ashram, fucking hundreds of people a day. She writes she is finding enlightenment through nonstop tantric fucking.”

Nelson touched the top of his car. His hand came away black with grime, and for a moment the three of us stood there staring at his hand. “I’m sorry,” Lucia said. “But if I can’t tell you, who can I tell? All alone I am going crazy.”

“Marianna?” I said.

“My daughter,” said Lucia. “Nelson’s friend.”

I couldn’t stop myself from saying, “But I thought she was dead!”

“My daughter is very much alive, thank you. Nelson, what have you been telling this child? Anyway, it is perfect you come. Marianna sends me a phone number where I can call her in India this weekend, we can go into town where is the nearest phone.”

“There’s no phone here?” I said.

“Of course not,” Lucia said. “Now come to my studio and see my new piece. I call it Così fan tutte, starring me and my cat.”

Nelson said he’d see it later, he needed to walk, he’d been in the car all morning; Lucia tried not to look disappointed at being left with me. Nelson headed off toward a horse barn and Lucia led me across a field on a path tunneled between high grasses. I didn’t know what to say. I felt I should praise everything I could — nice house, nice land, nice view, nice sky — without sounding truly psychotic. Finally I said, “What beautiful blue flowers!” The field was completely blue.

“Bachelor’s buttons.” Lucia sighed. “In Europe they are weeds. For years I never grow them. Then I learn they keep their color forever, Etruscan tombs are full of them, Etruscans bury them with their dead to stay blue in the afterlife.”

For an instant the waves of heat shimmering over the field resolved into a miniature phantom funeral procession, Etruscans in white, bearing scythes and armloads of blue flowers; and in that instant I wondered if Nelson’s episodes might be catching.

Then we went to Lucia’s studio and looked at the photos of her and her cat, and she played the Mozart that we listened to over and over. I could have listened forever and never gotten tired and been grateful for every minute by which it shortened the weekend. But after four or five times I said, “Okay! Enough!” It seemed required, like my admiring the field of blue flowers.

Lucia switched off the stereo and said, “I am right, am I not? Now go find Nelson, and I will do another five minutes of work.”

7:45 A.M. HE SHOWERS AND DRESSES.

Half of Rumpelstiltskin awakens from a dream in which his body is a filament of straw, coiled and twined about itself so as to mimic the presence of flesh and entrails, of hands and ribs and muscles and a knotty, throbbing heart. In his dream, Half of Rumpelstiltskin is seated at a spinning wheel, his foot pumping furiously at the treadle, his body winding into gold around the spindle. He unravels top down — from the crown of his head to the unclipped edge of his big toenail — loosing a fog of dust and a moist, vegetal drizzle. When the last of him whisks from the treadle and into the air, he is gold, through and through. He lies there perfect, glinting, and altogether gone. Half of Rumpelstiltskin is the whole of the picture and nowhere in it. He is beautiful, and remunerative, and he isn’t even there to see it. Half of Rumpelstiltskin has spun himself empty. There is nothing of him left.

When Half of Rumpelstiltskin awakens, there is nothing of him right. He is like a pentagram folded across its center or a tree split by lightning. He is like the left half of a slumberous mannequin, yawning and shuddering, rising from within the netlike architecture of his dreams. He is like that exactly. Half of Rumpelstiltskin sleeps in a child’s trundle bed. He turns down his linens and his thick, abrasive woolen blanket and hops to the bathroom.

Half of Rumpelstiltskin moves from point to point — bed to bathroom, a to b — in one of two ways. Either he hops on one foot, his left, or he arches his body to walk from toe to palm and palm to toe. When he hops, Half of Rumpelstiltskin lands on the flat of his foot, leaning backward to counter his momentum, which for many years pitched him straight to the floor. When he walks, Half of Rumpelstiltskin looks as might a banana with feet at both ends. Through the years, he has learned to plod and pace and shuffle, to shamble and saunter and stride. Half of Rumpelstiltskin doesn’t own a car, and there’s never been anyone to carry him.

In the shower, Half of Rumpelstiltskin scours himself with a bar of marbled green soap, a washcloth, and — for the skin at his extremities, as stubborn and scabrous as bark — a horsehair scrub brush. He lathers. He rinses. He dries himself with a plush cotton towel, sousing the water from his pancreas and his ligaments and the spongy marrow in the cavity of his sternum. Half of Rumpelstiltskin is the only man he knows whose forearm is a hard-to-reach place.

Outside his window, the sky is a startled blue, from horizon to horizon interrupted only by a dissipating jet trail and a bespotment of soaring birds. The jet trail is of uniform thickness all along its length, and try as he might, Half of Rumpelstiltskin can spot a jet at neither end. He runs his forefinger along the window sash, then flattens his palm against the pane. Both are warm and dry. Although it’s only the beginning of March, Half of Rumpelstiltskin decides to dress lightly — a skullcap and a tawny brown slacks leg, a button-up shirt and a red canvas sneaker.

Before leaving for work, Half of Rumpelstiltskin brews a pot of coffee. He drinks it with a lump of sugar and a dash of half-and-half. The coffee bores through him like a colony of chittering termites — gnawing down the trunk of him, devouring the wood of his dreams. As he drinks, Half of Rumpelstiltskin watches a children’s variety show on public television. The monster puppets are his favorite, with their blue fur, their ravenous appetites, and their whirling eyes. The children laugh at the monsters’ jokes and ask them about the alphabet, and the monsters hug the children with their two pendant arms.

I’M BACK.

I am back and you knew I would be. You knew it. Didn’t you? Yes, you did, don’t give me that look, you knew exactly what was going to — doesn’t matter. I’m here now so we should get started, get this thing all started and going. Go ahead, you can throw up, it’s not going to stop me, make me feel bad, I promise you. It’s not. You’re getting exactly what you deserve here, you are, you deserve it and that’s what is going to happen. Fate, or Karma or, or whatever they call it. Kismet? I know that was a play or something, a musical, but I think that word means the same sort of thing. Something happening that was supposed to happen and then it does. It comes true. Wham! Just like that. “Instant Karma,” isn’t that what Lennon called it? Not the dictator, but the Beatles guy. In his song. Right? He said “it’s gonna get you” and that is just so goddamn true. It reaches out — figures out where you are, takes its time to find you — and bam! Before you can even move or anything, it’s got you by the throat and you are fucked. It’s true, my dear. You are motherfucked. And so that’s you, today, at this very minute. Or second, or whatever you wanna call it. You are about to be motherfucked. By me.

I can see by the look on your face you’re surprised, so don’t pretend. Do not pretend that you were ready for this one because you weren’t. You were not. I came out of the blue, as they like to say, out of the darkness like some avenging angel — I’m not sure that’s the exact right analogy but you get what I mean — I appeared and it has thrown you for a loop. A big ol’ loop and you don’t know what to do, what to say even, sitting there on a park bench with your mouth hanging open and staring at me. Wow. I really caught you off guard, didn’t I? You knew this could happen but you still were not ready for it. Not today. Well, I can’t say that it doesn’t make me happy because it does. It makes me smile right down into my soul and that’s the truth so you might as well know it. I am happy to see you sweat. Really. Honestly I am. I mean, who knew? How would I ever know that it’d be this easy to make that happen, to bring your little world to a halt, for it to come crashing down around your ears? How could I be privy to a thing like that? You can’t, that’s the answer. You wouldn’t until you just go ahead and do it and now I have and I’m aware, by looking at your face I’m aware of the magnitude of what’s going on right now, at this moment, as we sit here quietly in the middle of this park and your kid is playing on the swings and life bounces merrily along. If you could scream or draw a gun or kill me even, stab me and cover me with dirt right here in those bushes behind us, I think you would. I know it, actually. I know that you would. And, to be fair, I might do the same damn thing if I was you, shoe on the other foot or whatever people say to mean what I’m talking about. I might also want to do you harm. Well, I do, actually, want that, me, I’m saying, shoe on my own foot and staring at you right now. I do want to bring a kind of harm to your life. And I’m about to. Yes, I am. Yes indeed.

Did you ever think, I mean, years ago, when you first saw me — picked me out of some gym class as the one you wanted — could you ever even imagine that it might come to this? I can’t believe that you would’ve, right? No, never, not in a million years or you probably wouldn’t have done it, that’s what I think. That has to be the truth because, I mean, why would you otherwise? You know? Yeah. It’s true. You wouldn’t. No, I was supposed to be a good boy, do what you say, nod when you ask, and that was going to be that. Easy as pie, that’s the phrase. My mom uses it — still, to this day — and it fits and so that’s why we say it, why I just said it now. Because it’s true. You planned on using and discarding me along the way without my ever knowing it. As easy as pie. And you did, to be fair, you got away with it for a really long time. True? I mean, a good long time. Right up until about seven months ago, and that, my dear, is a hell of a run. Nice long run. You shouldn’t look so nervous because you gave it a real go so that’s at least something. And look, it’s not like I plan on telling anybody, I really don’t, I mean, who could I tell? Hmm? Who? I mean, who would ever believe a story like this one?

I don’t mind that you’re black, I don’t, I’ve always been attracted to black women. Well, not necessarily black but darker-skinned people. Girls with tans and that sort of thing. And you were definitely that, which stood out at our school, didn’t it? You certainly did. Talk of the town, some might say, a real object of interest, and I’m sure a few of those men you worked with — teachers and coaches and administrators — they probably found you rather exotic and worth chatting up in the lounge. I’m sure it happened, I know it did, in fact, because I would see you often from where I sat in the office, waiting to get yelled at again by the vice principal. What was that jerk’s name, I don’t remember now. It doesn’t matter, he died years ago from cancer — one of the bad ones, like bowel or brain or something — and I recall not feeling a thing when I heard that news. Maybe even said “good” under my breath or smiled or something. Not instant, but Karma. But you didn’t talk to those men, did you, my dear, because you were already married, already wrapped up in a relationship, and so you made a choice, you picked me out of the crowd — maybe there in the office rather than in gym class, now that I think about it, maybe so — and said to yourself that I was the one. The worthwhile one, the one to play with and drive wild with desire. I know you helped me, too, I know that, gave me a belief in myself and pushed me to study and try and get into junior college even, you did all that and I appreciate it, I do, but all the while you made me feel like I was your boy. The guy you wanted in your life, if only your husband wasn’t around, if only things were different. If only. And I believed you, oh how I gobbled up the shit you spewed, gobbled it up and swallowed it down and smiled at you in the hall and from the bleachers and as you drove off in your dirty yellow bug on your way home each night. I believed you and loved you and gave you my little teenage heart there at West Valley High and I’ve never done that again, no, not ever, I haven’t. To anyone ever ever ever again because my trust is gone, disappeared like you did the next year to a new school with the whisper of “it could never work” and “this is a real opportunity for me” and it was like you never existed. An empty office was your vapor trail (cut-backs didn’t bring another of your kind, a counselor, into school until my senior year). Your desk and chair, alone in the dark, was where I would eat my lunch most days unless they caught me and threw me out — that was all that was left of our love and time together. And there was love, wasn’t there? Real, abiding love. I swear there was. Look at me right now and tell me there was and I will go away, leave you to watch your little girl as she runs about in the bright sunshine and I’ll be gone. Say it, just once, say it to me now and mean it, while I sit here with you. I beg you. Go on.

You can’t, can you? No, of course you can’t because it’s not true and you wouldn’t want to lie about that, lead me on or anything, now, would you? Absolutely not. Part of the strange, strict principles by which you live your life, even though our entire union was absolutely that. A pure and utter lie, one that you lived so easily and without remorse for so long. That’s hardly fair, though, is it, because how could I know your feelings about me at that time? That’s a good point and I stand corrected, or sit corrected, actually, sit corrected here on this bench with you. I-sit-corrected. Perhaps you did love me once, a while ago, a long, long time ago when I was sixteen and just learning to drive and we would meet off in the woods or at your home on an unexpected morning and make love. Yes, love, I’m sure it was, only that, never just fucking, and you taught me everything I know about that undiscovered country. It was well beyond description and nothing I plan to embarrass you with right now, not in front of your daughter as she plays, but it was something lovely and I remember it like it was just yesterday even though a decade or so has slipped away. Lying there, inside of you and looking into your eyes, the quiet of a forest above us and your beautiful skin soaking up the sun, kissing that mouth of yours, those lips that sucked me in and devoured me, I had no words for what you were doing to my life. And nothing now, now that I know the truth. The real truth of what we were doing there and why you loved me or said you did and watched me fall deeper and deeper into the endless chasm that was you.

Did I ever tell you that I imagined killing him? Your husband? Oh yes, so many times. When it was at its deepest and worst, the sickness of love made me want to be rid of him for all time and eternity. I planned his death a dozen times, in various ways and done so successfully by me that even you believed that the car wreck or the mugging or hanging was a suicide or a mistake or a simple twist of fate. And life goes on and I was suddenly with you always, at your side, and we made a new life for ourselves in another state or country or on an island somewhere and the last that anyone ever saw of us was us running, hand in hand, down the beach and off into that sunset people are always talking about. Yes. Was I wrong to think that? At the time I didn’t feel I was, it felt justified by what you said about him, about your life together. Just phrases, really, a little clue tossed off now and again over a meal at A&W, some little comment that made me believe he didn’t appreciate you, that he didn’t want children with you or to grow old with you or anything anymore, that you were trapped and alone and I was your savior, me, that only I could rescue you from the coal mine of a life that your marriage had become. Some white guy from home, a good family and a bad mistake is what you called it, and I took it to heart, believed that his inability to father a child was of his own making rather than biology, that he was withholding from you and cold and distant and had even laid a finger — or more than that, a hand one time — on your sweet face that I had come to adore and would protect with my life. Did you know that at the time, that I would’ve done even that, died for you? Of course you did. Sixteen-year-olds can hide nothing. I was like some puppy chasing after you, big paws and tongue and silly and sweet. But you didn’t want those things, did you? No, not all of them. Just one. One thing from me and when you had it you left so quickly, with such a fluttering of your wings that I was dazed and dazzled and I believed your whispers. I watched you drive away, even helped you pack your garage, if you can remember that, helped your husband pack up things into a U-Haul and swept it out and washed it down before you left. You paid me twenty dollars there in front of him, smiled at me like we’d never met, and off I trotted, back home to wait for a call that never came and an address that was never, not ever, no never sent.

And now you have your child, that thing you always said would make your life complete. Your husband, too, he got swept up in your miracle and never asked for a blood test that would tell him the horrid truth about you and your deeds. Your missteps. Your tiny plots. Instead you are a happy family living here, where I have found you and have now come to ask for something in return. Of course I have, don’t look so surprised, my dear, for there is always a price to pay for things like this, when you have done what you have done, and now the time has come.

All I want is nothing. That is, that nothing should change from this very moment on. I want you to know I know where you’re at, who you are and what you’ve become. No, you didn’t eventually divorce as you imagined to me you would, a life on your own in another city where I might join you one day, “when you’re grown,” you would say, and oh how I believed you and your words. Those intoxicating words that spewed from your beautiful lips into my ear as I held you and hoped for such a day. But that day never came as you well know, it never did and on you stayed with your man — why wouldn’t you, for there were never any plans on your part to leave him, to be alone, but to add, add a child to the mix and live happily ever after. My child. A child you took from me and I never even knew it. How clever of you, how smart and wily and clever. And almost perfect, the plan, it was almost the most perfect of plans but who knew that my sister — my stupid younger sister who I never really liked and I always thought was a little bit retarded — who could imagine that she could pass a course and would end up working for your doctor in town? You left no trace or so you thought, but files are files and so they stay, and one nosy day she glanced inside to see that your husband, that man I was so ready to hate and kill and despise, she saw that he was empty and void and unable to provide and she thought this was interesting and said so to me and my family one evening out of the blue. They all recalled you fondly and thought it was a sad and strange tidbit about a lovely woman who had been so helpful to their son, but I knew better, didn’t I, my dear? I now knew that you had used me to become pregnant and then off you ran to hide your secret from the world. And me. The one who wanted to be your world but was really only a pawn. A sorry little pawn in your grisly and gory game of love.

But children grow up, God bless them, they do and reach out and up and try things all on their own, things that even their own parents don’t always know about. And so I met your daughter, your little princess, on the Internet and have become her friend. What a place for people like us, you and I, the liars and braggarts and ghosts of this world. Such a nice place to hide and pretend and so I do, I am a lovely little teenage girl named “Samantha” with hair like hand-spun gold, and I live in Texas with my family of five with our dog named “Bubbles” and a boyfriend named “Cory”—yes, I used your husband’s name, I knew it would seal the deal when a squeal from your daughter was followed by “That’s my dad’s name, too! LOL!” Oh yes, she is mine for hours at a time now and we dream and talk and chatter on about a life together at college or beyond. It has been beautiful and filled with laughter and delight, not ugly like what you did to me, not wrong like how you used me. No. It has been so so beautiful and it needs to continue, must continue, and I know you have set restrictions on her recently because she gets online the second you leave the house and complains about you and so I know. But you will let her have this friend, won’t you? Yes, or everything will be revealed. Do you understand me? All of it and to the end. I will ruin you and your perfect little fairy-tale life if you stop her from “seeing” me. Obviously I can never meet her or tell her the truth, one day she will drift away from me and that will be that, as they say, I know this and accept it as fate. Kismet. Karma, not instant but destined and acceptable. But it is not for you to decide so stay away and so will I. That is the deal. That is the cost, my dear. She is yours, to be sure, but she is also mine now and mine she will stay. For as long as I can hold her she will be mine as well. Mine, mine, mine.

She’s beautiful out there, isn’t she? Dancing on the grass and running with her friends. I’ve had to send her photos of myself very carefully — using my little niece as a stand-in — but what I’ve seen of her has been no lie. She is perfect and golden and the one good thing to come out of the filthy ways you used me and soiled a part of my life. Don’t look away because you know it’s true. I hate women and their wily selves; I know men can suck and often do but you are a more treacherous creature overall, surely you recognize that as a truth. You ruined me and left me for dead. You built this burnished little life and happy little world on the shit and bones of my carcass without looking back — and now all I ask is that you continue to look away. Look off some other way when you see her sitting at the computer, giggling and talking with her “friends” on Facebook and Twitter and all the crap I’ve been reduced to just to be near her. My daughter. Look away, go into another room and leave us alone, and by doing so your own rotten, deceitful life can exist for yet another day. Do you agree, my dear? Oh, how I hope so. Here in my broken heart of hearts.

If you want me, need me, long for me as I do for you, my hated, hateful dear, you know where to find me. Lost in space. Out there, somewhere. Rump.69@hotmail.com.

I see you not looking at me. Head turned. Tears in your eyes. I so wish I knew what you were thinking, but then again, I never really did, did I, so why would it matter now? And it doesn’t. All that matters is you know the truth. Where we stand. And the truth of the matter is I’m here now. I am here and I’m not going away, no, I’m not. Not ever, my dear. Not for a very very very long time.

YOU ARE WALKING DOWN A FAMILIAR STREET AT DUSK. MEAT IS cooking. In the shadows down the block, you see a cardboard box, flaps open. The street is deserted; you will either be the first to look inside the box, or it has already been plundered; either way, there’s no reason to hurry, but you do. There is a limited variety of things left in boxes in your neighborhood: shoes gone the shape of feet, dusty videos, mugs with ceramic frogs amusingly glued inside them. You are hoping for books, and that’s what you find. Not many — others have preceded you — but you stoop anyway and poke through the pile, pushing aside The Big Book of Birds and What to Expect When You’re Expecting.

You are drawn to the shape, the color, the design of the book before you have made out the title. It is a durable old Dover paperback, its thick cover leathery with use and still bright red, except for a pink band along the top where a shorter neighboring book allowed sunlight to hit it. It is a small, fat, leather-bound book with marbled edges, its morocco binding glove-soft and chipped at the spine. It is a vintage pocket paperback with a keyhole on the spine, a map on the back, and a still life on the front: a quill pen, a bottle of ink, and a spindle.

When you flip through the book, more to feel the thick pages ruffle smoothly across your thumb, like an old deck of cards, than to check the contents, you find, pressed between two pages, a feather. It is white, it is black with an iridescent sheen, it is pigeon-gray, in any case you pin it to the left-hand page with your thumb as you begin reading, walking on. You like to start books in the middle. Maybe you like the challenge of trying to figure out what’s going on. Maybe you just like doing things differently. In any case, you are soon engrossed, though the page waxes and wanes as you pass under the streetlights, and it is sometimes hard to make out the words.

It’s a good thing you read so much when you were a child, or you wouldn’t know what to think — you read — when you turn the corner on the greasy little street — a pigeon startles up, leaving a lone feather stuck to the asphalt — and see the dusty storefront into which the woman, her hands, wrists, and forearms so swollen that she appears to be wearing down opera gloves, is dragging a stuffed, heavy-duty lawn-and-leaf bag with numerous rents out of which what must be nettles are protruding. But since you have read every single one of Andrew Lang’s color-coded Fairy Books, even the ugly olive-green one, you recognize at once that she is a daughter and, more important, a sister, who is involved in the long, difficult, and not always rewarding work of saving her brothers from — you duck reflexively at a whirring vortex in the air: that pigeon again.

The woman, who has held the door open with her rump while she edged the bag inside, turns into the brightly lit interior and lets the door slam shut. It doesn’t matter, you can watch through the big shop window, despite the posters pasted all over it. Because you’ve read a lot of stories, you’re not surprised when she seats herself at a spinning wheel, behind which a row of brown, bristly little shirts hang from hooks screwed into the wall.

Because you’ve also lived — you’ve been living and reading for years, sometimes both at once — you are not surprised that people often repeat their most unpleasant experiences. It’s probably for the same reason we tell the same stories over and over, with minor variations—“The Seven Ravens,” “The Seven Doves,” “The Twelve Ducks,” “The Six Swans.” It is cozy to have one’s expectations met, though there is also, always, the possibility — is this is a happy thought or a sad one? — that things will turn out differently, this time.

WARM MOUTH: CHINSCRAPER, WHY ARE YOU LYING THERE IN THE road with your jaw shoved back through your brain and your guts blown out as if you’d tried to swallow the highway?

CHINSCRAPER: Warm Mouth, I used to make my way along the median strips and trashy shoulders, my head in the vinyl noose of a six-pack, pop tabs gilding my teeth. I could steal the grease off a Taco John bag. Styrofoam was my bread. Oh, how far that good life seems from me now, laid out in this attitude of supplication, my head smashed in by a speeding Jeep!

WARM MOUTH: Truly I feel for you, Chinscraper, for I am also alone this night. Climb into my warm mouth and we will investigate the night together.

I MET THE GIRLS AND INSTANTLY LIKED THE GIRLS. OF COURSE I LIKED the girls. A girl is better than a feast.

This was before the arrest, before the indictment and the media stories.

The girls were sisters, as you may know, and lived, during the summer, in one of those upstate mansions built by the robber barons who made their fortunes off railroads and steel and unfair business practices. It was in the Low Peaks of the Adirondacks — the southern part with glassy lakes and green slopes and white-spotted fawns. The girls, who were innocent in the glut of their wealth because they’d never known anything else, called their summer house “the cottage” to distinguish it from “the apartment,” which was a ten-thousand-square-foot penthouse on Fifth Avenue near Washington Square Park.

Their father was in real estate, but no one ever saw him. Correction: from time to time we caught sight of him briefly, the girls and I, getting in or out of a long gleaming car. Once, from the woods, I spotted him walking down to the dock in a pale-gray suit, his phone held to his ear.

He looked like a groom doll on a wedding cake. I wanted to tear his legs off.

At twilight, on the grounds of the massive yet log-cabin-style robber baron mansion, dozens of deer stood around, their graceful necks lowered, eating the grass. There’s an abundance of deer up there, due to the hunters who’ve killed off all the animals that were supposed to be preying on them. So the deer.

And the girls, equally graceful with their light, carrying laughter and long limbs, spun glow-in-the-dark hula hoops or played croquet with ancient peeling mallets as the purple dusk fell. The older one had honey-colored hair and blue eyes; the younger had brown hair and her eyes were a shade of amber. They hardly looked like sisters, but they were. The blonde was called Nieve, Spanish for snow, and the brunette was Rosa but she went by Rose. Their mother — a former ballerina from Madrid who was both anorexic and mentally slow — had named them but often she forgot their names.

We only met because I came out of the woods one night. I came out of the woods and walked right across the rolling lawn, scattering the Bambis. The sun was setting over the lake and a slight breeze rippled the water.

I admit the girls appeared frightened. What Rosa told me later was this: those first few seconds, they actually mistook me for a bear.

They’d never seen a homeless guy before — they were that sheltered, even though they lived in downtown Manhattan; trust me, it can be done — and though I wasn’t technically homeless I had that same dirty, hirsute aspect. I’m not a small man but tall and barrelchested, and that June evening I wore filthy clothes and a long beard and needed badly to bathe in the lake.

I had a home in the forest, or a temporary shelter, anyway; but to girls that pampered and young there’s no perceptible difference between an aging hippie and a transient.

So they were frightened at first, but I held up my hands as I walked up to the porch. The cottage had a wide wraparound porch, stone-floored, with swings, chairs, rugs, and potted plants. The girls retreated partway up the stairs and stood there uncertainly on the steps in their simple cotton frocks, clutching a Frisbee and a skipping rope. I held up my hands like a man who was surrendering.

I was lucky the help wasn’t around and the mother, as usual, had gone to bed early. If anyone else had been there — the cook, for one, who was a domineering type — they probably would have run me off.

I’d had too much to drink, of course. It was my pastime then — the summer before my divorce, a strange and isolated time. I was camped out in an old airplane hangar on one of the smaller lakes and now and then I hitchhiked into town, bought booze and groceries, and prayed not to run into my estranged wife. We’d had our own more modest summer place nearby.

What I’d done was, I’d disappeared. I didn’t want my wife to know where I had gone. It was the only trick I had left: hiding and vanishing. I got some meager satisfaction from an idea I had of her not knowing whether I lived or died — her wondering if maybe, defying all her expectations, I’d left my dull old self behind and flown off to a distant and unknown country.

Those girls were good. Plenty of rich girls aren’t, we all know that. But those two girls were innocent. I don’t know how they turned out that way, with the mother who wasn’t all there and the father who wasn’t there at all. That goodness came from them like milk from a rock.

Snow, as I came to call her because I couldn’t be bothered to pronounce her real name, mostly liked books, and sat in the shade of the porch on afternoons, reading. Her sister was more social and spent her time talking to everyone. She rode her bicycle to an old folks’ home most days and helped the people there.

As I stood on the lawn looking up at them, I noticed something I hadn’t seen from a distance: the girls’ skin glowed. Both of them had this luminous kind of skin.

That clear, young skin is part of what makes girls look so edible.

I asked them not to be afraid. I told them my name, and after a few moments they seemed to relax and told me theirs. They had a dog, an old Irish setter who lay around and barely raised his tail even for flies. I sat down on the steps and petted the dog, after a while.

So we were friends. Of course, I wouldn’t have had a chance if the girls hadn’t been left on their own so much. Now and then a friend their own age came up from the city to visit and I didn’t intrude upon them then.

But those visits were rare. Often at dawn or dusk, when the deer and the girls were out, I was the only company they had. I kept a low profile and did not throw the Frisbee back and forth with them, in case someone could see us from the house. Usually we stood together and we talked, a little out of sight. Once or twice they sat on the end of the dock and trailed their feet through the water, and I swam, only my head above the darkening surface.

From the high bedroom windows of the cottage’s second floor, that wouldn’t have looked like anything.

The girls were kind to me. They let me use the canoes in the boathouse, even encouraged me, and some mornings I would row out into a hidden bay and sit and drift, trying idly to fish in the shade of a red pine. There were some old rods in the boathouse, and since I had none of my own I used to borrow them.

Snow would leave me sandwiches or sometimes bring a bowl of ice cream onto the porch. Rose offered small hotel bottles of shampoo and told me to use them.

These girls were both honest. Once Snow said to me, “You smell not too good. Did you know?”

I told her that I washed my clothes whenever I could, in the coin laundry in town or the lake. I also tried to swim and use soap on myself, but now and then I lost track and missed a day or two.

“I wish you wouldn’t,” said Snow wistfully.

My back hurt from sleeping on the cement floor of the hangar and I ended up asking the sisters for aspirin. For several days my back and neck had been sore, and the pills took the worst edge off the pain but that was all. Then Rose said I should sleep in the cottage, which had more bedrooms than could easily be counted. There was a certain servants’ part of the house, they said, which had its own entrance, and none of the help used it. I could sneak in at night and sleep in the comfortable bed, which had down pillows and high-thread-count sheets.

I protested at first; I had some fear I’d run into one of the other members of the household. But it was silent when I snuck in there at night, after the girls had gone to bed. It was so quiet that it almost seemed to me they lived there by themselves, and food and water were furnished to them by invisible hands.

The bed was a nice change from concrete floors, so nice I almost questioned my recent course in life — hunkering down in the hangar, unshaved and unwashed, hiding from my soon-to-be-ex-wife. But then I came full circle; the hiding couldn’t be so wrong for it had brought me here, to this great mansion with its soft sheets and gentle girls.

After that I often slipped in by the servants’ narrow stairs and slept in my private room, tucked up under the roof. I set my wristwatch alarm and crept out at the crack of dawn. The cottage doors were never locked during the summer months; the family was always there, the family or the staff. I watched them from the shadows whenever I could. The Mexican groundskeeper rode around on his lawn tractor uselessly, mowing nothing, happy to sit aloft. The live-in maid smoked cigarettes near the garden shed and sometimes slipped away to have sex with him in the bushes.

One day the mother had a brief flash of life and donned her sparkling tennis whites. She ran outside and hit a few balls feebly with Rose on the clay tennis court. Meanwhile Snow, on the sidelines, took snapshots for the family album.

It was a rare occasion, to see the mother outside in the sun, acting alive like that.

But only fifteen minutes passed before the mother went inside again, apparently angry or depressed. She threw her racket down and blurted something that I couldn’t quite make out. I saw the girls’ faces as they watched her go. Their faces were both sad and calm; the girls were resigned to this beautiful, semiretarded mother with her spidery limbs and odd tantrums.

Perhaps she was never a ballerina, I thought to myself. There aren’t too many retarded ballerinas in this world, is my perception of the thing, although there certainly are a few who, like the mother, starve themselves.

That evening, around dusk, the girls came swimming with me in the lake; Rose lathered my hair up with shampoo. It was one of the only times I felt the sisters’ touch. They weren’t too prone to physical contact. They hadn’t grown up with affection, and also, I was an older, often bad-smelling man, quite unattractive to them. No doubt they were afraid that any touching would be mistaken for an invitation.

But on this occasion, beyond the end of the dock, Rose ducked my head under, laughing, and when I came up spluttering and trying to catch my breath Snow pushed my head under again, and both of them were playfully drowning me.

We were happy.

Then Rose said, “What would he look like with no beard?”

Snow looked at me, too, considering, and then climbed up onto the dock, toweled off, and ran into the house. She came back in a minute with shaving equipment. She even had scissors — clearly no razor, by itself, would be up to the task — and an old hand mirror of heavy silver.

Snow cut off the part of the beard that hung. Then they watched while I sat in the shallows and, with Rose holding up the mirror, shaved off the stubble that was left.

“He’s not that bad,” she said, when I was done.

I dipped my face under and came up again, wiping the water away from my eyes, the flecks of girl-scented shaving foam floating.

“He looks like that actor,” said Snow, cocking her head. “You know, that big French one with the crooked nose.”

“You look like that actor,” concurred Rose, nodding.

“He’s sort of ugly,” said Snow. “And you have to like him.”

“Exactly,” said Rose. “Ugly, like you.”

“But also likable,” said her older sister.

“Girls,” I said ruefully, “you’re going to have to find a way to tell the truth a little less often.”

“Why?” asked Snow.

“Well, for one thing, it hurts people’s feelings.”

“We’re sorry,” said Rose. “We didn’t mean to.”

“I know,” I said. “I know. And B, if you get in this habit of telling men the truth, you’ll never find true love and get married.”

“I won’t get married anyway,” said Rose.

“I won’t either,” said Snow.

“How do you know?” I asked.

“It seems really stupid,” said Snow.

“Like cutting off your leg,” said Rose.

“Every marriage is different,” I said.

“Get out,” said Snow.

“Well, you’re supposed to be married,” said Rose. “But now your wife likes someone else better.”

“So soon you won’t be, anymore.”

“More or less accurate,” I conceded.

“Then why are you defending it?” asked Snow.

“Once you were practically normal,” added Rose. “But now you carry a roll of toilet paper around in a greasy disgusting backpack,” and she shuddered visibly.

“We’re just saying,” said Snow, almost apologetic.

It was then that we heard a rare sound — at least, rare to us in the tranquillity of those summer evenings: car tires crunching on gravel in front of the house.

“No way,” breathed Snow.

“Daddy,” said Rose.

“It’s the third time this whole summer,” said Snow.

“The first time lasted for an hour,” Rose told me.

“The second was on my birthday,” said Snow.

“He stayed fifteen minutes.”

“He brought me a gift certificate.”

I tensed up, worried I’d get caught with them. My clothes were heaped on the bank, except for the boxer shorts I wore. There was a clean line of sight if he came around the corner. But I had other clothes in the hangar so all I had to do was swim away — swim across to the part of the shore that was hidden from the house by trees, and from there retreat to my hangar.

“I should go,” I said.

“Don’t worry. We’ll totally distract him,” said Rose.

They climbed up onto the dock, legs dripping. Towels swirled up around their shoulders, feet left wet prints on the dry wood before they slipped into flip-flops. Then the girls were headed up the grassy slope — not running, not eager. Just dutiful.

I felt a rush of thankfulness that I’d never had children to disappoint. Though I wished the girls were my own daughters; even I would have shone in comparison with the gray doll.

I didn’t have his wealth. But still.

I sank down in the water and spied on them, the waterline beneath my nose. I kept my mouth clamped shut.

The suit was undertaker-black this time and I could just make out a silver-colored headset. He talked into the headset as the girls went up the hill to meet him. Rose stepped toward him awkwardly, as though she wanted to embrace, but he held up his hand and shook his head and kept talking, turning around as he paced.

She stepped back.

It occurred to me then that they would be better off if he died, but it was an academic, impersonal thought. It had nothing to do with me.

A second later, it also occurred to me that if someone tore the groom in half, the girls would still have his money but not his cold and persistent disregard.

It was painful, on the other hand, the loss of a father. Even a negligent father. And with the semiretarded mother on the brink of death surprisingly often — due to the repeated self-starving activities, which made her subject to sudden hospital visits — the poor girls might be farmed out to relatives. Separated.

So as quickly as I had it, I gave up the idea of murdering him. You know: murder goes through your head sometimes, and then goes out again. It’s normal, in my opinion.

Anyway, the thought had no bearing on subsequent events.

After a while the father stopped talking into his headset mouthpiece. By that time the girls had already given up and drifted into the house without, as far as I could tell, even a smile of greeting from him. Some fragments of his one-sided conversation floated down to me — a few words in the twilight, “value-added,” “deal structure,” and possibly “red herring.”

Then he, too, disappeared.

What happened later that night was simple, as I would testify.

Around one in the morning, as I lay trying to sleep on the hangar floor, my back started to hurt. It hurt a lot, mainly because there was nothing between me and the cracked cement but a threadbare sleeping bag I’d filched from a Goodwill bin in Albany. During the vanishing act I hadn’t wanted to reveal myself by using my joint-account ATM card. And I had no painkillers left from the prescription stash the girls had given me. So finally, driven by discomfort, I crept out onto the dirt road, pain shooting through my back, grasping my heavy, antique flashlight.

There was a dim glow in the ground-floor windows of the mansion where lamps had been left on, but through those windows I could see no one was reading by their light. The family was sleeping. So I went around behind the house and up the servants’ stairs, taking off my shoes and walking in my sock feet. I found my room as usual and went to sleep myself, so relieved by the comfort of the bed that I forgot my back.

But presently I was woken up. There was a loud, terrible noise. Bleary, I didn’t recognize it at first. I thought it was a cat, in pain or trying to mate. Then I understood it was human — human and female. I sat right up, jolted with fear for those sweet girls. I had to do something, so I grabbed my flashlight and ran out into the corridor.

I didn’t know the house at all, only the route to my secret cubby. So I was stumbling down narrow halls like I was in a maze, basically running blind, this way and that, trying to follow the screaming. It stopped for a short time and I faltered — partly in confusion, partly out of a growing conviction that the sound wasn’t coming from either of the girls. It was too feral and too hoarse. But then it started up again and I ran, tearing up and down halls in a panic, because I couldn’t be sure.

Eventually I came out into a wider hall where lights were ablaze; a long carpet down the middle, and there was the mother. She wore nothing at all and was so emaciated that her jutting ribs resembled zebra stripes. I couldn’t help but notice she was shaved completely bare beneath. And there was the father, in seersucker pajamas, who seemed to be choking or suffocating her. They were thrashing around, and she must have been the one screaming, though now his fingers were over her mouth. He had the upper hand, clearly, being a man and not mentally or physically impaired. A fear seized me — though behind that fear I was relieved that Snow and Rose were not the targets of this violent assault — and without thinking I threw myself into the fray.

The flashlight was the only weapon I had, and as I said, it was heavy.

Before I knew it the groom doll lay upon the ground, the left side of his head stove in.

Once we understood the gravity of the situation, we threw ourselves into reviving him. I knelt beside him and performed CPR, which I’d learned as a lifeguard in the seventies; Rose, in her frilly teddy-bear nightgown, ran to the telephone and called 911; Snow sat, her face solemn, and held one of her father’s limp white hands, which I noticed was almost effeminate in the perfection of its manicure. Only the starving mother, still naked, hung back, sitting with her knobby knees raised to her chin against the far wall’s wainscoting, beneath the pompous portrait of a wattled ancestor.

As you may already be aware, if you’re the type to follow crime-beat or society news stories, the father did not die. In fact — and this is little known — he came out of the hospital substantially improved. It was as though he’d had a personality alteration, the sort that might follow a frontal lobotomy, for instance. He was more pleasant, after he recovered. He had more time for his wife and his children.

I even heard from my lawyer that he sought professional help for the mother. Not for the retardation, I don’t think — there isn’t much they do for that — but for the eating disorder.

And me, I never heard from the girls again. Not personally. But they must be better off now, too.

Because the father, who’d already made enough money to keep the family in fine linens and silverware for life, was no longer interested in business. That part of his character had simply been removed, either by the impact of the flashlight or the subsequent brain bleed. It wasn’t that, as my lawyer assures me, his cognitive capacity was reduced, per se. He still performed adequately in standard aptitude tests.

No, it seemed to be more a matter of a changed disposition.

Myself, I didn’t fare so well. It adds up against you when you’re indigent at the time of felony commission, abusing alcohol, etc., even if the crime was committed in defense of a vulnerable party. And there was the trespass issue — although the girls, I have to say, did not desert me in my hour of need. They told the police I’d had their full permission to sleep in the house that night. Sadly, due to their ages — eleven and twelve — that testimony did not go far to clear me of the trespass charge.

I sometimes dwell on my last moments with those girls. It’s true we sat upon an old carpet, discolored by the father’s spreading blood, between dark-painted walls adorned with grim, even judgmental-looking paintings of the girls’ dead relatives. It’s true our clothing was splattered and gruesome, and the unconscious father was stretched out between us, casting a pall.

But I gazed up and around, when I’d done all the CPR I could — it was a kind of coma, I guess, though it wouldn’t last long once they got him to the emergency room — and saw the semiretarded mother. Even a ballerina, I remember thinking, did not deserve to be asphyxiated, and I was still glad I’d come to her aid. Now she was staring at me with eyes as big as saucers, murmuring something in her native tongue. She spoke the dialect of Spanish where everyone has a lisp. I saw Snow, whose lovely face, lit from within, bore the light, drying tracks of tears, and the vibrant Rose, nervous and biting her nails beside a Tiffany table lamp effulgent with orange-pink roses.

And I was overcome with a curious feeling of belonging and satisfaction, as though I’d eaten a full meal and was preparing now for a long winter sleep. With the father lying inert between us in his blue-and-white seersucker, I felt we were all where we were meant to be, all posed in a tableau whose composition had been perfectly chosen a very long time ago. Whatever came afterward, I recall thinking, this was a warm cave full of soft, harmless things.

IT IS JUST AS SHE HOPED. THE WORN PATH, THE BELLS TINKLING ON the gate. The huge fir trees dropping their needles one by one. A sweet mushroomy smell, gnomes stationed in the underbrush, the sound of a mandolin far up on the hill. We’re here, we’re here, Kate repeats to her child, who isn’t walking fast enough and needs to be pulled along by the hand. Through the gate they go, up the dappled path, beneath the giant firs, across the parking lot and past the kettle-corn stand, into the heart of the elves’ faire.

Her child is named Ondine but answers only to Ruthie. Ruthie’s hand rests damply in her own, and together they watch two scrappy fairies race by, the swifter one waving a long string of raffle tickets. Don’t you want to wear your wings? Kate asked that morning, but Ruthie wasn’t in the mood. Sometimes they are in cahoots, sometimes not. Now they circle the great shady lawn, studying the activities. There is candle making, beekeeping, the weaving of god’s eyes. A sign in purple calligraphy says that King Arthur will be appearing at noon. There’s a tea garden and a bluegrass band, a man with a thin sandy beard and a hundred acorns pinned with bright ribbons to the folds of his tunic, boys thumping one another with jousting sticks. The ground is scattered with pine needles and hay. The lemonade cups are compostable. Everything is exactly as it should be, every small elfish detail attended to, and as Kate’s heart fills with the pleasure of this, the pleasure of a world complete unto itself, she is also struck by the uneasy feeling that she could have but did not secure this for her child, and therein lies a misjudgment, a possibly grave mistake.

They had not even applied to a Waldorf school! Kate’s associations at the time were vague but nervous-making: devil sticks, recorder playing, occasional illiteracy. She thought she remembered hearing about a boy who could map the entire Mongol empire but at nine years old was still sucking his fingers. That couldn’t be good, could it? Everybody has to go into a 7-Eleven at some point in their lives, operate in the ordinary universe. So she hadn’t even signed up for a tour. But no one ever told her about the whole fairy component. And now look at what Ruthie is missing. Magic. Nature. Flower hair wreaths, floating playsilks, an unpolluted, media-free encountering of the world. The chance to spend her days binding books and acting out stories with wonderful wooden animals made in Germany.

Ruthie wants to take one home with her, a baby giraffe. Mysteriously they have ended up at the sole spot in the elves’ faire where commerce occurs and credit cards are accepted. Ruthie is not even looking at the baby giraffe; with some nonchalance she has it tucked under her arm as she touches all the other animals on the table.

“A macaw!” she cries softly to herself, reaching.

Kate finds a second baby giraffe caught between a buffalo and a penguin. Despite representing a wide range of the animal kingdom, the creatures all appear to belong to the same dear, blunt-nosed family. The little giraffe is light in her hand, and when she turns it over to read the tiny price tag stuck to the bottom of its feet, she puts it back down immediately. Seventeen dollars! Enough to feed an entire fairy family for a month. The Noah’s Ark looming in the middle of the table now looks somewhat sinister. Two by two, two by two. It adds up.

How do the Waldorf parents manage? How do any parents manage? Kate hands over her Visa.

She says to Ruthie, “This is a very special thing. Your one special thing from the elves’ faire, okay?”

“Okay,” Ruthie says, looking for the first time at the animal that is now hers. She knows her mother likes giraffes; at the zoo she stands for five or ten minutes at the edge of the giraffe area, talking about their beautiful large eyes and their long lovely eyelashes. She picked the baby giraffe for her mother because it is her favorite. Also because she knew her mother would say yes, and she does not always say yes, for instance when asked about My Little Pony. So Ruthie was being clever but also being kind. She was thinking of her mother while also thinking of herself. Besides, there are no My Little Ponys to be found at this faire; she’s looked. And a baby giraffe will need a mother to go with it. There was a bigger giraffe on the table, and maybe in five minutes Ruthie will ask if she can put it on her birthday list.

“Mommy,” Ruthie says, “is my birthday before Christmas or after?”

“Well, it depends what you mean by before,” Kate says unhelpfully.

Holding hands, they leave the elves’ marketplace and climb up the sloping lawn to the heavy old house at the top of the hill, with its low-pitched roof and stout columns and green-painted rafters sticking out from the eaves. Kate guesses that this whole place was once the fresh-air retreat of a tubercular rich person from long ago, but now it’s a center of child-initiated learning.

Ruthie’s own school is housed in a flat, prefab trailer-type structure tucked behind the large parking lot of a Korean church. It’s lovely in its own way, with a mass of morning glory vines softening things up a little, and, in lieu of actual trees, a mural of woodland scenes painted along the outside wall. And parking is never a problem, which is a plus, since that can be a real issue at drop-off and pick-up. At Wishing Well the parents take turns wearing reflective vests and walkie-talkies, just to manage the morning traffic inching through the school driveway! Or else there’s the grim Good-bye Door at the Jewish Montessori, beyond the threshold of which the dropping-off parent is forbidden to pass. For philosophical reasons, of course, but anyone who’s ever seen the line of cars double-parked outside the building on a weekday morning might suppose a more practical agenda. To think this was once the school Kate had set her heart on! She wouldn’t have survived that awful departure, the sound of her own weeping as she turned off her emergency blinkers and made her slow way down the street.

But she had been enchanted by the Jewish Montessori, helplessly enchanted, not even minding (truth be told) ghastly tales of the Door. Instantly she had loved the vaulted ceiling and skylights, the Frida Kahlo prints hanging on the walls, the dainty Shabbat candlesticks, and everywhere a feeling of coolness and order. On the day of her visit, she sat on a little canvas folding stool and watched in wonder as the children silently unfurled their small rugs around the room and then settled down into their private, absorbing, and intricate tasks. The classroom brimmed with beautiful, busy quiet. She felt her heart begin to slow, felt the relief of finally pressing the mute button on a chortling TV. How clearly she saw that she needn’t have been burdened for all these years with her own harried and inefficient self, that her thoughts could have been more elegant, her neural pathways less congested — if only her parents had chosen differently for her. If only they had given her this!

It came as a surprise, then, that the school did not make the least impression on Ondine. Every Saturday morning for ten weeks the two of them shuffled up the steps with more than twenty other potential applicants and underwent a lengthy, rigorous audition process disguised as a Mommy and Me class. Kate would break out into a soft sweat straightaway. Ondine would show only occasional interest in spooning lima beans from a small wooden bowl into a slightly larger one. “Remember, that’s his job,” Kate would whisper urgently as Ondine made a grab for some other kid’s eyedropper. The parents were supposed to preserve the integrity of each child’s work space, and all of these odd little projects — the beans, the soap shavings, the tongs, and the muffin tin — even the puzzles — were supposed to be referred to as jobs.

Ten weeks of curious labor, and then the rejection letter arrived on rainbow stationery. Kate was such an idiot, she sat right down and wrote a thank-you note to the school’s intimidating and faintly glamorous director in the hope of improving their chances for the following year. She had never been so crushed. “You’re not even Jewish,” said her mother, not a little uncharitably. Her friend Hilary, a Montessori Mommy and Me dropout, confessed to feeling kind of relieved on her behalf. “Didn’t it seem, you know, a little robotic? Or maybe Dickensian? Like children in a boot-blacking factory.” She reminded Kate about the director’s car, which they had seen parked one Saturday morning in its specially reserved spot. “Aren’t you glad you won’t be paying for the plum-colored Porsche?”

She wasn’t glad. And she did take it personally, despite everybody’s advice not to. Week after week, she and her child had submitted themselves to the director’s appraising, professional eye, and for all their earnest effort, they were still found wanting. What flawed or missing thing did she see in them that they couldn’t yet see in themselves? Even though she spoke about the experience in a jokey, self-mocking way, she could tell it made people uncomfortable to hear her ask this question, and she learned to do so silently, when she was driving around the city by herself or with Ondine asleep in the back of the car.

“Can I get the mommy giraffe for Christmas?” Ruthie asks at the end of what she estimates is five minutes. She stops at the bottom of the steps leading up to the big green house and waits for an answer. She wants an answer but she also wants to practice ballet dancing, so she takes many quick tiny steps back and forth, back and forth, like a Nutcracker snowflake in toe shoes.

“People are trying to come down the stairs,” says her mother. “Do you have to go potty? Let’s go find the potty.”

“I’m just dancing!” Ruthie says. “You’re hurting my feelings.”

“You have to go potty,” her mother says, “I can tell.” But Ruthie sees that she is not really concentrating, she is looking at the big map of the elves’ faire and finding something interesting, and Ruthie will hold the jiggly snowflake feeling inside her body for as long as she wants. This means she wins, because when she doesn’t go potty regular things like walking or standing are more exciting. She’s having an adventure.

“It says there’s a doll room. Does that sound fun? A special room filled with fairy dolls.” Her mother leans closer to the map and then looks around at the real place, trying to make them match. “I think it’s down there.” She points with the hand that is not holding Ruthie’s.

Ruthie wants to see what her mother is pointing at, but instead she sees a man. He is standing at the bottom of the lawn and looking up at her. He is not the acorn man, and he does not have a golden crown like the kind a king wears, or the pointy hat of a wizard. She has seen Father Christmas, by the raffle booth, and this is not him. This is not a father or a teacher or a neighbor. He does not smile like the brown man who sells Popsicles from a cart. This man is tall, thin, with a cape around his neck that is not black, not blue, but a color in between, a middle-of-the-night color, and he pushes back the hood on his head and looks at her like he knows her.

“Do you see where I’m pointing?” Kate asks, and suddenly squats down and peers into Ruthie’s face. Sometimes there’s a bit of a lag, she’s noticed, a disturbing and faraway look. It could be lack of sleep: the consistent early bedtime that Dr. Weissbluth strongly recommends just hasn’t happened for them yet. A simple enough thing when you read about it, but the reality! Every evening the clock is ticking — throughout dinner, dessert, bath, books, the last unwilling whiz of the day — and with all of the various diversions and spills and skirmishes, Kate wonders if it would be that much easier to disarm a bomb in the time allotted. And so Ruthie is often tired. Which could very well explain the slowness to respond; the intractability; the scary, humiliating fits. Maybe even the intensified thumb sucking? It’s equally possible that Kate is just fooling herself into thinking this, and something is actually wrong.

Tonight she’ll do a little research on the Internet.

Slowly Kate stands up and tugs at Ruthie’s hand. They are heading back down the hill in search of the doll room. They are having a special day, just the two of them. They both like the feeling of being attached by the hand but with their thoughts branching off in different directions. It is similar to the feeling of falling asleep side by side, which they do sometimes in defiance of Dr. Weissbluth’s guidelines, their bodies touching and their dreams going someplace separate but connected. They both like the feeling of not knowing who is leading, whether it’s the grown-up or the child.

But Ruthie knows that neither of them is the leader right now. The man wearing the cape is the leader, and he wants them to come to the bottom of the hill. She can tell by the way he’s looking at her — kind, but also like he could get a little angry. They have to come quickly. Spit spot! No getting distracted. These are the rules. They walk down the big lawn, past the face-painting table and some jugglers and the honeybees dancing behind glass, and Ruthie sees that her mother doesn’t really have to come at all. Just her.

She has a sneaky feeling that the man, under his cape, is holding a present. It’s supposed to be a surprise. A surprise that is small and very delicate like a music box but when you open it keeps going down like a rabbit hole, and inside there is everything, everything she’s wanted: stickers, jewels, books, dolls, high heels, pets, ribbons, purses, toe shoes, makeup. Part of the present is that you don’t have to sort it out. So many special and beautiful things, and she wants all of them, she will have all of them, and gone is the crazy feeling she gets when she’s in Target and needs the Barbie Island Princess Styling Head so badly she thinks she’s going to throw up. That’s the sort of surprise it is. The man is holding a present for her and when she opens it she will be the kindest, luckiest person in the world. Also the prettiest. Not for pretend, for real life. She’s serious. The man is a friend of her parents, and he has brought a present for her the way her parents’ friends from New York or Canada sometimes do. She wants him to be like that, she wants him to be someone who looks familiar. She asks, “Mommy, do we know that man or not?” and her mother says, “The man with the guitar on his back?” but she’s wrong, she’s ruined it: he doesn’t even have a guitar.

Ruthie doesn’t see who her mother is talking about, or why her voice has gotten very quiet. “Oh, wow,” her mother whispers. “That’s John C. Reilly. How funny. His kids must go here.” Then she sighs and says, “I bet they do.” She looks at Ruthie strangely. “You know who John C. Reilly is?”

“Who’s John C. Reilly?” Ruthie asks, but only a small part of her is talking with her mother, the rest of her is thinking about the surprise. The man has turned his head away, and she can see only the nighttime color of his cape. She is worried that he might not give it to her anymore. She is sure that her mother has ruined it.

“Just a person who’s in movies. Grown-up movies.” Kate’s favorite is the one where he plays the tall, sad policeman: he was so lovable in that. Talking to himself, driving around all day in the rain. You just wanted to hand him a towel and give him a hug. And though something about that movie was off — the black woman handcuffed, obese, and screaming, and how the boy had to offer up a solemn little rap — John C. Reilly was not himself at fault. He was just doing his job. Playing the part. Even those squirmy scenes were shot through with his goodness. His homely radiance! The bumpy overhang of his brow. His big head packed full of good thoughts and goofy jokes. Imagine sitting next to him on a parent committee, or at Back-to-School Night! She’d missed her chance. Now he and his guitar are disappearing into the fir trees beyond the parking lot.

Kate sighs. “Daddy and I respect him a lot. He makes really interesting choices.”

“Mommy!” Ruthie cries. “Stop talking. Stop talking!” She pulls her hand away and crosses her arms over her chest. “I’m so mad at you right now.”

Because another girl, not her, is going to get the surprise. The man isn’t even looking at her anymore. Her mother didn’t see him, she saw only who she wanted to see, and now everything is so damaged and ruined. It’s not going to work. “You’re making me really angry,” Ruthie tells her. “You did it on purpose! I’m going to kick you.” She shows her teeth.

“What did I do now?” her mother asks. “What just happened?” She is asking an imaginary friend who’s a grown-up standing next to her, and not Ruthie. She has nothing to say to Ruthie: she grabs her wrist and marches fast down the rest of the hill, trying to get them away from something, from Ruthie’s bad mood probably, and Ruthie is about to cry because she is not having a good day, her wrist is stinging very badly, nothing is going her way, but just as her mother is dragging her through the door of a small barn she sees again the man with the surprise, he has turned back to look at her, so much closer now, and when he reaches out to touch her she sees that he has long, yellowish fingernails and under his cape he’s made out of straw. He nods at her slowly. It’s going to be okay.

Inside the barn, Kate takes a breath. It actually worked. Nothing like a little force and velocity! Ruthie has been yanked out from under whatever dark cloud she conjured up. Kate will have to try that again. The doll room, strung with Christmas lights, twinkles around her merrily. Bits of tulle and fuzzy yarn hang mistily from the rafters. As her eyes get used to the dim barn and its glimmering light she sees that there are dolls everywhere, of all possible sizes, perched on nests of leaves and swinging from birch branches and asleep in polished walnut-shell cradles. Like the wooden animals, they seem to be descended from the same bland and adorable ancestor, a wide-eyed, thin-lipped soul with barely any nose and a mane of bouclé hair. Despite being nearly featureless, they are all darling, irresistible: she wants to squeeze every last one of them and stroke the neat felt shoes on their feet. Little cardboard tags dangle from their hands or ankles, bearing the names of their makers, the names of faithful and nimble-fingered Waldorf mothers who can also, it’s rumored, spin wool! On real wooden spinning wheels. What a magical, soothing, practical skill. Could that be what she’s missing — a spinning wheel? Kate is still searching for the proper tools in the hope that maybe they will make her more equipped. But no sooner has the idea alighted than with perfect, disheartening clarity she sees the lovely spinning wheel languishing alongside the white-noise machine and the child-sized yoga mat and the big expensive bag of organic compost intended for the theoretical vegetable garden, a collection of great hopes now gathering deadly spiders in the back of the garage. She glances down at Ruthie — is she charmed? Happy? — And then looks anxiously around the room at its sweet assortment of milky faces peeking out from under tiny elf caps or heaps of luxuriant hair. Please let there be some brown dolls! she thinks. And please let them be cute. Wearing gauzy, sparkly fairy outfits like the others, and not overalls or bonnets, or dresses made of calico. A brown mermaid would be nice for once. A brown Ondine. She squeezes her daughter’s hand in helpless apology: for even at the elves’ faire, where all is enchanting and mindful and biodegradable, she is exposing her again to something toxic.

But Ruthie isn’t even looking at the dolls because now she has to go pee very badly. Also she can’t find her giraffe. It isn’t there under her arm where she left it. Her baby giraffe! It must have slipped out somewhere. But where? There are many, many places it could be. Ruthie looks down at the floor of the barn, covered in bits of straw. Not here. She feels her stomach begin to hurt. It was her one special thing from the elves’ faire. A present from her mother. Maybe her last present from her mother, who might say, “If you can’t take care of your special things, then I won’t be able to get you special things anymore.” But she won’t need special things anymore! She is going to get a surprise, one that gets bigger and bigger the more she thinks about it, because she has a feeling the man is able to do things her mother is not able to do, like let her live in a castle that is also a farm, where she can live in a beautiful tower and have a little kitten and build it a house and give it toys. Also she’s going to have five, no, she means ten, pet butterflies.

The man is standing outside the barn, waiting for her, and maybe if she doesn’t come out soon enough he’ll walk right in and get her. Ruthie wants to run and scream, she can’t tell if she’s just happy or the most scared she’s ever been. Noooooooo! She shrieks when her father holds her upside down and tickles her, but as soon as he stops she cries, Again, again! She always wants more of this, and her father and mother, they always stop too soon.

The man in the cape won’t stop. The dolls in this room are children, children he has turned into dolls. Ruthie can help him, she’ll be on his team. She’ll say, “I’m going to put you in jail. Lock, lock! You’re in jail. And I have the key. You can never get out until I tell you.” Her friends from school, her ballet teacher, Miss Sara, her best friends, Lark and Chloe, her gymnastics coach, Tanya, her mommy and daddy, her favorite, specialest people, all sitting with their legs straight out and their eyes wide open and no one else can see them but her. She will be on the stage copying Dorothy, and they will be watching, she will do the whole Wizard of Oz for them from the beginning, and the man will paint her skin so it’s bright not brown and make her hair so it’s smooth and in braids and she looks like the real Dorothy. It will be the big surprise of their life!

Kate knows there must be a brown doll somewhere in this barn, and that it’s possibly perfect. If anyone can make the doll she’s been looking for, these Waldorf mothers can: something touchable and dreamy, something she could give her child to cherish and that her child would love and prefer instead of settle for. Considering that she’s been searching for this doll since the moment Ondine was born, $130 is not so much to spend. For every doll in this barn can be purchased, she’s just discovered; on the back of each little cardboard tag is a penciled number, and it’s become interesting to compare the numbers and wonder why this redheaded doll in a polka-dot dress is twenty-five dollars more than the one wearing a cherry-print apron. She wanders farther into the barn, glancing at the names and numbers, idly doing arithmetic in her head: how much this day has cost so far (seventeen for the giraffe, eight for the smoothies, two for raffle tickets) and how much it might end up costing in the future. Because if she does find the doll she’s looking for, it’d be wonderful to get that white shelf she’s been thinking about, a white shelf she could buy at IKEA for much less than the similar version at Pottery Barn Kids and nearly as nice, a shelf she could hang in a cheerful spot in Ondine’s yellow room from which the doll would then gaze down at her daughter with its benign embroidered eyes and cast its spell of protection. All told, with the doll and the giraffe and the smoothies and the shelf, this day could come in at close to $200, but who would blink at that? You’re thinking about your child.

Ladies and gentleman! Ruthie will say, Welcome to the show! And the man with the cape will pull back the curtains and everybody will be so surprised by what they see, they will put their hands over their mouths and scream. But Ruthie’s own surprise is already turning into something else, not a beautiful secret anymore but just a thing that she knows will happen, whether she wants it to or not, just like she knows she will have an accident in the barn and her giraffe will be lost and her mother will keep looking at the tags hanging from the dolls’ feet, looking closely like she’s reading an important announcement, looking closely and not seeing the puddle getting bigger on the floor. When it happens her mother will be holding her hand, she is always holding and pulling and squeezing her hand, which is impossible actually because Ruthie, clever girl, kind girl, ballet dancer, thumb sucker, brave and bright Dorothy, is already gone.

THERE CAME A TIME WHEN I, THE YOUNGEST OF TWELVE SONS, EACH of whom had imposed himself upon me in turn, could bear it no longer and fled the house. I left one morning without awakening either my parents or brothers, carrying only the clothes on my back. I traveled for many days, begging food where I could, until I came to a spacious castle of white stone lying in the lee of a mountain. It was the exact converse of the house in which I had been raised, the fourteen of us crammed into narrow rooms and someone’s elbow always gouging someone else’s eye. Here, I thought, I would be able to breathe freely and fully.

“Who lives there?” I asked the old woman who had shared her table with me.

“A king,” she said. “But he is unfortunate and a little mad and has lost his daughter to a troll upon a mountaintop. You would do better to stay far from him.”

“Mark my words,” I said to her, “I will find a place for myself with him,” and though she laughed at me this is exactly what I managed to do, entering into the service of the king.

HERE IN THE CITY LIVES A PRINCE WHOSE LEFT ARM IS LIKE ANY other man’s and whose right arm is a swan’s wing. He’s a survivor of an old story. His eleven formerly enchanted brothers were turned from swans back into fully formed, handsome men. They married, had children, joined organizations, gave parties that thrilled everyone right down to the mice in the walls.

The twelfth brother, though, got the last of the magic cloaks, and his was missing a sleeve. So — eleven princes restored to manly perfection and one with a little something extra going on. That was the end of that story. “Happily ever after” fell onto everyone like the blade of a guillotine.

Since then, it’s been hard for the twelfth brother. The royal family didn’t really want him around, reminding them of their brush with the darker elements, stirring up their guilt about that single defective cloak. They made jokes about him, and insisted they were only meant in fun. His young nieces and nephews, the children of his brothers, hid whenever he’d enter a room and giggled from behind the chaises and tapestries. He grew introverted, which led many to believe that swanarmedness was also a sign of mental deficiency.

So finally he packed a few things and went out into the world. The world, however, was no easier than the palace had been. He could land only the most menial of jobs. Every now and then a woman got interested, but it always turned out that she was briefly drawn to some Leda fantasy or, worse, hoped her love could break the old spell and bring him his arm back. Nothing ever lasted long. The wing was graceful but large — it was awkward on the subway, impossible in cabs. It had to be checked constantly for lice. And unless it was washed daily, feather by feather, it turned from the creamy white of a French tulip to a linty, dispiriting gray.

He’s still around, though. He pays his rent one way or another. He takes his love where he can find it. In late middle age he’s grown ironic, and cheerful in a toughened, world-weary way. He’s become possessed of a wry, mordant wit. Most of his brothers back at the palace are on their second or third wives. Their children, having been cosseted and catered to all their lives, can be difficult. The princes spend their days knocking golden balls into silver cups or skewering moths with their swords. At night they watch the jesters and jugglers and acrobats perform.

The twelfth brother can be found most nights in one of the bars on the city’s outer edges, the ones that cater to people who were only partly cured of their spells and hexes, or not at all. There’s the three-hundred-year-old woman who got nervous when she spoke to the magic fish and found herself crying, No, wait, I meant young forever into a suddenly empty ocean. There’s the crownletted frog who can’t seem to truly love any of the women willing to kiss him. In those places, a man with a single swan wing is considered lucky.

If you’re free one night, go out and find him. Buy him a drink. He’ll be glad to meet you, and he’s surprisingly good company. He tells a great joke. He has some amazing stories to tell.

When I was a kid in the suburbs of Chicago my family had a copy of the stories of Hans Christian Andersen, with beautiful, rather grotesque illustrations by Arthur Rackham, which I found so terrifying that I could not only not open the book but could not, on some of my more delicate days, enter the living room in which the book was shelved. This terror metamorphosed eventually, naturally, into fascination, and one day when I was six I forced myself to take down the book, open it, and gaze unflinchingly, unaccompanied, at its pictures. I believed that that day, I became a man.

THUNDER, WIND, AND WAVES. YOU IN YOUR CRADLE. YOU’VE NEVER heard these noises before and they are making you cry.

Here, child. Let me wrap you in a blanket and my arms, take you to the big chair by the fire, and tell you a story. My father’s too old and deaf to hear and you too young to understand. If you were older or he younger, I couldn’t tell it, this story so dangerous that tomorrow I must forget it entirely and make up another.

But a story never told is also a danger, particularly to the people in it. So here, tonight, while I remember.

It starts with a girl named Maura, which is my name, too.

ONCE PRIZED, NOW SHE LANGUISHES IN THE DRAWER, ONE OF MANY contained within a cedar chest. It stands beneath a window, shut against the day. His little dog guards it from intruders.

Exactly twelve months ago they had measured his ballroom together: 666 paces one way, 666 the other. Thriving they were then: fucking and spending. His kisses tasted like sweet tobacco, and after he gave her pleasure, her sex tasted like tobacco, too.

DESIREE, THE CHILD BRIDE, AND HER SISTER MIRANDA HAD GONE grave robbing for a wedding gown. In the north end of the cemetery, among the palatial mausoleums with their broken windows of stained glass where the ivy crept in, was the resting place of a young woman who’d been murdered at the altar while reciting her marital vows. The decaying tombstone, among the cemetery’s most envied, was a limestone bride in despair, shoulders as slumped as a mule’s, a bouquet of lilies strewn at her feet. Though her murder, by her groom’s jealous mother, had been long in the past, everyone knew that her father had had her buried in her gown of lace and silk.

“Can you believe we’re the only ones to have ever thought of this?” Miranda said, her knuckles bloodied from shoveling dirt, as she undid the delicate whalebone buttons lining the back of the skeleton’s dress.

Desiree, however, was less inclined to be enthused, and she climbed from the hole, distracted, to light a cigarette on the flame of the lantern. She uncorked a jug, gulped down a few fingers of whiskey, and squinted at the horizon of plains burned black by old prairie fires, the setting sun leaving behind a thin ribbon of violet. His heart isn’t mine, she thought.

The two sisters snuck back to Rothgutt’s Asylum for Misspent Youth, where the girls had lived since infancy, having been arrested then for taking candy from a baby. Desiree was fifteen now, Miranda fourteen, and Desiree’s impending wedding, to take place at midnight in the all-night chapel of a seaside amusement park, excited Miranda far more than it did Desiree. The engagement burdened Desiree terrifically. As Miranda cinched Desiree into the corpse’s stiff flounces of taffeta, then teased her straw-like hair into a glam fright-wig of poof and aerosol lift, Desiree plotted out how she might best jilt her betrothed.

“It needs a heavier blast of spritz,” Miranda said, leaning back with one eye closed, surveying Desiree’s hairdo. “Cover your face with this pillow.”

As she did so, and as Miranda gave her hair a heavy fogging with the DDT pump she’d filled with her own mixture of liquor and sap, Desiree could hear, in the muffling from the pillow, the thick rise and fall of the ocean, and she knew this was the mermaid ghost beckoning her to the tree. The mermaid ghost had something important to tell her.

Desiree stood and tossed the pillow aside, and lifted the bottom of her dress just above her bare feet so she could run from the room. “Flowers,” she told Miranda, and she hurried through the halls and into the walled-in courtyard and to the unruly thicket of rosebushes that concealed loose bricks. She got her hair snagged up in thorns but managed to escape Rothgutt’s unnoticed by the young nun who manned, up in the turret, night security with an archer’s bow and a narcotizing-tipped arrow.

About a mile away, in an open pasture overrun with musk thistle and cocklebur, stood a tree perfect for lynchings — one thick branch extended, leafless and sturdy, at a height that allowed for the knots of a noose, and yet prevented anyone who dangled there from gaining purchase with their toes tippied. At the base of the tree were the bones of many accused and convicted men and women, but also the bones of the mermaid who’d hung herself there only months ago. Her body had decayed quickly, plucked apart by the carrion that found her exotic flesh a delicacy. Whenever Desiree pricked the tip of her finger on the sharp end of a rib bone of the mermaid’s skeleton, and a drop of blood bubbled up, the mermaid’s ghost would appear among the many nooses that still lined the branch.

“Speak to me,” Desiree said as the mermaid appeared again, swinging and mute — a misty apparition. Desiree wrapped her arms around the tree, its black bark tearing at the rotted lace of her dress. She pressed her cheek against it. She looked closely at the ghost and noticed, for the first time, that the mermaid’s lips moved and trembled with words.

Desiree climbed the tree and eased out onto the branch, dangling down from it, walking herself over with her hands until she was next to the mermaid. In life, the mermaid’s tongue had been cut out, but in death she could speak in a hush that sounded like the froth of a breaking wave. It was while hanging there, in her stolen wedding gown, next to the ghost, that Desiree learned the story, the truth of what had happened between the mermaid and Axel, the boy Desiree was to marry at midnight.

IT TOOK A LONG TIME TO FILL THE ENORMOUS TANK IN THEIR LIVING room. Meredith dragged in the garden hose, and Ray adjusted the stepladder so that he could direct the water over the rim. Their rented Victorian on Divisadero featured cathedral ceilings. The tank was Plexiglas, fifteen feet tall and twelve feet wide, acquired through a phone call to his father’s company, a supplier of containers, whether to circuses, institutes of marine biology, or furniture conglomerates. Men used a gigantic dolly to convey the tank through the back garden and past the open French doors.

Meredith and Ray were water people. In their years together, they’d shared a fascination with anything aquatic. But they no longer went swimming, as they used to; they did not visit the ocean often, though it was a short drive away. She was afraid of scuba diving, and they enjoyed the fanciful notion that if they mastered the holding of their breaths, they could go lower than the snorkeling tourists and get to the stunning blue-lipped triggerfish in Hawaii, which they’d talked about visiting. And wouldn’t that be simply heaven.

But now they hardly talked at all.

I’D JUST MOVED BACK TO THE CITY, HAVING BEEN AWAY FOR A LONG time during which I’d accomplished quite a bit of work — I’m no judge of the quality — and was crashing at the apartment of a friend I’d run into at Borders bookstore after two weeks of hapless wandering. It had been snowing, but it always seemed to be snowing here those days; even when it wasn’t snowing one had the impression of snow about to or having just, and I was therefore cold. I was wearing only a flimsy red windbreaker, which is the same as saying I might as well have been wearing my bathing suit. I suppose it was pity when my friend asked where I was living or if I had a place to stay for the night. My general look of forlornness must have prompted him to say, I happen to have a free sofa, and he winked at me, which I considered very kind, very warm-hearted, of this friend who, as I recall, did not have a reputation for either warmth or kindness.

We were browsing the psychology section, he holding a book on the borderline personality and I holding a similar volume concerning narcissism. The maladies de jour, quipped my friend, if you don’t count drug addiction. Ah, yes, drug addiction, I said vaguely. I wasn’t sure I wanted to discuss drug addiction with this friend. I had known many drug addicts and they all were unbearably sad and I found it hard to be irreverent about them. One such was my own son, a pathetic person who wandered the streets homeless, perpetually checking himself into and out of detox units and trying to scam me into purchasing phony prescriptions. I wanted to forget about my son, to excise him from my mind, but the more I tried to do this, the more his presence asserted itself and I could see him, as if a movie were being played in front of my eyes, as a serious, overalled toddler and then as a tender, pudgy preteen with straight brown hair that hung over one eye.

Judge not and ye shall not be judged, warns the Bible, and actually I myself was homeless at the time, having just returned from a kind of vacation, really, during which I’d produced mountains of material (god knows how good any of it was). Still, I did not want to discuss my son.

My friend and I then repaired to the fiction section and explored the As — Jane Austen, all the Andersons, Agee, Alcott, and others, the usual great variety under A — and we each perused according to our tastes, slipping a book from the shelf, riffling through the pages, and replacing it, but not before chuckling over a title or author photo, the way you do.

I hadn’t slept for a week. I’d been away, and when I returned to this city I found everything changed. For example, a certain street I’d remembered as going one way toward the state capital now pointed in a different direction. Where this boulevard had been tree-lined, it was now flanked with tall soulless buildings. A store that used to sell small appliances had sprung up in the place of the junior college where I’d once taught freshman composition and all the cars had new-style garish license plates. I do not remember the state motto being ___________, but it’s possible I’d never really attended to the state motto. It was very cold, as I’ve said, snowing or about to — whereas before it had been temperate, tending toward sea breezes, balmy and blue. Now, no sea in sight (though I searched until I exhausted myself) and a strange odor permeated the air, a cold odor, not quite fresh, as of old snow, but so recent that it did not qualify as memory, but more like the fleeting space between nostalgia and dread, frozen into permanence.

My friend was blind in one eye, and though he assured me he’d always been blind in one eye — the result of a sleigh-riding accident when he was ten — I don’t remember him being blind in one eye. You must have hidden it well, I remarked. At this he bristled. It’s not something you can exactly hide, he retorted. He was holding a paperback edition of H. C. Andersen’s fairy tales — as far away from his face as his arms could stretch, because in addition to being blind in one eye he needed new reading glasses — and he insisted on sharing with me an excerpt from “The Snow Queen,” which is all about a terrifying being called the Snow Queen who kidnaps a boy called Kay. I didn’t want to be rude, but I’m not especially interested in fairy tales, no matter how capable and esteemed the author. In fact, “The Snow Queen” had a particularly perilous association for me, as she — the cold and beautiful woman — put me in mind of my mother, who had once read me that story. Therefore, while my friend read — it was a lady, tall and slender and brilliantly white.. — I let my mind wander.

For two weeks, I’d been looking for the sea, sleeping where I could under whatever canopy or ledge I could find — bridges, which had been abundant in the old days, had vanished without a trace, and so I was reduced to buttresses — the new gargoyles, snow-laden and hideous, the tiny balconies that used to be so fragrant and flower-laden, where people now smoked cigarettes, pitching the still-smoldering rockets below, almost burning me to death on several occasions.

I did not like to ask my friend — or anyone for that matter — about the sea because it is entirely possible that I am misremembering my old home. While he read Andersen’s “Snow Queen” in that excited way people have when they desperately want you to share their enthusiasm, their voices ratcheting up dramatically, my mind wandered the streets in the same manner that my body, for the past month, had wandered the streets. Still no sea.

My friend did not have the reputation for warmth or kindness, nevertheless he invited me to his apartment where he said there was an empty sofa with my name on it. He must have known I was extremely tired, yawning constantly and twirling and untwirling a strand of my hair around a forefinger, a habit when fatigued.

My friend said: All I ask is that you remember to put the shower curtain inside the tub. Otherwise the water will drip into the downstairs apartment and that bitch will have a fit.

That’s easy enough, I said. We hadn’t even arrived at his apartment when he gave me this rule about the water and shower. I wondered if there were other rules that would be more difficult to follow because, like anyone, I worry about unconscious behaviors, those which I cannot control, and then I worry that I am too old to change.

I don’t see well, said the friend apropos of nothing. We were walking down some avenue or other — I should say sliding down some avenue or other, because it had of course recently snowed and the road held the tracks of sleds and skis as well as snow tires and chains — but there was really nothing to see, I wanted to point out to my friend, everything was white, the sky, the street, and all the things that might have been visible on a day without snow were now covered with snow — rows of automobiles to the point that I wasn’t sure they were automobiles. For all I knew, they might have been great hulking sea monsters who had lost the sea like the rest of us.

Nevertheless, I gave my friend my arm, and he clutched my red windbreaker, which probably did the opposite of keeping me warm, it was of such a weird, cold material, and in this manner we eventually arrived at his apartment.

I was perfectly comfortable in my new surroundings; they beat the hell out of wandering the icy streets homeless, running into bands of thieves and drug addicts, my son not among those I’d encountered, thank god. I don’t know what I would have done if I’d seen my pathetic son. My heart no longer bleeds for him, though there was a time when my heart was smashed to smithereens. Enough said. Every time I try to banish him from memory here he comes again with his tilted gray eyes, even in the guise of who I did not see in the past month, as he who was conspicuously absent from my wanderings.

Being homeless is no picnic and, unlike my son, I did it drug-free, with only my thoughts for comfort, my belief (mistaken) that the sea lurked somewhere, waiting to restore me to my bearings.

My friend had a sofa, a TV, a lamp, a rug, a stove, a fridge, a double bed, a closet full of shoes, and a cat. I hadn’t realized he was such an austere fellow. He didn’t have a reputation for warmth or kindness, but inviting me to his apartment suggested that this reputation was not entirely warranted.

I slept on the sofa, as instructed. It was foamy, not lumpy, and its velvet material a cocoon of sorts. We all like to feel swathed, I think. Also, my friend gave me a blanket — a nice blue blanket which I wrapped around myself multiple times — and a pillow that used to belong to the cat. In fact, the cat shared the pillow with me at night, which I didn’t mind, the paddling and purring of the cat next to my ear as I slept, though I believe it colored my dreams.

The cat was cream-colored with large irregular splotches on its back, giving it the appearance of a small cow.

As cats go, it was medium-sized.

I dreamed of cows, therefore, and human infants who were pitched into dark holes and drug addicts sleeping on sofas belonging to other drug addicts.

The last time I saw my son he informed me that he was living in a “squat.” I told him that that fact struck me as kind of ignominious.

I remember the ocean as being a deep gray color laden, on good days, with streaks of white, which gave it its characteristic shimmer. The sky on such days was lit with what looked to be rags hanging from a celestial clothesline. Very beautiful, but spooky.

My friend was christened Frederick von Schlegel, after the German philosopher of the same name, but everyone called him Hans. My name was G, just the initial deprived of the clothing, I liked to say. The cat’s name was Fur and I won’t tell you my son the drug addict’s name.

I had been away for an indeterminate amount of time during which I completed a great deal of work. I kept residuals in a suitcase which, until I met Hans in Borders bookstore, I lugged around with me through the city. The bulk was housed elsewhere. I had no idea if any of it was successful. In more optimistic moments, I liked to think so; but eventually something would happen — the tiniest alteration in the atmosphere, such as the time when the crow who frequented the fire-escape railing growled at me through the window — and then I would be in despair over my accomplishments. At such times I felt I understood the impulses of those who scourged themselves with cato’-nine-tails and slept on beds of nails. I, too, craved punishment for the unworthiness of my effort, indeed the unworthiness of my being.

Other than the sofa, Hans’s apartment was replete with artificial flowers of every denomination. In the mornings, he would tend to these thousands with a translucent spray bottle, which would take a full hour. I could not shake the feeling that these flowers were about to speak, that there was more to them than twists of colored plastic or, in some cases, starched fabric. The cluster of pink ranunculus that sat stiffly on the coffee table in front of the sofa on which I slept seemed always about to discourse about psychology. The narcissist, they always seemed about to say, is generally a happier person than the comparatively hysterical borderline personality. Here they seemed to nod pointedly toward the daffodils, and I of course was reminded of my encounter with my friend at Borders bookstore when we each held those books on personality disorders only to abandon them (thankfully) for fiction. The tulips, I thought, seemed about to agree with me that the idea of personality disorders was kind of creepy and attractive at the same time, the notion that something surprising lurks under the surface of a person always a thrill, but perhaps, at times, an unwelcome thrill. On and on, the flowers seemed about to yak, and I admired their stamina. The fact that they all persisted in a season of profound winter was, I suppose, cause for celebration of some sort — or perhaps they were merely stir crazy, as was I.

Even so, I rarely left the apartment, but settled myself by the window where I indulged in an on-and-off sprightly communication with the crow. The crow would bring me news of my son, not welcome news, and much as I tried to dissuade him (or her) from these reports, she seemed to insist upon delivering them. You never know about the sensibilities of other species that are possibly impervious to that which we hold dear as humans. In this case, I was holding dear the absence of my son from my life. I cherished this absence as some might cherish inhabiting the premises of one who collected artificial flowers of every denomination and harbored a spotted cat.

The cat was not a communicator and, aside from our sleep time, kept its distance. There were times when I felt it was “giving me a look,” but many feel this way about cats on account of the shapes of their eyes and the fact that they rarely blink. Perhaps, though, they have the capacity to stare into the soul; if this one had been able to gaze into mine, I doubt it would have insisted on sleeping with me. It would have discovered a clotted mess of conflicting desires and repugnancies, all of which I hid behind my usual sangfroid.

Hans and I spoke rarely, and when we did our conversation tended to get caught up in snarls of misunderstanding. He was, as I’ve said, blind in one eye, and this was the central fact of his life, to hear him talk about it. Once I tried to tell him that being blind in one eye was not all that disabling and he nearly bit my head off. You have no idea, do you? he said incredulously, and we went on from there, back and forth, like a Ping-Pong tournament I remember participating in (and losing) as a ten-year-old. Nerve-wracking to see that little white ball — innocuous as it may have been — barreling toward you, as if it might cripple you for life, which is the spirit in which we fought, Hans and I. You are the most self-indulgent person I’ve ever met, he shouted, and I shouted, At least I’m not deluded, and he shouted, You could at least tidy up a little around here, and I shouted, I can’t hear myself think around here!

This last was a mean-spirited reference to Hans’s incessant theremin playing, the spooky sounds reminiscent of bad sci-fi or a copulating cat or, less frequently, a flock of warbling mourning doves. Hans had not yet mastered the instrument, which was a difficult instrument to master, though if you asked me, anyone with a decent soprano could mime the sounds pretty accurately by intoning ooooo and eeeee to the tune of something plaintive.

When he played O mio bambino cara, though, in spite of myself, I was moved. There he would stand, at the helm of his peculiar instrument, a lumpen figure of a man with a large square head, his mouth pressed in a grim line, his hands like big roast beefs paddling the air — and the tender spectacle of this sad, blind-in-one-eye man, along with the Puccini — all the more poignant for being a little off-key — would unfailingly bring tears to my eyes.

I was settling in like a cat settles in, surrendering myself to unfamiliar surroundings, marking my own tiny territory, as it were, which consisted of the sofa and a plastic chair I had moved to the window for the purpose of looking outside. It was always snowing or about to snow and it fascinated me to watch the snowflakes, which resembled swarms of large white bees.

I began to dread the crow’s visits, however, the news of my son always discouraging — he was caught scoring heroin and the police had broken his nose; he was contemplating injecting bleach into his arm, so despondent was he; he had checked himself into detox units, rehab programs, hospital psych wards; he was cohabiting with a Mormon bishop, a blond meth freak, a black cat who subsequently died in an alley. I had to cover my ears.

There came the day, as I knew it would, when I neglected to tuck the shower curtain inside the bathtub while taking my shower. Hans had gone for the afternoon — god knows where he went for hours at a time (I used to speculate that he had a woman stashed somewhere, a person who tended to his physical needs and complimented him on his taste in reading, his formidable intellect, and his sense of humor) — and when I had finished with my ablutions, I heard the angry pounding on the apartment door. Wearing only a towel, I peered through the little eyehole and perceived a tiny, misshapen woman with a large nose looking back at me.

You have some nerve, she said when I opened the door. My entire apartment is flooded, thanks to you. She was not as tiny as I’d thought, nor as misshapen. She was actually quite attractive in a cheerleaderish way — a certain type of big girl with crisp incisors renowned for a lack of irony. Permit me to help you clean up the mess, I said. Which is how I came to know Rita and her various boyfriends, one of whom was perched on top of a ladder reading a book on that first visit, where, for the rest of this tale, we will leave him.

Rita was a hairdresser with her own business, which had been recently revamped by a TV personality who went around revamping hairdresser salons. She was immensely grateful to this personage, claiming that her sales went up exponentially and her employees were far more respectful than before. All this was divulged after I’d done a fair job of sopping up the small lake in Rita’s bedroom with two bath towels. When I’d wrung the last of my shower effluent from the towel into a large bucket, Rita was frowning over me. Your hair needs attention, she said.

This is how I happened to become a regular patron of Rita’s Hair Salon. I’d been cooped up in Hans’s small rooms for so long, I’d forgotten the sheer gleam of the outside world — its rivets and whorls, its dizzying frontal assault when, on my first time out, the snow bees attacked me. Bigger and bigger they grew until they transformed to giant chickens in front of my eyes, squawking and revving up their wings like jet engines, but silent (paradoxically), perfectly silent, so that the squawks and the revving were only in imagination (nevertheless loud).

And this is a curiosity — how the mind creates its own disturbances and how there is almost a kind of synesthesia involved when it comes to the workings of the imagination, a kind of leakage among compartments. Indeed, in imagination everything connects and overlaps — a disturbing vision is capable of hurting the ear and vice versa, and what was past returns uncannily to infect our present moments. Not only memories but stories, even the stories we held most dear as children, and the thought of who we were as children reading those stories, or listening to them, our mothers’ warm breath on our necks.

Which is why I tried to banish all thoughts of my son.

Thankfully, Rita’s salon did not entail much of a trek. It was a pleasant enough place with purple walls and elderly women sitting under hair driers with pink curlers and Rita running around snapping her precision scissors, which she ultimately employed on my own coif, cutting, shaping, and spraying to such an extent that I did not recognize the severe and helmeted visage — like a Roman foot soldier! — that looked back at me from her mirror.

An old woman to whom Rita applied her energetic ministrations, from I believe Finland or Lapland, engaged me in conversation; she talked about her children and her abilities as a fortune-teller, a little diminished, she admitted, with her great age. Her children and her children’s children and even their children were getting on, she said, and the whole business made her feel very ancient, which in fact she was, displaying the ropy veins on her old hands with pride. Fabulous, no? she said. I am lucky to have made it so far as the world is endlessly — here she searched for the right word, then shook her head. The world is endlessly, she repeated, then laughed. Rita was teasing her hair into two towers, then situating tiny plastic windows in each. I like to do my part, said the old woman.

Then she took my hand in both of hers and read my palm. Ah, but you, she said. You have just been away on a, shall we say, sojourn, during which you completed a great deal of work. It is difficult, almost impossible, to judge this work — I’m not sure why. Then you wandered, looking for that which no longer exists. Then you happened upon a friend, not noted for his warmth and kindness, who took you in. Listen to the crow, she said. Follow the snow bees. Your son awaits you. At this the old woman began to weep so profusely that Rita gently escorted her to the restroom and I made my departure.

“The Snow Queen,” written by an unattractive, socially inept Dane, said Hans, is a sort of coming-of-age story. There are two children, a boy and a girl, who through a twist of fate become separated. The twist of fate is the Snow Queen herself, an enigmatic personage, beautiful and dangerous—“slender and dazzling”—who entrances the boy, invites him to ride on her sled, wraps him in her fur—“creep into my fur,” she entreats seductively — and takes him to her ice palace. We know she is dangerous because on the way to the ice palace, the Snow Queen says, “And now you will have no more kisses. or else I shall kiss you to death!”

But the best part of the story, said Hans, is that before any of the above occurred, the devils dropped a special mirror which smashed into millions of pieces and became lodged in people’s eyes and hearts, causing distorted views of the world. For some reason, don’t ask me why, I love the idea of that mirror. You love contradictions, I pointed out, and calamities. No, said Hans, I love the idea of lost souls.

The story is a ludicrously obvious tale of sexual seduction, piped up the iris. The beautiful queen, the “fur” that “envelopes” the boy, the sleigh ride to “another land,” even the palace with its postlapsarian, postcoital chill. who among us wants to surrender his penchant for enchantment?

We are all lost souls, Hans went on mournfully, and then he went mournfully to his theremin to play a version of “Over the Rainbow,” which sounded like a duck quacking. But I was still thinking about the Snow Queen, who had always reminded me of my mother, who also was given to furs and a cold house and, for years in my young life, inhabited a place of mystery. And this made me think of my son, which I did not want to do, so I changed the course of my thinking and instead thought of the power of the imagination.

A soldier came walking down the road, raw from encounters with the enemy, high on release, walking down the road with no money. The road was lined with trees, and every so often a hovel hunched right there at its edge, droopy and mean, with a dirt yard like a pale sack at its feet. The soldier thought he was walking home, but at the end of the road no one was there anyway. He passed a hovel with a little dog outside, barking on a rope. The dog’s dish was just beyond the reach of the rope, and he watched the dog run, barking, to reach it, catch itself by the neck at the end of the rope, bounce back yelping, and then do this repeatedly, his white ruff following the jerk of his head. The soldier could see that there was nothing in the bowl.

As he walked along, the trees grew broader, filling in space, the canopy more complete and farther above. He passed a little girl on the stoop in front of a blackened hovel door, breaking branches into pieces for tinder, wearing a fancy dress gone ragged. He could see, through the tattered ribbons and limp lace bows, that the fabric of the dress had once been bright, rainbow colored, and shiny. The girl’s eyes looked very big because of the circles under them, but her skin, smudged as it was with ash, seemed to pulse dimly, just as the shine of the dress did.

At the next hovel, an old woman was stirring a large iron pot set up on coals in the dirt yard. For an instant, the soldier thought that this was his mother, and he took his hands from his coat pockets to wave to her, but then he could see that it was not his mother; it was a witch. The resemblance, however, remained, and part of him thought that with all he’d done and seen he might have made his mother into this. Another part of him, though he could see she was a witch, still felt the kind of trust and longing you can feel toward a mother, even if she has become a witch after all these years.

The witch called out to him, her face rusty and sweating or beaded with steam, holding a crooked spoon in a hand concealed by her cloak: “Soldier! I see you looking at me with your weird eyes. I can see right through you, and I know what you want.”

The soldier said: “What’s in the pot?”

He thought, I bet you think I want to be a better man.

The witch said: “I know what you want. It’s money, and I know where you can get it, and there’s nothing to it, you just go and get it, and I know where.”

She was right. That’s what he wanted. He even forgot to ask her how it could be that she lived in a hovel and knew where there was money, but then there she was, and she was right, he wanted it, so the soldier forgot to ask about that, and about why the witch’s hovel sagged to the side and why she wore a witch’s rags, and if she had any sons who’d gone off to war, and he forgot about the pot, about what might be stewing and steaming in it, something awful, something good to eat or know. His mind cleared of everything except the idea of money.

“Tie this rope around your waist,” said the witch. “Hop down this black hole into this deep hollow tree. You’ll be tethered to me. Don’t be frightened of what you’ll see. Ha! You’ve seen worse than this. You’ll see some dogs. Wink at the first dog, blink at the next dog, and for the third, squeeze your eyes shut, and wait to see. You will find a little leather purse in the earth down there, and all I ask is you bring it to me. If you don’t, I won’t pull you up, and then you’ll have something to be frightened of.”

A SLENDER GIRL AND HER MOTHER LIVED IN OUR TOWN, GOOD PEOPLE but poor. They had nothing to eat, like everyone else in our town. The girl was always wandering in the forest. She walked, snapping the branches, scaring the squirrels, looking for something to put in her mouth. Here the story turns: The slender girl meets an old crone. The crone’s hand opens. In the open hand, a pot.

A little pot. From nothing, it appeared.

The crone said: When you are hungry, say Cook, little pot, cook and the pot will give you sweet porridge. And she said a few other words. A few words, the old crone smiled, and vanished from this tale. As for the girl, she did what the girls do, she ran to her mother. They whispered Cook, little pot, cook as they swallowed sweet porridge. And the pot cooked, and they kept whispering. And the porridge was good. But the story keeps turning: Here, they feed a neighbor’s aged child. Here, they share their porridge with a pigeon. Here, the girl walks to school where she learns from schoolbooks about cookbooks and from cookbooks about constitutions.

She walks. Her mother whispers: Cook, little pot, cook.

The pot cooked as the mother ate, the pot cooked. The mother ate and became full and asked the pot to stop—

But she had no words to make it stop.

Her slender girl knew the words. But she was at school learning of theorems and tomatoes and generals who liked tomatoes. The pot kept cooking. The mother kept eating. And the porridge kept bubbling over the top. And it cooked into the next paragraph and the next. And the kitchen floor was soon covered with porridge and the tables covered with porridge and the chairs. Then the stove covered, and then the bedroom where lights were on but the porridge put out even the lights. The town darkened.

And the pot did what pots do.

The porridge began to drip on the cobbled sidewalks, on the splintering staircases. The next house was covered with sweet porridge, the nearby street covered: its barbershop and its tailor shop and its bakery. And the neighbors sat on the pavement, eating biscuits and breads and sweet pies covered in porridge. The baker said, eat! eat! While his money-till filled with porridge.

The porridge was sweet.

And it rose to the branches of birch, the branches of ice, and the birds landed, and swam, and washed themselves. And they ate. And dogs swam, and ate. And the chickens made tiny noises. And then they began to drown. Everyone prayed for the pot to stop cooking, and everyone ate.

No one could stop.

Only one house remained that was not covered with sweet porridge to its copper roof. One house. All the neighbors sat on its roof and ate, their feet dangling in porridge. It was heavy on their feet. It was hard to pull their feet out, but they pulled. At last. The girl returned from school. A little girl swimming in the porridge on two large books. She yelled: Stop, little pot, stop! The townspeople all looked at one another and shook their heads.

ONCE’T, YOU COULD SPIT ON THE GROUND AND GROW WATER.

They said back then that the rain would follow the plow. They lied.

Our plows were painted grass green, and they broke open the green grass prairie hereabouts. Where it split and opened up, I swear, you could hear it leak, spitting a little spit, spitting a hiss-like hiss.

Spit of steam here, spit of steam there, the ground a rolling boil, all that steam boiled up into a smoke of steam.

The water rained from the ground pouring into the sky sighing as it went. The water, it up and went.

After a while all that water emptied into a big ol’ cloud wall that hanged down from the sky and hugged the ground that fed it.

That big ol’ cloud wall, it was made up of all these little drops of steam-water and seeded inside each of all these drops of steam-water were itty-bitty grains of dust that got carried away, snug, that the water would stick to.

When that big ol’ cloud begun to move with the big ol’ wind a-pushing it over the land, the grains of dust inside, they sanded the dry ground beneath it into more dust.

More more dust.

More dust got swallowed up by the dust and soon it was just dust in the big ol’ cloud. That and a little paste of mud.

The land was wore away.

The land was wore away. The land was turned into air. We breathed it in.

The land, it filled our lungs like food filled up a stomach, but those were empty, our stomachs, even as we got to eating the dirt. We were eating dirt all the time as it up and went.

Jack, he kept burying his daddy.

Jack kept to burying his daddy in the dirt as it up and went.

Nobody farmed anymore. Nobody farmed.

We’d plow and the furrows would flatten. We’d plant and the seeds, they’d be blowed away. No need to hoe since the dirt-wind and the dirt-cloud scoured the ground-up ground clean of every weed.

Jack, he kept burying his daddy.

In that dirt-wind, Jack, he kept to burying his daddy.

Jack, he’d dig him a hole and roll his daddy, in his winding, into it.

The tailings Jack tossed into the hole turned to smoke on his shovel as he tossed them, trying to fill the hole he dug.

A whole spade full of soil smoking off the blade as he aimed for the hole with his daddy, in his winding, in it.

Jack, he’d end up scooping the sandy sides of the hole over the sides of the hole to fill the hole up.

Jack, he dozed the dust with his feet, pushed the dust into the hole to get it out of the wind, get the ground below ground out of the dirt-wind even as dirt-dirt washed away in the dirt-wind.

He’d finally get a blanket of that dirt-dirt over the body of his daddy, wrapped in the rotting winding.

Jack, he’d sit on top the dust he’d swept into the hole, but not to rest so much as to see if he could hold the dust down, keep it from drifting away again.

But the dust, it drifted away again.

He watched coils of dirt-dirt snake away from right under where he sat on it.

And Jack, he’d sink into the hole he dug as the dirt-dirt washed away from right under where he sat on it, wash away in the dirt-wind.

’Fore you know it, Jack, he would be all the way in the hole, sinking into it, with his daddy in his winding cloth. ’Cept there was no hole no more.

Jack, he’d stand back up and start to digging another hole to bury his daddy, his daddy in his rotting winding, lying in a heap on the shifting ground at his feet.

This went on a spell.

About then, the brindle cow, she run dry.

The brindle cow, she up and dried up.

Jack, he was in no ways surprised by this.

Jack, he’d been feeding the brindle cow wood from the barn, the red clapboards stripped of paint and sanded smooth by the dirt-wind.

Jack, he’d be back there massaging the bag to get the brindle cow to let down. The brindle cow, she’d be chewing and chewing the old barn wood all the time Jack was there in the back trying to get her to let down.

Jack, he’d work up a spit to spit on his hands to rub the boss’s bag to get her to let down.

Before she give out, she’d give just one-half tin cup of rheumy cream.

To get that, Jack’d use all four teats for that one-half tin cup of rheumy cream the brindle cow would give after Jack’d massage her shrinking bag to get her to let down.

The brindle cow, she’d graze the sticking-out tops of the buried bob-wire fences.

The fence pickets and the bob-wire, they would knock the dirt-dust out of the wind and all get buried in the drift.

The brindle cow she would graze the fence tops, work the staples loose.

The brindle cow, she’d lick rust right off the bob-wire. Her big ol’ tongue licking the rust right off the wire.

Jack, he found himself one of them ol’ magnets. He found one of them big ol’ bar magnets and fed it to the brindle cow.

The ol’ magnet, it done lodged up in the crop.

That ol’ magnet up in the crop, it draws all the hardware the brindle cow grazed on.

That ol’ magnet, it didn’t do no good.

That ol’ magnet, it didn’t do no good at all ’cause the brindle cow went dry as a bone.

The brindle cow, she stopped altogether letting down.

The brindle cow, she stopped altogether letting down, stopped giving milk, not even giving up a stringy spit of milky milk.

Jack’s momma, she says to Jack to fetch the brindle cow into town.

Jack, Jack’s momma says, fetch that ol’ stopped-up cow into town.

She’ll fetch a price, Jack’s momma says, for her stringy meat if nothing else.

Jack’s momma says the brindle cow’s hide’s done been already tanned by the wind. Her coat, she says, done been wore away. Her horns and hoofs done been hollowed out by the same dirt-wind wore the coat clean away.

And she’s full-up with all that scrap, Jack’s mamma says.

Jack’s momma, she tells him to sell the scrap after the slaughter of the ol’ brindle cow.

Jack, he says he will.

And the bones, Jack’s momma says to Jack, fetch home them inside bones for bread.

Jack, he says he will.

And the tongue, Jack, Jack’s momma says, fetch that home too. We can ring it out, ring it dry of water, the water that got leeched from the rust she’s been licking from the bob-wire.

Jack and the brindle cow, they up and go, gone behind the big ol’ cloud wall hanging from the sky and sweeping up dirt-cloud of dust at its feet.

Right away, Jack, he sees nothing but the cloud of dirt all around him.

Jack, he can’t even see the brindle cow on the other end of that there rope.

Jack, he nickers. Jack, he says, come, boss, he says.

Jack, he hears the brindle cow say moo. Jack, he can’t see her inside the dirt-cloud all around.

This goes on for a spell.

Then Jack and the brindle cow come to the forest. Jack, the brindle cow, and the forest are all in the dirt-cloud all around.

The forest isn’t made up of no trees. It is a forest of old windmills. Hundreds of windmills. Hundreds. The windmills’ blades make an aching sound in the gloom when the snaggle-tooth blades turn in the gritty dirt-wind.

The snaggle-tooth blades turn over out of sight inside the gritty ground-up dirt-cloud there overhead Jack and the brindle cow mooing in the gloom.

The windmills, they are only milling wind.

The windmills’ screw gears, they done been wore away, been stripped clean by the gritty wind.

The windmills can’t lift no water. No water to lift.

The windmill in the windmill forest done sucked up all the water out of the ground hereabouts long ago. The windmill forest, it is sinking into the ground, into the hollow place where all the water used to be.

All them windmills, they can’t lift no more water. No water to lift. The windmills, they pump sand.

Jack and the brindle cow, they walk through the forest of the criss-crossed windmill towers, the windmill blades making their aching sound overhead.

The brindle cow, she hold up, stops to take a bite from the wood on one of them criss-crossed windmill towers. The brindle cow, she can’t be budged.

That’s when a man, he’s been there all the time, says to Jack, say, what you got there at the end of that rope.

Jack, he says back to the man that he has a brindle cow all dried up he’s taking to slaughter somewhere over there on the other side of the dirt-cloud.

The man, he says I can take her off your hands, says he’s got something here way better than a dried-up brindle cow to trade.

Jack, he considers this for a spell.

Jack, he considers all the digging he’s been doing, trying to keep his daddy in the ground. Jack, he considers what his momma said about the scrap metal and the hide and the sopping tongue and such.

Jack, he considers the big bones inside the brindle cow and the bone bread his momma wants to make with them.

The man, he says, after a spell, says what’s it going to be?

Jack, he says to the man to tell him what’s he got.

The man, he takes out a glass vial, a vial stopped up with a rubber stopper. The man, he holds it up right up to Jack’s eye so as Jack can see into it.

Jack, he looks and looks.

Jack, he sees inside there an ocean of silver in the vial. An ocean, it has itty-bitty waves breaking and everything. Silver spume and such.

Jack, he is fair amazed.

The man, he says that that there is beads of quicksilver eating each other up. That there is melted metal that don’t need no fire to melt. That there is magic beads.

Jack, he can’t take his eyes off of them beads of quicksilver swallowing each other up inside the glass vial.

The man, he says this here is the rarest of the rare. Metal made outa water, water made outa metal. You go and spread that there metal-water on any ol’ ground and see what grows up.

Jack, he’s done thinking.

Jack, he up and takes the glass vial with the beads of quicksilver from the man right there and then.

Jack, he hands over the rope to the man. Somewhere out there on the other end of the rope is the brindle cow.

The brindle cow, she moos in the gloom.

Jack, he hears the man and the brindle cow go off that-a-way.

Jack, he turns the other way for home. The quicksilver in the glass vial, it gives off its own kind of silver light in the gloom.

The windmill blades over Jack’s head, they make that aching sound, turning in the dirt-wind up inside the dirt-cloud.

This goes on for a spell.

Jack’s momma, she asks Jack what he’s got to show for the brindle cow. Jack’s momma, she’s been waiting for Jack for a spell. Dirt-drifts, they have drifted around her skirts where she waited for Jack on the house stoop.

Jack, he shows her there then what he had to show for the brindle cow.

Jack, he shows his momma the glass vial glowing in the gloom, filled up with the itty-bitty ocean of water-metal and metal-water.

Jack’s momma, she’s angry.

Jack, says Jack’s momma, what about all that scrap metal and the leather tanned by the dirt-wind and the waterlogged tongue of that ol’ stopped-up brindle cow?

Jack’s momma, she says what about the big bones I was going to grind down to bonemeal to make our bread?

Jack, he says to his momma that there is quicksilver inside the glass vial, the rarest of the rare. Metal that ain’t hard like metal. Water that ain’t wet like water.

Jack, he says there ain’t no telling what it can do.

Jack’s momma, she don’t say nothing, takes the glass vial right out of Jack’s hands. The quicksilver inside the glass vial, it’s glowing a little in the gloom.

Jack’s momma, she considers for a spell.

Then, sudden-like, Jack’s momma, she up and unstops the stopper there and just like that pours the water-metal metal-water on the ground.

The quicksilver is quick, quicker than quick, glows in the gloom as it slides through the dirt-air to the ground.

Jack’s momma, she says this here is not worth a bucket of warm spit.

The quicksilver, it splashes on the ground. Where it splashes it kicks up little clouds of dusty dust. The way the quicksilver splashes, it makes a wet pattern like a map of the world ’cept the wet parts is the land and the dry parts is the vast ocean tracts I have only heard about in stories.

Jack and Jack’s momma, they look down on the ground where the quicksilver, it makes a map of the world in the dirt.

Both of them stare as the silver-wet of the quicksilver sinks into the dirt-dirt, making a patch of gray mud that, right there and then, begins to dry up on the spot. But it isn’t so much drying up as it is drying down. The wet soaking into, seeping into, that ground-up ground.

Jack and Jack’s momma, they both stand still for a spell. They watch what little wet there was in those quicksilver beads turn into a big ol’ dry.

In no time, even the big ol’ dry, it’s all dried up or, more exact, all dried down.

Jack and Jack’s momma, they stand stock-still for a spell. Still long enough that the drifts of dirt begin to cover Jack’s feet. Still long enough for the drifts of dirt to begin to cover the hem of Jack’s momma’s dress.

Enough, Jack’s momma says after a spell.

Not enough, Jack thinks after another spell of saying nothing.

And both of them fall asleep then and there.

This goes on for a spell.

Then in the dark-dark of the night, Jack, he wakes up to take a leak. Jack, he wakes up and gets up from where he fell asleep on the dirt. Jack, he makes water.

In the yard, Jack, he makes water. The yard, it is so dark, Jack, he can’t see the leak he is taking.

Jack, he hears the water he is making hit the ground. The water, it sounds like it sizzles when it hits the ground-up ground, sizzles like it turns to steam the second it strikes the ground.

After Jack takes a leak, after he has made water, Jack he goes back inside to his pallet of hard-packed dirt.

That night is when the thing growed up out of the ground-up ground.

The thing didn’t need no sun to grow since it growed up in the nighttime.

That nighttime while Jack and Jack’s momma sleep on their pallets of hard-packed dirt, the thing commences to grow.

First, there is this wrenching sound followed by a thumping bunch of big ol’ hollow booms followed by a slide-whistling, followed by a scale pings and plucks followed by a string breaking on an out-of-tune fiddle followed by the kinks being peened out of an ol’ washboard followed by a mucus-y pneumatic sneezing followed by the crinkling up of a tinfoil ball the size of the moon followed by the lumbering howl of a two-handed whipsaw being doubled up and honed with a horsetail bow to within an inch of its life to play a kind of toothy crosscut lullaby of ripped-up half-notes cut in half. And all of this followed by the ears of Jack in the dark-dark, a dark darker than dark on account of the dirt-cloud doubling the dark of the night.

Then, in the dark, there commences the no-mistaking-it sound of water running, water banging in plumbing that hasn’t been bled yet, water glugging through too narrow a gauge pipe, water over a rapid, water filled with air bubbles, water fizzing with seltzer. Water plumb out of its mind with wet.

In the dark-dark, Jack hears it all. Jack, he heard the metal sounds and the water sounds growing together in the dark-dark.

In the morning, when the dark of the dark turns less dark and the dark becomes more of the regular gloom, Jack, he gets up off his dirt pallet and sees what he can see.

Jack, he sees that it is no longer dark-dark like the night but he also sees it isn’t the regular gloom. The thing that growed up through the night with sound of metal and sound of water is so big as to cast a shadow on all the shade.

Out of the ground-up ground all around the wind-stripped wood of the wore-out house of Jack and Jack’s momma, Jack, he sees these big ol’ struts made of metal.

Jack, he sees a grove of these big ol’ struts all studded with rivets, all trussed up and down with guy wires and ratlines growing out of the ground-up ground.

The big ol’ struts, they’re all riveted up and rigged all around with guy wires and ratlines, the big ol’ struts also got rungs.

The rungs, they’re tack-welded to the big ol’ struts.

Jack, he looks up into the depths of the gloom of the dirt-cloud. Jack, he looks deep into the cloud.

Jack, he can’t see no end to the big ol’ struts growing up together into the depths of the dirt cloud.

Jack, he grabs hold of one of them tack-welded rungs.

Jack, he commences to climb one of them trussed-up struts.

Jack, he has no idea where he’s going.

Jack, he has no idea where he’s going but he gets going, climbs up them tack-welded rungs, hand over hand, up into the depths of the dirt-cloud.

The climb, it takes a spell.

After a spell, Jack, he looks back down from the rung he is hanging on to, back down through the rigging of the guy wires and ratlines going every which way between the big ol’ struts. Jack, he sees nothing down below but the dirt-cloud and nothing up above but more dirt-cloud.

Jack, he commences to climb again.

Jack, he climbs up those rungs so long and so far he sleeps in the rigging of the guy wire and the ratlines.

After a spell of more climbing up the rungs and more sleeping in the guy wires and ratlines, Jack comes to the top of the dirt-cloud.

Jack, he pokes his head up above the top of the top of the dark ground-hugging dirt-cloud. And Jack, he sees out over the vast plain of the top of the dirt-cloud, a desert of dirt-cloud, and floating above that desert are cloud-clouds, all white and lovely-like.

Jack, he pokes his head through the top of the dirt-cloud, sees the cloud-clouds stretching above the dirt of the dirt-clouds, and then and there he ends up on a catwalk.

Jack, he ends up on this here catwalk after all that climbing up the rungs of the big ol’ strut.

This here catwalk, it rings around a big ol’ cloud, but this big ol’ cloud is different from the white and lovely-like clouds floating all around it in the clear-clear air above the dirt-cloud.

This big ol’ cloud, Jack, he sees, it’s all made out of metal, metal studded all around with rivets and such. The big ol’ metal cloud is being held up by the big ol’ struts with the guy wires and the ratlines right at the top of the dirt-cloud. The big ol’ metal cloud, it looks like it is floating there, a big ol’ bar of soap floating on top of a bathtub of dirty cloud water.

Jack, he walks for a spell on the catwalk.

Jack, he walks on the catwalk and on one side, Jack, he sees all the while the white lovely-like clouds hanging in the deep blue sky, and on the other side, Jack, he sees the sheet metal of the big ol’ metal cloud with its rivets and seams and such.

Walking on the catwalk, Jack, he comes to a hatch cut into the metal of the big ol’ metal cloud.

Jack, he climbs through the hatch, he climbs inside the big ol’ metal cloud, and inside there, here is this here other catwalk that Jack climbs down onto.

It is dark inside that big ol’ metal cloud. It is dark and Jack, he waits a spell until his eyes can see the light that’s in the dark.

And in the light inside the dark, Jack, he sees nothing but water. Inside the metal cloud, Jack sees nothing but water in an ocean of water stretching away to forever and ever.

Inside the metal cloud, Jack, he sees this ocean as far as he can see. This here ocean, it looks like an ocean with ocean waves breaking over each and such right up to the catwalk where Jack, he’s standing.

Inside the metal cloud, the breeze in there is freshening. The freshening breeze, it sails over the endless ocean, over the breaking waves and such, and lights on Jack’s grimy sweaty face.

Jack, he just lets that breeze light on his face. Jack, his face, it is all grimy and sweaty. And the breeze sailing over the ocean lighting on his face washes all that away.

The breeze, it lights on Jack’s face with all its grime and sweat from climbing up inside the dirt-cloud, from living on the ground-up ground for so long.

The freshening breeze, it lights there, it licks the grime and the sweat right off of Jack’s face.

This goes on a spell.

And Jack, he commences to cry right then and there. Jack, he’s crying on that there catwalk, looking out over that endless ocean he sees in the light of the dark.

Jack, he cries these big ol’ tears. These big ol’ tears, they roll down Jack’s once’t grimy and sweaty skin of his face. And the breeze lighting there freeze-dries them big ol’ tears right then and there.

That’s when a woman, she’s been there all the time, says to Jack, say, what you got there?

Jack, he says back to the woman that he don’t know what she means.

The woman, she says I can take them off your hands, off your cheeks. The woman, she says she’s got something here way better than them there freeze-dried tears.

Jack, he considers this for a spell.

Jack, he considers all the walking he’s been doing, all the climbing. Jack, he considers all the dirt and all the water. Jack, he considers not even knowing about them there freeze-dried tears on his once’t grimy and sweaty face.

Jack, he considers the big ol’ tears on his face, how the freshening breeze squeezed them right out of him and freeze-dried them on his face.

The woman, she says, after a spell, says what’s it going to be?

Jack, he says to the woman to tell him what she’s got.

The woman, she takes out a glass dish, covered all over with a glass lid. The woman, she holds it up right up to Jack’s eye so as Jack can see into it.

Jack, he looks and looks.

Jack, he sees inside there a frozen ocean of silver stuck on the glass dish. A frozen ocean, it has itty-bitty frozen waves breaking and everything. Frozen silver spume and such.

Jack, he is fair amazed.

The woman, she says that that there is flakes of iodide frozen on the dish. That there is frozen metal that don’t melt. That there is magic flakes.

Jack, he can’t take his eyes off of them flakes of iodide frozen on the glass dish.

The woman, she says this here is the rarest of the rare. Metal made outa no water, air made outa metal that don’t melt. You go and spread that there air-metal on any ol’ cloud and see what grows down.

Jack, he’s done thinking.

Jack, he up and takes the glass dish with the flakes of iodide from the woman right there and then.

Jack, he chips off the big ol’ freeze-dried tears from his face, hands them over to the woman.

Jack, he sees the woman turn to a purple smoke in front of his eyes right then and there.

Jack, he smells the blood in the freshening breeze.

Jack, he watches the purple smoke turn and twist. The iodide frozen on the glass dish, it gives off its own kind of silver light in the dark light inside the big ol’ metal cloud.

The ocean waves below Jack’s feet on the catwalk, they make that breaking sound, grinding down the waves into water.

The smoke, it turns and twists going up and up.

The turning and twisting smoke, it done turns into a stairway of smoke. The smoke, it done turns to a stairway right in front of Jack’s eyes.

Jack, he knows there is more climbing to be done, knows he will have to climb these smoke stairs, turning and twisting.

Jack, he commences to start climbing the smoke stairs with the dish of iodide flakes giving off that silver light inside the big ol’ metal cloud filled up with an ocean that goes on forever and ever.

This goes on for a spell.

The smoke at the top of the smoke stairs, it done drilled a Jack-sized hole in the metal of the top of the metal cloud.

Jack, he sees up ahead the hole the smoke done drilled there.

Jack, he sees the sunlight pour in through the hole the smoke done drilled.

The sunlight, it pours through the hole.

The sunlight, it pours through the hole and goes right for them iodide flakes under the glass lid on the glass dish.

Up inside there, up inside there the iodide flakes begin to melt. But them flakes don’t melt as much as they don’t turn into no water. Them iodide flakes, they turn right into more smoke turning and twisting under the glass lid.

Jack, he climbs himself right through that Jack-sized hole the smoke stairs done drilled in the top of the metal cloud. Jack, he climbs right out of that there hole in the cloud.

Jack, he is standing on top of that there cloud.

Jack, he is standing on top of that there cloud holding in his hand the glass-covered glass dish holding the cloud of purple smoke that once’t was the silver flakes of iodide.

Jack, he lifts up the glass lid right then and there. And the smoke, it commences to expand. The smoke it begins to break into a million grains of smoke carried by the wind up there in the blue-blue sky.

Jack, he blows with the breath from his dirt-filled lungs the last of the smoke from the dish.

Jack, he sees the million grains of smoke go looking for the million cloud-clouds all white and lovely-like.

Jack, he’s done climbing.

Jack, he is on top of the big ol’ metal cloud and he is done climbing.

Jack, from way up there, he watches in the blue-blue sky the grains of smoke go looking for the cloud-clouds all white and lovely-like.

Jack, he’s done climbing, he’s done climbed all he was going to climb.

Jack, up there in the air, works up a bit of spit in his dry-dry mouth. It ain’t much but enough.

Jack, he works up some spit.

Jack, he leans over the edge of that big ol’ metal cloud he done climbed. He looks down into the dirt-cloud hanging there down below.

Jack, he spits.

CATS WENT IN AND OUT OF THE WITCH’S HOUSE ALL DAY LONG. THE windows stayed open, and the doors, and there were other doors, cat-sized and private, in the walls and up in the attic. The cats were large and sleek and silent. No one knew their names, or even if they had names, except for the witch.

Some of the cats were cream-colored and some were brindled. Some were black as beetles. They were about the witch’s business. Some came into the witch’s bedroom with live things in their mouths. When they came out again, their mouths were empty.

The cats trotted and slunk and leaped and crouched. They were busy. Their movements were catlike, or perhaps clockwork. Their tails twitched like hairy pendulums. They paid no attention to the witch’s children.

ONCE THERE WAS A YOUNG MAN NAMED TEAGUE O’KANE. HE WAS probably too handsome for his own good, and certainly too handsome for the good of others, since he was loved by every boy and girl that he met, and he broke hearts by the dozen. He lived in Orlando, and had successfully auditioned for a boy band, and made no secret of this. In fact, it was usually the second thing he told people, after his name.

One night he went out dancing with his many friends, and, as was the usual case, many people wanted to dance with him. People approached him on the dance floor, and he might dance with them or he might not; it all depended on how he was feeling, and upon the quality of their groove, which he could evaluate at a distance, and in the semi-dark, so sometimes they were still a long way off when he had decided that they hadn’t made his cut, and he turned his back on them. On this night there was the usual crowd of aspirants, and some of them were quite pleasant-looking, and others were quite ordinary, and some of them were excellent dancers, and some of them were merely enthusiastic. It was a typical night, until something extraordinary happened.

Teague was minding his own business, sort of dancing with a handsome girl on his left, but also sort of dancing with a pretty boy on his right, when an absolutely hideous man came bopping up to him and audaciously invaded his space, bumping aside the boy and the girl and doing a nasty grinding dance with his hips and his groin. Teague turned his back to him, but the man only stepped around and presented himself again. He was really quite amazingly ugly; Teague placed him somewhere in his fifties, if not his sixties, and he had flabby arms, and two chins, and terribly ill-advised hair. “Dance with me, Teague O’Kane!” he cried, and tried to put his hands on Teague’s handsome hips, but Teague shook him off, and said, “Get away from me you old troll!” But he grabbed at him again twice more, and twice more Teague called him a troll and told him to get away. The man went away after that, but no sooner had he gone but a hideous woman had taken his place, a woman so ugly she could have been the troll’s sister, with her own flabby arms, and her own abundance of chins, and her own terribly ill-advised hair. “Get away from me you hag!” Teague shouted, not even giving her the chance to ask him to dance, and he turned and danced away hurriedly to another side of the floor.

But three more times the old hag came and found Teague, once in the hinterlands of the dance floor and once at the bar and finally in line for the men’s bathroom. He was standing there minding his own business when he felt a tickle on the back of his neck. He turned around and saw the woman standing there.

“Hey, baby,” she said. “You want to dance?”

“Did you just touch me?” Teague asked.

“Maybe I did and maybe I didn’t,” she said. “But that isn’t the question. The question is, do you want to dance with me?”

“Leave me alone,” Teague said. “Don’t you speak English?”

“I won’t ask you but one more time, Teague O’Kane,” the woman said. “Won’t you dance with me?”

“Not in a gajillion years,” Teague said, and he gave her a little push, which he regretted almost immediately, even though she didn’t exactly fall down, but only stumbled back a few paces.

“That’s a long time, Teague O’Kane!” the old hag said, and laughed at him, and it occurred to Teague to wonder how she and the man might have known his name, because even though he had successfully auditioned for a boy band, he wasn’t famous yet.

“My night is ruined,” he said to the urinal, rather too loudly, because a voice came out of the stall next to him, saying, “Mine too! Mine too!” in between horking exclamations of vomit.

“Mine’s ruined worse,” Teague said, aware that he was being peevish, and that he should go right back out on the dance floor and pretend like he hadn’t been nearly molested by a hag and a troll, and that he had not spent his whole night so far oppressed by other people’s ugliness and audacity. He should just get back out there and dance, and so he tried, but his heart just wasn’t in it; his groove was compromised, and his moves, even his signature moves, somehow felt not like his moves. It was like someone else was dancing in his body, somebody who was sad, and ugly, and lonely. He decided to go home alone, and texted seven of his friends to announce that to them, because they were always texting him to say they were going home alone, as if that were his responsibility, or as if he should feel bad because they were going home alone and he was not.

He lived with his father in a big house on a lake, or rather, he lived very close to his father, in a much smaller house next door to the big house. The little house was a present on his sixteenth birthday from his father, who maintained that a boy needed independence as well as supervision, and so he had made his son a gift of the little house, but outfitted it with cameras to keep watch over Teague and make sure that he never did anything to compromise their good name. There was a driver who would have gladly come to fetch him from the club, but because he was feeling agitated from his bad night he decided to walk home, though the way was far. But he liked to walk whenever something unpleasant happened to him, because he could pretend that he was walking away from whatever it was that was troubling him. And as he walked away from the club, down the brightly lit streets of the downtown, and then the half-lit sidewalks of the old city, and finally the darkened paths of his father’s estate, the horrible man and woman, and the bad time they had engendered with their saggy asses and their grabby hands, seemed more and more remote. He had almost forgotten about them entirely by the time he was on the last stretch of his walk, when he had entered into the orange groves that surrounded the house, and could see the light in his father’s room twinkling through the trees. Perhaps, he thought, Father has sensed that I had a bad night, and is waiting up to comfort me.

He heard voices on the path ahead then, and wondered briefly if his father had come out of the house to welcome him. He stopped and leaned against a tree, and a heavy wind stirred the branches all of a sudden, making the fruit swing gently, and pummel him softly on the shoulders and face. The wind carried the voices to him, and he heard now clearly that there were many people ahead, and that none of them was his father. Burglars! he thought, and then, Admirers! because it had already been the case that various persons had invaded their property before both to steal from his father and to plead a case of love to Teague. He bent down to take up a small thick branch at his feet. It was light and soft with rot, and wouldn’t hurt anybody if he hit them with it, but he thought it would make a good tool for a threat.

The wind shifted, and for a moment the voices were silent, and Teague cocked his head and squinted his eyes. “I’ve got a stick,” he said, but not very loudly. A bell sounded, tinny and high, and the night seemed to darken. The voices returned in a rush of laughter, and then Teague saw figures — all he could make out was the shape of them — capering through the trees, skipping and dancing and falling now and then to roll briefly on the ground before springing up again. He raised his stick up and said it again, much louder this time, as they rushed toward him: “I have a stick!” “And a pretty stick it is!” said a voice that was very familiar, though it took him a moment to place it. “As pretty as the hand that wields it, eh, Porcupine?” The lady from the club came walking out of the gloom, and though the night stayed just as dark, she seemed oddly lit somehow, as if the sun were shining only for her and only on her. She was just as ugly as she ever had been, and seemed even shorter and more bent, and yet somehow she seemed less pathetic than she had in the club.

“Oh, yes, Aardvark, my dear,” said another familiar voice. The man from the club came up behind her and put his arms around her, placing his head just to the side of her neck. Of course they were friends, Teague thought. That made perfect sense, even if it made no sense that they had just popped out of the night within sight of his house.

“What are you doing here?” Teague asked them in a whisper-shout. “Get off my property!”

“Duly, duly,” said the woman. “Duly and in time. But first, won’t you dance with me?”

“No!” Teague said. “Stop asking me that. Are you deaf? What part of not in a million years do you not understand?” The lady was hopping back and forth on her feet and smiling at him, and the man behind her was doing the same thing, but exactly out of sync, so he hopped on his left foot just as she hopped on her right, and he moved his head to peek at Teague from above one and then the other of the woman’s shoulders. Others were coming up behind them, figures whose faces were lit just like the old woman’s with a curious, source-less light, so Teague could tell from far away that they were just as ugly as she was, and indeed some were even uglier, lumpier and more misshapen, or too big or too small, and it was obvious that none of them had given the least bit of thought to their hair, or to what they were wearing. They shuffled and danced toward him, and surrounded the old woman and the old man in a hideous huddle.

“A million years? Will you dance with me in a million years?”

“No!” Teague shouted, not caring anymore if he woke his father up. In fact, he wanted his father to come out with a flashlight and a shotgun, and scare the hideous weirdos away. “I said not in a million years. Not even. Aren’t you listening to me?” The whole crowd of them laughed at him then, an odd sort of chuckle that circulated among the ones on the sides and the back and then came to the old man, who chuckled in the ugly lady’s ear, and she uttered a sharp little bark of mirth.

“Not with me? Not with any of us?”

“No!” Teague said, and he reached into his pocket to get his phone. “I’m calling the police now,” he said. “But I’ll dial slowly, so you have time to just go away.”

“Not with my friend?” the lady said, and indicated a large lumpy bundle which, he suddenly noticed, they were passing back and forth among them, each of them, even the small ones, shouldering the burden and passing it on. He thought it was a sack, but he couldn’t tell for sure because the light that fell on them seemed to miss the thing they carried.

“I’m dialing,” Teague said. But he was very slow about it, because he wasn’t very good at dialing with one hand, and also because he was getting increasingly nervous and afraid, because they were something else besides just ugly and annoying. There were a lot of them — it seemed like there were more of them every time he looked — and he was starting to appreciate that they might want to do something else besides dance with him.

“For the last time, Teague O’Kane,” the woman said, “won’t you dance with one of us, even out of pity, or fellow-feeling, to share just a little of your undeserved beauty with those who have lost their own?”

“Hello, police?” Teague said into his phone. He had dialed 911, but it wasn’t ringing yet. “I am being attacked by ugly people.”

“Attacked?” the woman said. “We only wanted to dance!” But just then the ugly old man picked up an orange and threw it at Teague. It missed, but another, thrown from farther back in the crowd, connected solidly with his head.

“Hey!” he said, and then he was hit again, on the ear he was using for the phone. A lady answered just as the phone flew away. He scrambled after it, stooping to pick it up, but before his fingers could reach it another orange struck and knocked it farther. “Stop that!” he said, and three more oranges came hurtling out of the darkness, two for his face and one for his stomach. Then a whole barrage of them started, and he stood there for a moment, trying to protect his face and his stomach and his groin, but when he covered up one part of himself they only hit him in another. He turned and ran.

He hadn’t gone very far before it occurred to him that he should be trying to run toward home, not away from it, that if he could make it to his front door he could rush through and lock it against them. And he hadn’t gone very much farther than that when they started to appear in front of him in ones and twos, strangely lucent in the darkness under the trees, smiling at him hideously as they lobbed oranges at him. He and his friends had been in the habit lately of driving along Orange Blossom Trail and throwing oranges at the prostitutes, just for the fun of it, and now he found himself regretting that, as fruit after fruit connected with his head. Looking back, he saw that he was being pursued by the wily crowd. They ran close together, one roiling beast, and in their light he could see the sack (it was definitely a sack) balanced on their shoulders, being passed among them as they ran. There was something terrible about their faces, in the glimpse he had of them before he turned his head around again, that was very different from mere ugliness.

He put his arms over his head, peeking out between his elbows to watch his way, and ran as hard as he could, not caring whether he was going toward the house or away from the house, only wanting to get away from them, and very shortly tripped, whether over a root or an outstretched foot, he didn’t know, but he found, as he fell down, that he was somewhat grateful for the trip, and he was less panicked, as he rolled and skidded on the dirt and coarse grass, than he had been as he ran. Well, he thought, I tried to get away, but there are too many of them, and they have too many oranges, and now they are going to get me. He lay on his back, looking up through the leaves of the orange trees at the dim stars, and they clustered around him.

“Orange you sad you didn’t dance with us now?” said the hag. She leaned over him with the man, and all around them the others were giving him orange-rind smiles, wedges of fruit stuck in their mouths, and juice dripping down their hairy chins.

“Go on and do it,” Teague said. “Rob me. Take my wallet. Take my jeans. They’re not going to fit you, and they won’t look good on anyone you know. But go on. Just get it over with.”

“Rob you?” said the hag.

“We aren’t here to take anything away,” the old troll said.

“We’ve come to give you a gift, Teague O’Kane,” the hag said.“It would have been a merry gift, if you had chosen to dance with us. It would have been a gift of poodle breath and panty lace and eyes bright with joyful tears. But you have spurned those who only meant to bless you, and now you must take another kind of gift from us entirely, and do a deed for us, or else.”

“Or else what?” he asked.

“Or else dark deadliness of poodle!” the old man said. “And suffering sobs!” said the woman. “And an acid bitter sadness in your soul that will last a million years.”

“A million billion!” said the man.

Teague wanted to say that was stupid, that nothing lasted that long, not — he was pretty sure — even the universe itself, but instead he asked, “What do you want me to do?”

“Only this,” the woman said. “Take our friend home, and put him to rest.” There was a flurry of activity among the others. Within a few seconds they threw down the bundle in the sack and uncovered it. Teague could tell there was something unpleasant in there by the noise it made when it hit the ground. It’s full of steak, he thought, and Who carries around a big sack of beef in the middle of the night? It seemed to attract the darkness as it lay on the ground, but when they uncovered it he could plainly tell what it was, and he shuddered because he had never seen a corpse before, nor ever seen a body in such an unnatural posture as it assumed when they rolled it toward him with their feet. It lay with its back to him, one arm stretched out underneath it and another up over its head. Its feet and its chest were bare, and the face was turned away, but he could tell by the breadth of its shoulders and back that it was a man, and he could tell that his jeans were of a very high quality, because he had a special sense for things like that, and could tell a good pair of jeans from across the street, or in the dark, or by the touch of his hand against somebody’s bottom.

“Take him and bury him inside the Catholic church at Pine Hills, or, if you cannot bury him there, in behind the Salty Pig sausage factory in Windermere if there is no room for him at the church, and if all else fails then take him to the Green Swamp near Orlo Vista and lay him to rest in the bog.”

“Oh, all right,” Teague said, sitting and then standing up slowly. “Is that all you want me to do?”

“Nothing more and nothing less.”

“Okay, then,” Teague said. “But first there’s something you should know.”

“What’s that, Teague O’Kane?” she asked, smiling at him in a very unfriendly way.

“Just. this!” Teague said, and cast the orange he had picked up at her face. He didn’t wait to see if it hit her or not, but turned to run again, leaping nimbly over the corpse and sprinting for home. But he hadn’t been running for ten seconds before he was tackled from behind, and all those ugly old people were swarming all over him, their terrible moth-ball breath in his face and their starchy sprayed-up hair brushing his cheek and neck. It felt like they were all sitting on him — for a moment he could hardly breathe — and then the pressure let up, but there was still a great weight on him. They jumped back and away from him.

“There now!” said the woman. “Now you are ready!” Teague lay on his belly, slowly understanding that they had put the corpse on his back, and that the dead man’s arms were crossed over his shoulders.

“What did you do?” he said. “Get it off of me!”

“We certainly won’t,” said the lady. “You alone will do that. Now take him to be buried and be quick about it. If the sun rises on you before it is done, you will regret it!”

“Get it off of me!” Teague said again, and now he was crying, and struggling on the ground, flopping around to throw the thing off, but the dead man held him fast.

“You do it,” said the woman. “And remember what I said to you. Dark tears of the great poodle of sadness! Acid in your heart! Burning forever! Get you gone, Teague O’Kane. You have chosen not to dance with us, and the night is running out!”

“Get it off,” Teague said again, but no one answered. When he looked up they were all gone, and if not for the weight on his back, he would have thought he had imagined them. He got slowly to his knees, and then he stood, the corpse very heavy on his back. When he looked around there was no sign of the crowd of ugly people, but they had left him a message on the ground, words spelled from torn rinds of orange. “We will be watching you,” it said.

“Help!” he shouted. “Help, somebody!” His voice sounded very loud in his ears, but he had the sense that it wasn’t carrying very far, and among the trees he could see none of the lights of his home, and he wasn’t sure which way he should go for help. “And I don’t even know where Orlo Vista is,” he said sadly. At that a hand rose up before him pointing, and it took him a moment to realize who it belonged to. With a shout he started to run again, trying to get away from the corpse on his back, but he only fell again, and he lay there weeping again for a moment.

“Crying won’t get me buried,” the corpse said behind him then. “Get up, idiot.”

Teague cried out again, and tried to crawl away, saying, “You can’t talk to me! It’s bad enough as it is but you’re not allowed to talk.”

“The dead do as they please,” the thing said, but then it was silent. Teague lay panting with his face in the ground, and then he did get up, and started to walk in the direction that the corpse had pointed. It was very slow going at first. The corpse was heavy, and the night was dark, and he didn’t know where he was, for all that he could not have been very far from his own house. But the trees looked strange, even when he left them behind he walked for what felt like an hour without encountering a highway, only a narrow dirt road that looked more fit for horses than cars, but was easier to walk on than the soft ground. If he had seen a car, he would have flagged it down to ask for help, though he wondered if anyone would have stopped for him, a man with a corpse on his back, no matter how handsome and alluring he might be. It occurred to him, as he trudged slowly down that road, half-fearing that the corpse would speak again, but half-hoping that it would as well, because he was feeling very lonely and afraid, that the night would have been much easier if he had agreed to dance with either the man or the woman, that he must be dreaming, and the changeless quality of the road made it seem this must be so, and he started to feel like he had been going along on it forever. “I’ll just keep walking,” he said, “until I wake up, and if later tonight I see any ugly people on the dance floor, I’ll run away from them right away.” He closed his eyes a moment — the road was so unchanging he suddenly decided there was no need even to watch where he was going. Then he was jolted by a sharp pain — the corpse had reached into his shirt and pinched him on the nipple! “What was that for?” Teague demanded, though of course he knew what it was for. He stopped a moment on the road, feeling very frightened and very awake.

Not long after that he saw the church, sitting all alone at the top of a hill, lit up by a single street lamp. The road led right to the door, and passed through a parking lot that was full of cars. It was hard going up the hill: when he got to the top he just wanted to lie down on the hood of one of the cars and rest for a long time. He went to the door of the church and paused there. “Are you supposed to knock on the door of a church before you go in?” he wondered aloud. He had never been in a church before.

“Not necessary,” said the corpse.

Teague pushed the door open and went inside. The church was lit with candles, and the gentle flickering light made the faces of the many statues seem particularly alert and alive. It wouldn’t have surprised him at all if they all started talking to him, insulting him or asking him the time or scolding him for not dancing with them. But they stayed silent. As he stared at them, though, he thought he recognized the light that had fallen so strangely on all those ugly old people: their faces looked like the statues, as if the light that shone on them came from invisible candles.

“We’re here for a reason,” the corpse said.

“You don’t have to remind me,” Teague said. He started to walk around the church, up and down the aisles, and peeked down the lines of pews, looking for a place to bury someone. People belonged in graveyards; it made no sense at all to him that somebody should be buried inside a church, even one that was carpeted, like this one was, in tacky indoor/outdoor carpeting. That was typical of Florida, he thought, a place where extremes of bad taste flourished.

“Dig!” said the corpse, when Teague had been looking for a while here and there for a place.

“With what? My hands?”

“Until they bleed and your bones poke through the skin!” it said harshly. But then it pointed Teague toward a closet, where, among tall stacks of kitty litter and ammonia and paper towels, a shovel was waiting. Teague took it and picked a spot near the altar. “Do it!” the corpse told him when he hesitated. He raised up the shovel in both hands and stabbed it down, thinking he was going to have to break through cement underneath the carpet to get to the ground. He gave a yell as he brought the shovel down, the loudest noise he had ever made, the angriest noise and also the saddest noise. He was sure the shovel was just going to bounce off the concrete, and that the wooden handle would split, and that his hand would break from the shock of it. He didn’t care if it did.

But it was just soft ground underneath the carpet. The blade sank in completely, and he had to put his whole weight on it to pull up the earth and carpet. A smell rose up — an odor of fresh loamy earth that made Teague think of rainy days and earthworms. The corpse took a deep breath of it behind him, but didn’t let it out. “I am about to get rid of you,” Teague told it, but it didn’t respond. He got to work, driving the blade of the shovel into the carpet again and again, and marking out a rectangle long enough to fit the corpse. He said it again and again, speaking a word every time he made a blow with the shovel: “I. am. going. to. get. rid. of. you!”

The corpse didn’t talk back, and he was just starting to convince himself that he wouldn’t hear from it again when a hideous shriek sounded in the air. “What?” he shouted, dropping the shovel and jumping back. “What did I do? Why are you screaming?”

“Wasn’t me,” said the corpse, and there was another cry, much softer but still angry. Someone was obviously very upset. Teague walked to the edge of the grave he was digging — it was only a couple of feet deep — and looked in. There was movement in the dirt. Something was trembling underneath the soil. A sinkhole opened up in the dirt, just mouth-sized. The dirt fell in, and then was spat out again in another scream, and then suddenly, horribly, a dead woman sat up out of the shallow grave that Teague had been uncovering.

“Oh, oh, oh!” she cried. “What are you doing to me?”

“Nothing!” said Teague, which was patently untrue, but the first thing he thought of to say.

“Nothing? Nothing? Why have you disturbed my rest, horrible boy? Rude boy! Terrible boy!”

“I didn’t mean…” Teague began. “I mean. I just wanted to bury my friend!”

“He’s not my friend,” said the corpse behind him. “And he is very rude. Terribly rude.”

“Cover me up!” the woman, cried. “Cover me up, boy, before I get cold.”

Teague did as she said, heaping the dirt back on her when she lay back down, and throwing the carpet on top in a disorganized heap that he made no attempt to neaten. He left the shovel leaning on the altar and ran out. He stood outside panting and feeling ready to cry again. The corpse heaved an enormous sigh against his neck, and then did it twice more.

“Stop that,” Teague said. “Stop sighing. You don’t need to sigh. You don’t even need to breathe.”

“I am disappointed. When I am disappointed, I sigh.” It sighed again, and then Teague did it, too.

“I forget where the other place was,” Teague said after a moment. “The other place I was supposed to take you.” The corpse was silent, and Teague thought it figured that it would talk when he wanted it to shut up, and be silent when he was asking it for help, but then it lifted its hand again and pointed the way.

The Salty Pig sausage factory was set in a dell instead of high on a hill, surrounded by a greasy, low-lying fog that smelled of bacon. Teague carried his burden down the road for an hour until he smelled it, and it was another half hour before he saw the smokestack spires poking up, tall shadows against the stars. Instead of cars, the factory was surrounded on all sides by a field of gravestones, which made no sense at all until Teague was close enough to read some of the names on the stones: Snorty, Fatty, Missy, Mr. Snorfle, Petunia, Wilbur, Otis; they were pig names. “Why would they bury the pigs from the factory?”

“Respect,” said the corpse.

“Where is the shovel?” Teague asked.

“In your hands,” said the corpse. Teague held up his hands in front of them both, and it clarified, “Your hands are the shovels.”

“That’s not fair,” Teague said to the corpse, and then he lifted his head and said it again to the air and the fog and the strange piggy graveyard. “That’s not fair! I’m doing what you told me to. I’m doing what you asked. The least you could do is give me a shovel!” But silence was his only answer, so he knelt down in a place between graves that looked likely to be empty and started to dig with his hands, tearing up the coarse grass and then scooping up great double handfuls of earth and tossing them to one side or the other (when he tossed them over his shoulder the corpse complained bitterly). And he hadn’t dug far before he touched on a leathery bit of something that proved upon examination to be a pig’s ear, and shortly after that he uncovered the rest of the pig, a dried-up husk of muscle and skin with a slit down its belly. “But there’s no stone!” Teague said. “And why are they burying the muscle parts? What did they put in the sausage?”

“Not meat,” said the corpse. The pig opened an eye at that — the socket was quite empty — and began to squeal wordlessly, but Teague got the sense of what it was saying: Cover me up. Leave me alone. I’m getting cold. He covered it up swiftly, then knelt on the grave with his face in his hands.

“Get up!” said the corpse. “Try again. The dawn is coming, and if I’m not buried by then you’ll be sorry sorry sorry!” Teague was so tired from digging, and so dispirited from failure, that he didn’t even argue, but moved a few hundred feet away and tried again. But he had not been digging ten minutes before his hand touched on leathery skin, and a muffled sound of squealing came up through the dirt. Teague jerked his hand back and cried out. “Again! Again!” said the corpse, but the next time the squealing started as soon as he started to dig, and then there was squealing even when he trod on a grave, so with every step he took there was another squeal, each one in a slightly different tone, so as he stepped and jumped, trying not to step on a grave, he made an odd sort of music, and the whole graveyard had become an instrument for him to play, and he was its exhausted, unwilling virtuoso. When he finally escaped it he sank again to his knees and started to weep freely.

“There, there,” said the corpse after a while. “There, there. It’s not so bad as that. There’s still the Green Swamp, and dawn is still a little while off.”

“Dark dread diarrhea of poodle!” Teague said. “Deadly sad acid bitterness! I can feel it starting already!”

“That is something else you feel,” the corpse said. “You have not yet failed in your mission, and the kindly ones keep their word to the letter. Get up and take me to the swamp. I hear my grave singing to me and feel sure you’ll find a place for me there.” So Teague pushed himself up, and followed the pointing finger of the corpse one last time.

It wasn’t very long before the ground started to become soft, and not much longer after that that he was walking in places through sucking mud, and he very shortly lost his shoes, and then his socks. The stars began to dim, and the sky to lighten. “Hurry!” the corpse whispered to him. “Hurry! The sun is coming, but we are close, close!” Teague felt sure he could hear other voices telling him to hurry along. He thought he heard the voices of the old man and woman coming at him from the trees, telling him he was almost there, and being more encouraging than scolding when they demanded haste of him. He thought a possum, hanging upside down by its naked tail, told him to hurry it up, and an alligator, just a dark shape at the edge of a pond, opened its mouth and told him to run. He tried to do that, but he was so tired all he did was speed up his shambling, weeping lurch through the swamp. “Ah!” said the corpse. “The sun. the sun! Don’t let it touch me. we are so close!” And indeed they were. There weren’t any corners in the swamp, but Teague had the impression of rounding one, and then there it was: a tidy grave set under the sweeping branches of a willow, as pretty a place to be buried as you could ask for, and nicely dry as well for all that it was in the middle of a bog. Teague lurched toward it just as the sun was rising, and the gray swamp suddenly became green all around him. He was sure he was going to fall in with the corpse and be buried with it, but he fell short, and rolled on his side just to the edge. The corpse let go its hands and fell in.

Teague rolled over and looked in. “Are you down there?” he asked, because the grave was full of shadows. “Yes,” said the corpse. “Good-bye, Teague O’Kane. Think of me every time you dance.” Then it was quiet, and Teague never heard its voice again except in dreams. He stared another moment into the darkness, even though something in him told him he should look away, and so when the sun rose up and cast a little light into the grave he saw very plainly that the corpse’s face was his own.

TWO AND A HALF WEEKS AFTER I WAS BORN, ON JULY 9, 1958, THE plates that make up the Fairweather Range in the Alaskan panhandle apparently slipped twenty-one feet on either side of the Fairweather Fault, the northern end of a major league instability that runs the length of North America. The thinking now is that the southwest side and bottom of the inlets at the head of Lituya Bay jolted upward and to the northwest, and the northeast shore and head of the bay jolted downward and to the southeast. One way or the other, the result registered 8.3 on the Richter scale.

The bay is T-shaped and seven miles long and two wide, and according to those who were there it went from a glassy smoothness to a full churn, a giant’s Jacuzzi. Mountains twelve to fifteen thousand feet high next to it twisted into themselves and lurched in contrary directions. In Juneau, 122 miles to the southeast, people who’d turned in early were pitched from their beds. The shock waves wiped out bottom-dwelling marine life throughout the panhandle. In Seattle, a thousand miles away, the University of Washington’s seismograph needle was jarred completely off its graph. And meanwhile, back at the head of the bay, a spur of mountain and glacier the size of a half-mile-wide city park—40 million cubic yards in volume — broke off and dropped three thousand feet down the northeast cliff into the water.

This is all by way of saying that it was one of the greatest spasms, when it came to the release of destructive energy, in recorded history. It happened around 10:16 P.M. At that latitude and time of year, it was still light out. There were three small boats, carrying six people, anchored in the south end of the bay.

The rumbling from the earthquake generated vibrations that the occupants of the boats could feel on their skin like electric shocks. The impact of the rockfall that followed made a sound like Canada exploding. There were two women, three men, and a seven-year-old boy in the three boats. They looked up to see a wave breaking over the 1,700-foot-high southwest edge of Gilbert Inlet and heading for the opposite slope. What they were looking at was the largest wave ever recorded by human beings. It scythed off three-hundred-year-old pines and cedars and spruce, some of them with trunks three or four feet thick, along a trim line of 1,720 feet. That’s a wave crest 500 feet higher than the Empire State Building.

Fill your bathtub. Hold a football at shoulder height and drop it into the water. Scale the height of the initial splash up, appropriately. Imagine the height of the tub above the waterline to be 2,000 feet.

IT WAS A SUBURBAN STREET, ONE BLOCK LONG, THE HOUSES MADE OF brick and built to last like the third little pig’s. Sycamore trees had been planted at regular intervals along the curb and the curbs themselves sparkled; I think the concrete was mixed with mica in it. I think the street was so new it couldn’t help but draw attention to itself.

The families living on the street came from all over, but the children had no trouble forming friendships, the boys’ based on rough-housing and ball games, the girls’ on a series of strategic moves, tireless linkings and unlinkings, the bonds double, triple, covalent like molecules. “Heads up!” the boys would yell when a car appeared, interrupting their play; the girls sat on the porch stoops, cigar boxes of trading cards and stickers in their laps, making deals. School was about to start. The darkness welled up so gradually the only way anyone could tell night had fallen was the fireflies, prickling like light on water. The parents were inside, presumably keeping an eye on their children but also drinking highballs. Fireflies like falling stars, the tree trunks narrow as the girls’ waists.

Occasionally something different occurred. One girl pasted a diadem of gold star stickers to her forehead and wandered from her stoop to get closer to where one of the boys stood bent slightly forward, his hands on his knees, waiting for another boy to hit the ball. This waiting boy was Eddie, who lived at the opposite end of the street from Mary, the girl with the diadem; their bond was exquisite, meaning it would never let go, though they were too young, really, to understand the implications. Once she fell roller-skating and skinned her knee and he stood spellbound, staring at the place on the sidewalk where he could see her blood. “I shouldn’t have let it happen,” he told her, even though he’d been at the dentist having a cavity filled at the time. When he described how much the drill hurt she gave him one of her two best trading cards, Pinkie, who she thought of as herself despite the fact that she, Mary, would never dream of wearing a hat that had to be secured with pink ribbons, not to mention the fact that she needed glasses and had mouse-brown hair and wasn’t especially pretty despite her nice brown eyes. Giving him Pinkie meant she had to break up the pair with Blue Boy, who she thought looked like him with his dark hair and soft lips and studiously downcast expression. But, then, she wasn’t sentimental like he was, either.

Bedtime, the end of summer. In the brick houses the clocks kept ticking away the time, chipping off pieces of it, some big ones piling thick and heavy under the brass weights of the grandfather clock in Eddie’s parents’ hallway, others so small and fast even the round watchful eyeballs of the cat clock in Mary’s parents’ kitchen couldn’t track their flight. The crickets were rubbing their hind legs together, unrolling that endless band of sound that when combined with the sound of the sycamore trees tossing their heads in the heat-thickened breeze could break even the least sentimental human heart.

Headlights appeared; the boys scattered. The car was expensive and silver-gray and belonged to the sorcerer Body-without-Soul, a tall thin bald man with a small gray mustache who lived somewhere on the next block over with a woman everyone knew as Miss Vicks, the elementary school teacher, who also may or may not have been his wife. One minute Mary was standing there in her plaid shorts and white T-shirt, balanced like a stork on one leg, the headlights turning the lenses of her spectacles to blazing spinning disks of molten gold so she could no longer see the street, the sycamore trees, the brick houses — anything at all, really, let alone Eddie — and the next minute she was gone.

“Has anyone seen Mary?” Eddie asked.

“She disappeared,” Roy Duffy told him, but he was joking.

Everyone knew how Mary was — here one minute, gone the next. Besides, they were all disappearing into their houses — it was only the beginning. The game was over; the next day school started. When the crest of one wave of light met the trough of another the result was blackness.

Miss Vicks handed out sheets of colored construction paper. They were to fold the paper in half and in half again and then in half again — in this way after unfolding the paper they would end up with eight boxes in each of which they were to work a problem in long division. A feeling attached to the act of being given instructions involving paper and folding it, a feeling of intense apprehension verging on almost insane excitement. Eddie filled his boxes with drawings of Mary, some of them not so bad; it was his plan to be an artist when he grew up. From time to time he looked to his left where his subject sat folding her piece of orange paper, folding and folding and folding it, many more times than they’d been instructed, many more times than it’s physically possible to fold a piece of paper, in this universe at least. He tried getting her attention but it was as if she weren’t there, the light bouncing off the glazed schoolyard pavement and onto her glasses. It was like looking at a robot, Eddie thought, but also like looking at an old-fashioned girl toiling up a steep hillside in a faraway land, carrying a bucket of cream.

“Mary is sick,” Miss Vicks told them the next day. “She won’t be coming back to school. Wouldn’t it be nice if we made her a present?” The teacher was pretty and seemed no older than most of the students’ parents, but in fact she was very old, old as a breastplate of hammered bronze, a virus.

“We could make a card,” suggested Betsy Abbott, a suggestion Miss Vicks met with disdain verging on rage.

“Oh, a card,” said Miss Vicks. “What good would that do?”

Someone was going to have to go to the old Poole estate. There they would find a black egg hidden somewhere in the middle of the knot garden, the only thing that could make Mary better. As Miss Vicks talked she paused from time to time and cocked her head like she was listening to someone or taking dictation. She described the egg in detail — the dark shell dappled with pale white spots that shifted when you weren’t looking at them, as if sunlight were falling onto it from above through the shifting crowns of the trees, but you’d be wrong, oh so wrong, for this egg could only be found where there was no light at all, the aroma it released when you cracked it open unpleasant but also sweet, like a mouse decomposing in the wall of an old house, all of which made perfect sense given the fact that the egg could only be found in the body of a dying animal.

“Let’s see,” Miss Vicks said, looking around the room, pretending to think. She put one manicured fingernail to the delicately upturned tip of her chin. No one was surprised when her gaze fell on Eddie — everyone knew it had been headed there all along, which was also why no one except Eddie found her description of the egg disturbing, since he was the only one who had been listening. Eddie and Mary were a pair; they had been formed that way — everyone knew that.

“Edward, wait!” Miss Vicks said, reaching into her desk drawer and removing a small curved knife with a gold handle. “You’ll need this. The shell is hard as rock.”

To get to the Poole estate you went to the far end of the street, up the three little green hills beyond the school, and over the trestle bridge above the railroad tracks. Old Mr. Poole had abandoned the estate years earlier for some reason no one was able to remember — the parents had all warned their children to stay away from the place. The mansion was dangerous, its floors and staircases rotten, the windowpanes smashed to glittering daggers of glass. In the spring you could still find lilacs and forsythia growing in what had once been the formal gardens, but by summer’s end the stringweed and creeper covered everything, leaving behind only the general shapes of things, disquieting like the sheeted furniture in Victorian novels, and if you weren’t careful you would pitch into a cistern and drown.

Of course Eddie had been there — all of the children who lived on the block had been there on their bicycles. It was the best place to play hide-and-seek or sardines. Eddie knew without being told that some egg wasn’t going to cure Mary, assuming she was sick. From the sound of it, in all likelihood it would probably make her sicker, if not kill her. Even so he rode his bike to the Poole estate that same afternoon. The minute he had passed beyond the formal entryway’s twin pillars, one surmounted by an armless Athena, the other by a noseless Aphrodite, the air suddenly grew ice-cold, as if a thin veil of pretense had been let fall, the illusion of light and heat withdrawn, the planets swimming closer and closer, drawing into their orbits the dark chill nothing of outer space. “Is this because the season’s changing,” Eddie wondered, “or is this the way the world really is, or is this my mood because of Mary?”

He left his bike leaning against a pillar and began to explore, eventually locating the knot garden, more or less unrecognizable as anything at all under its blanket of vines. There at the garden’s heart, lying on its side, was the dead body of one of the big gray hares that had appeared in the neighborhood the previous spring — the cause of many a minor automobile accident — but it didn’t have an egg like the one Miss Vicks had described to him hidden in it. Nothing was hidden in the hare’s body.

While he sat hunkered there, looking at the hare, night fell, taking Eddie by surprise. He’d brought no flashlight, forgetting how quickly the days grew shorter once the equinox was past. As unsentimental as Mary was, Eddie was suggestible. The hare’s dead body frightened him, the glazed surface of its upward-facing eye reminding him of Mary’s the other day in the classroom when she couldn’t stop folding the piece of paper. He returned to where he’d left his bike leaning against the pillar and removed the curved knife from the basket. Then he retraced his steps to the maze and cut the hare’s body into pieces.

By now it had grown so dark he could barely see a thing; if there was a moon most of it seemed to have slid through a slot in the sky. It took Eddie a long time to once again track down his bike. When he did, he found a big yellow cat sitting there by the front wheel waiting for him. “Pssst,” the cat said, licking the hare’s blood from its paws and flicking its long yellow tail from side to side like the cat on the clock in Mary’s parents’ kitchen. Atop Athena’s head perched a flea-bitten crow, a string of entrails dangling from its beak; a rake-thin dog sprawled under a lilac bush, worrying a foot bone. “Thank you, Eddie,” he heard a tiny voice say, and when he tried to figure out where it had come from, it seemed to be from the ant he saw crawling up his ankle. “We were starving.”

It wasn’t until he got home that he found the gifts the animals had left for him in his bike basket: a cat’s claw and a dog’s whisker, the feather of a crow and the leg of an ant. These things might come in handy, he thought, and he stowed them away along with the curved knife in the shoe box where he kept Mary’s trading card.

Mary returned to school the following day as if nothing had happened, and Miss Vicks acted as if Mary had never been gone, withholding the usual favors she granted students snatched from the jaws of death, such as clapping the erasers or feeding the fish. At some point Mary got contact lenses and stopped wearing glasses; for a while in high school she and Eddie were sweethearts, but even when they started having sex things never went back to being the way they’d been when they were young.

In spite of that, though, the look of Eddie, his obvious preoccupation with an inner life he kept hidden from everyone, excited Mary; she would grow so moist she’d have to leave class. There was a cot in the furnace room where she would lie waiting for him, her skirt hiked up around her waist and her underpants down around her ankles. The one time he asked her where she’d gone that summer night so many years ago, she looked at him in amazement. “I was kidnapped,” she told him. “I thought everyone knew.”

Eventually Mary moved on to other boyfriends, some of them the same boys who’d played baseball in the street with Eddie. She developed a reputation for being fast. Then she got engaged to a much older man who was said to have a lot of money. Sometimes Eddie saw her standing by the magazine rack in the corner drugstore, teetering a little in her stiletto heels, her mouse-brown hair now bleached blond and worn in a French twist. She would be paging through a fashion magazine, but because she had on sunglasses Eddie couldn’t tell if she’d noticed him too and was choosing to ignore him, or if she hadn’t seen him at all.

After graduation he went off to the city to study painting at the Academy. He moved into a large apartment building where he lived by himself until one day the big yellow cat showed up at his apartment door, wrapping itself around his ankles while he was struggling with his key, and then slipping through the open door so quickly and curling itself so comfortably in his one good chair that it was as if it had always been there. Often he would talk to the cat about the past and the cat would offer monosyllables in exchange; Eddie told himself this was the way things were meant to work out. Whatever he had felt for Mary — and, really, he wasn’t certain what that had been, only that it had been everything for him — he chalked up to the fires of youth, which he told himself were behind him. I think he was encouraged to feel this way, to belittle everything that had happened between him and Mary; time healed all wounds, everyone knew that!

What Eddie didn’t take into account was the fact that while time did, indeed, heal all wounds, it was also the source of them — a fact the sorcerer Body-without-Soul was only too well aware of. It was the sorcerer’s ambition to get rid of time altogether, and in so doing to make everything in the world duplicate his own grotesque condition. For what granted the body its relation to time but the soul, the ageless, deathless soul — without the soul the lump of flesh that was the body would just sit there forever like the lump it was, unable to understand or feel a thing.

Eddie turned out to be a portrait artist of uncommon skill, his ability to capture the essence of a subject so uncanny he earned commissions from some from the city’s most prominent citizens. He painted the newly appointed bishop with his gold mitre and ivory teeth; he painted the mayor’s bony wife with her chubby daughter. In each case he was able to convey an almost painfully accurate representation of the subject’s external appearance while at the same time laying bare what would otherwise remain occult, the bishop’s unrequited love for his own handsome face, the daughter’s delight at being the cause of her mother’s embarrassment.

It wasn’t long before Eddie could afford a studio of his own in a fashionable neighborhood. Initially society’s darling, as the years passed he also became the object of serious critical attention. There were shows at the major galleries, articles in the best journals, adulatory monographs, even a coffee-table-sized book. For a while he was married to one of his patronesses; he had his share of love affairs as well. Then one evening he got the call that changed everything. “I have a job for you,” said the sorcerer Body-without-Soul, disguising his voice to sound human. “I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised.”

The next day when Eddie entered his studio he found that a woman had let herself in and was standing on the dais with her back to him. She was wearing an organdy gown of a pinkness so pale as to be practically white, tied at the waist with a deep pink sash. On her head she wore a bonnet, its long pink streamers hanging loose to her shoulders, which were bare. She was the image of Pinkie, the girl on Mary’s trading card, though unlike the woman in his studio, Pinkie would never have been caught dead with a cigarette. The woman glanced to one side. “Eddie,” she said, exhaling smoke. “Darling.” He got the fleetest glimpse of a single eye, refracting light and silver like mirror backing.

But if this was Mary, why was the yellow cat hissing at her, its back arched in a parody of feline anger? The woman looked no older than Mary had the last time Eddie had seen her, whereas he, Eddie, was losing his hair and needed glasses to read the paper, and the yellow cat had long surpassed one hundred in human years. The studio was overheated, the water banging in the radiators, the smell of turpentine and cigarette smoke overpowering. There had been some scandal, Eddie remembered, following which Mary had moved to the city. As he watched, she began removing her clothes. Her skin was that shade of milky white that’s almost blue, like skim rather than whole milk, her hair a tumble of curls. Before she had a chance to turn to face him, he had bolted from the room, together with the shoe box and the cat.

Now he could no longer stand the sight of living flesh. For a while he drew the cadavers the hospital supplied for the use of the medical students; he had been told there was money to be made illustrating anatomy textbooks and this proved to be true. Later he preferred to find his subjects at the city morgue, where he was befriended by the coroner, a heavyset man with the drooping jowls of a hound and a long gray ponytail. When Eddie asked him the difference between a cadaver and a corpse, the man pointed to a recent arrival by way of reply. The bodies that came into the morgue were not always in such good shape, corpses — as opposed to cadavers — often having met a violent end. But Eddie could draw anything. “You’re so good you can draw blood,” the coroner liked to say, and then he would howl with laughter.

I suppose it’s not surprising that eventually someone Eddie knew would show up there. He was sitting alone eating a sandwich, his drawing pad open on his knees, and had just started sketching.

“Remember me?” asked the corpse.

It was Miss Vicks lying on the marble slab, flat and pale as a flounder. “Listen to me, Edward,” said Miss Vicks. “You’ve always been good at following directions. Do you still have that knife I gave you?” She asked him to cut her up in pieces the way he’d cut up the hare. When Miss Vicks spoke her mouth opened and closed like a small live entity all its own.

“Why should I do that?” Eddie asked, and he began to grow dizzy thinking of where the time went and how there wasn’t that much of it left. “Besides,” he said, “the last time I followed your directions I don’t remember things going particularly well.” Over the years he had grown so used to talking to the yellow cat he didn’t find it that strange to be talking to a corpse.

“What on earth do you mean, Edward?” Miss Vicks asked. “It was Mary who didn’t fold the paper the way I said, not you. Hurry up, please!” she added, flecks of spit appearing on her lips. “What’s taking you so long?”

At some point rain had started falling, long strings of it from a sky the color of tin, pieces of which kept breaking loose and landing on the morgue roof, piling up there like the pieces of time in the case of the grandfather clock in Eddie’s parents’ hallway.

Eddie felt so dizzy, he hardly knew what he was doing. He took the knife from where he kept it in the shoe box. He cut off Miss Vicks’s hands and feet and cut out her entrails and was just cutting off her head when he heard a tiny voice coming from his sandwich.

“Eddie,” the voice said. “Don’t listen to her. It’s a trap.”

Eddie looked down and saw an ant emerging from between the two slices of bread, the very same ant he’d saved so many years ago from starving. What Eddie had to do, the ant told him, was to hold onto the leg it had given him back then — did he remember? Eddie had put it in his shoe box. By holding onto its leg, the ant told Eddie, he would become an ant so small no one could see him, even with a magnifying glass. And indeed the second Eddie picked the leg up he found himself standing on the sandwich, the other ant at his side, as enormous as an elephant, its magnificent abdomen gleaming like patent leather.

“What do we do now?” Eddie asked.

“We wait and watch and listen,” the ant replied.

When the coroner arrived at the morgue to find parts of Miss Vicks strewn across the slab, he couldn’t believe what he was seeing. “Oh, Eddie,” the coroner sighed. “How could you do this to me?” Clearly it was a case for the police. In no time at all Body-without-Soul had sped to the scene in his silver-gray car. “Tell me you haven’t touched anything,” he said to the coroner. “We’ll dust for prints,” he added, snatching Eddie’s drawing without first bothering to put on his latex gloves. “You might as well go home,” he told the coroner. But the minute the man was gone Body-without-Soul tore the drawing to bits. “They’ll never get me,” he said. “Most human beings are too stupid and sentimental and the only one who isn’t I took care of years ago.” Of course Miss Vicks knew he meant Mary. Precious Mary, as Miss Vicks thought of her, sourly.

Human beings would never be able to kill him, the sorcerer went on to say, because to do that would require tracking down his soul, which was hidden somewhere on the Poole estate in a black egg. A black egg in a black craw in a black heart in a black stomach. Someone was going to need the right tools — a bunch of body parts, he added, a trifle sadistically thought Miss Vicks — without which they’d never be able to make all the transformations needed to slit open the belly of the cat that ate the dog that ate the crow and find the egg that his soul would fly out of when you cracked its shell open. “Blah blah blah,” said Body-without-Soul. “The usual song and dance. It’s not going to happen.”

Miss Vicks moved her mouth as if to answer. Nothing came out at first but a trickle of sound like tap water and then her hands balled into fists and the sound grew louder, churning and grinding and clicking like stones borne on the flood.

MORE THAN ONCE THERE WAS A SOON-TO-BE-OLD WOMAN WHO HAD A loaf of bread, held it in her hands she did, and it was inconvenient to have a loaf of bread always sitting in her hands as she tried to sweep or sew or sneeze, so she said to her daughter, the one with cheeks the appalling color of let blood: “With a face like that, you haven’t anything better to do, so here, take this bread off my hands!” The woman said she knew a sickly wolf who would like nothing better than to receive stale bread from a girl like her, “but be careful,” said the girl’s mother, “as the woods are full of primordial women with faces like the bottom of a river and who long to feel the weight of bread in their twisted mitts once more.” The minute the woman handed the bread to the girl, her face grew dark as thunder, and she barked, “Git!”

The girl fled with the loaf under her arm, and at the fork where everyone chooses wrongly, she saw a crusty old woman with a face like a fallen cake, and the woman yowled, “You’re headed the wrong way, dear heart!”

“But I haven’t chosen yet!” said the girl with the objectionable cheeks.

“As if that mattered,” muttered the woman, and for a moment her face looked like a weathered map leading nowhere good.

The girl examined the tines of the forking path and could see that in one direction the road was covered in spoons and in the other it was littered with blood sausages. The girl had always preferred spoon to sausage and so she confidently strode in that direction. The sunlight that needled its way through the branches of the forest struck the bowed bellies of the spoons, splintered in every direction, and pricked the girl’s skin as she walked. She tried to brush away the light that beetled along her arms and up her throat with its sticky legs. The light, pragmatic and cowardly at heart, would not go near those cheeks red as a carbuncle.

The old woman, knowing what was expected of her, cackled. She swiftly slipped and wobbled atop the sausages and cursed herself for having forgotten to bring along a growler of beer. No matter, she’d be at the house of the ailing wolf soon enough, and then she’d have her fill, boy howdy.

When she reached the house of the wolf, the cunning beldam let herself in and shook her head at the sight of him: he looked half-dead already, more moth-eaten pelt than glamorous savage, not even fit to be a stole. She spit a bolus of sausage at the foot of his bed. The wolf weakly stirred at the sound.

“Well, I suppose I haven’t any choice but to eat you,” said the woman.

“I suppose not,” said the wolf, who’d had a hunch the saving catholicon of the bread would not make it to him in time. There is no rescuing a wolf, not in this world or any other. He unzipped his coat and dragged his body dutifully into her mouth, and the woman, who found him a little gamey, spit the bones onto the bed.

From inside her belly, the wolf’s muffled voice came, Take, eat, he said, this is my body, which is broken for you.

Such theatrics, heavens to betsy! thought the old woman, and she socked herself in the stomach and belched. If she ate before sundown, her meals always repeated on her.

The ancienne noblesse began to undress, lace-up peep toes, garters, support hose, daisied duster, crocheted shrug, ragged bonnet.

A yellow cat lying curled before the hearth unwound himself, sat up, and said, “Get a load of Granny’s gams, ooh-wee hubba-hubba!” then whistled like a sailor newly on leave.

The ripe old dame, whose sister had a weakness for strays of every stripe, had had her fill of cheeky gibs and she booted him across the room. Then she stepped inside the wolf skin, which fit a skosh too snugly, and slipped beneath the covers. She struck a wan pose and conjured a pallor that announced she was on the verge of oblivion and should be the recipient of a steady supply of pity and bread and the affection of innocents, and just as she did, Little Miss Red Cheeks knocked at the door.

“Allow me,” said the limping tom, who wanted to hotfoot it to a place free of irascible old grimalkins, notorious collectors of the likes of him, and he slid out the door sly as butter.

And there the girl was, laden with spoons she’d collected along the way, a crumbling loaf, eager to be cradled in the hands of a long-fallow hag, under her arm.

“Hello, sick wolf,” said the poppy, and she set the spoons and the bread upon the floor.

My soul is exceeding sorrowful, lamented the wolf inside the woman, and she coughed hoarsely and slapped her chest, and the girl said, “What was that?” and the woman replied, “My cold is leaving my snout full,” and she coughed again.

“I have bread,” said the girl, who blushed brash as an open wound, “bread that has never left the hands of my mother until now, bread that can save you.”

I will smite the shepherd and scatter the sheep, said the wolf, and the woman poked herself hard in the gut and her stomach emitted a feeble growl.

The little radish knew there was no love lost between wolf and sheep, but there wasn’t a flock to be found for miles around, and she smiled at him pityingly, thinking some poor creatures are simply doomed by instinct, helpless to hallucinate more reachable goals, slave to implausible diets. She picked up two spoons and began to tap a melody on her knees, which made her legs involuntarily kick.

The woman threw back the covers and exposed more fully her lupine duds.

“My, what big breasts you have!” exclaimed the girl with cheeks like molten embers. She dropped the spoons, which landed with a timpanic plonk upon the pile.

So sad when a girl goes ruddy, thought the woman, tsk.

The old woman adjusted her dugs, which, raised in the wild away from the civilizing influence of brassieres, were a little claustrophobic and so tried to escape the suffocating skin of the wolf. She corralled them and they nickered. “The better to suckle you with, dear heart!” said the woman. Pitiful little strawberry, thought she, whom I might once have been able to save had your mother, grrrr, not pinched the loaf from my withered fingers. It is always advisable to bear in mind that the embezzlement of fertility necessarily exacts a stiff tariff.

“Oh, wolf, what blue hair you have!” said the girl. The old woman had only yesterday been to the beauty parlor and chosen a rinse the color of irises. Sprigs of hair escaped through the wolf ’s ears, and the woman tried to tuck them back inside.

Behold, he is at hand that doth betray me, croaked the woman’s belly. She was having a little trouble restraining her feral anatomy, and she put a hand to her complicated crotch and her befurred breasts and gave everything a shake and an upward tug. Oof, went her stomach.

“What opposable thumbs you have, wolf!” bleated the girl, who began to fear that this blue and breasted creature was not all that he seemed, this womanly wolf that smelled vaguely medicinal, giving off an odor of vitamins, blood, and moldering roses. And thumbs, he smelled of thumbs!

“Oh, wolf!” cried the girl. “Your bones, your bones!” She pointed at the pile. “How can you heave your body from hill to dale without them? How can you properly terrorize woodland creatures with only raggedy fur and a pudding of flesh with which to spook them?” Bones were an essential ingredient of both locomotion and thuggery, the girl well knew.

The old woman now saw she’d left the bones in plain view on the bed, an osteological oversight, and she took up the wolf ’s femurs and drummed on the headboard behind her. “If I carry them with me,” said the woman, “they don’t poke me as much. And, well, they’re, uh, erf, much more percussive when not swimming inside me!” The woman halted the racket and could see she was straining even this rosily jowled gull’s willful naïveté, so necessary to the telling of stories and the entrapment of children.

The girl bent to fetch the loaf of bread that she hoped would help provoke the wolf ’s natural canine vitality, and when she did, she spied beneath the bed the old woman’s clothes. She remembered what her mother had told her, and she was relieved at the thought that there was one less old woman in the woods to worry about. She put on the old woman’s shift and the old woman’s shawl and the old woman’s bonnet and she clomped about in the old woman’s shoes and she pretended to scold invisible children and to dab at imaginary dew-laps with an embroidered hankie that she kept tucked beneath her wristwatch, then she picked up the bread and crawled into bed with the wolf, who seemed to her to suffer from womanhood, the worst of all afflictions, a disease she would likely contract in time, and the wolf, quick as the flick of a lizard’s tongue, quick as a badger’s dander, swallowed her whole like the meat of an oyster. The old woman felt the satisfied satiety of having dined on bread and girl. The girl shimmied down the throat of the wolf clutching the loaf to her breast only to meet another throat on her way to the wolf’s stomach and she could see this was not the shriveled throat of a bruised peach past her prime. Only then did she realize she’d been bamboozled and was now curled inside the true wolf ’s boneless belly as if waiting to be born, half wood-sprite battle-ax, half consumptive cur, nuts! She heard the old woman licking her fingers, and she stretched herself inside the flesh of the wolf and began to jab the old woman in the kidneys. “Say, stop that!” howled the old woman. “Nobody likes an impudent lunch!”

Just then, punctual as misery, fragrant as the coming of bungled valor, there appeared at the door a huntsman. The huntsman took one look at the bloated wolf, put two and two together (crack huntsman, he), and reckoned all parties worth saving were at this moment being digested. He’d been sent by the young tomato’s mother to reclaim the loaf of bread, which she had decided she could not live without. The huntsman, to summon the requisite mettle, lifted to his mouth the wineskin slung over his shoulder and squeezed a stream of port into his gullet. Drink ye all of it, for this is my blood, came a gauzy voice as if from under a hidden pillow. “What’s that?” asked the huntsman. A higher-pitched voice said, “My, oh, my, what a big spleen you have!” And another voice, clearer but sporting an incognito hoarseness, said, “The better to chide you with, lovey!” And the woman, wrapped in a swaddling of wolf, let rip a musical belch and the girl inside her immediately recognized the melody of those windy gripes and she added to them by gasping: Grandmother! She hadn’t seen her maternal grandmother for many years, not since Nana and her mother angrily parted after an argument about how best to attend to the loaf. The girl remembered the delicious wolf soup her grandmother used to make her and felt a fond stirring in her own kishkas.

And the huntsman, so easily sidetracked when a quarry began to spill its guts, hastily reached a brawny fist into the wolf ’s maw and extracted. a frumpy girl! Whose cheeks were so frightfully abloom he thought she might be better off left to the vagaries of the wolf’s intestines, but she held the bread in her hands, so he dropped her onto the ground. Next, with the skill and boredom of a surgeon performing his one-thousandth appendectomy, he carefully plucked a quivering aspic of flesh from the throat of the wolf and decided the old woman, with her long nose and big ears, was likely beyond saving and he dropped the slop of her onto the floor and wiped the residual goo onto his gambeson, but when thick-nailed, corn-tumored toes poked through the fur as though it were a footed sleeper a size too small, the huntsman reached in again with the resentful finesse of a down-on-his-luck magician who believes he’s bound for a destiny far grander than the endless extraction of rabbits from hats, and he neatly skinned what turned out to be. a very old woman, ta-daa! Well, fancy that. The wolf’s weathered exterior, heavily trafficked of late he could see, lay rumpled at the old woman’s feet like a discarded cape too threadbare to repair. This nested zoology made the huntsman vertiginous, and he dropped himself onto a chair. Just then the jumble of flesh inched up the bed, enveloped the bones, then slid into the fur and got back under the covers, where he rattled a final breath and went limp with extinction. The girl, with a face like a rusted skillet, clutched the bread, and when she saw the huntsman, she went, stem to stern, red as the end of the world; the huntsman took one look at the girl and thought Bolshevik and decided no brazen-faced rose that rutilant was worth deflowering, bread or no bread, and he pumped the bladder beneath his arm and took another slug of wine; and the naked old crone? She smiled at the pair of them and bowed her head at the wolf, messianic with mange, who had just been alive then inside her. Then alive again, repatriated to the fatherland of his ailing skin. He’d be back, that one, sure as pokeweed.

The old-old woman, much older now than when she’d arrived, a coon’s age older than when she’d grudgingly passed down that loaf of bread to her daughter, picked up a sausage between her fingers and pretended to smoke it, then looked at herself in the shiny dowager’s hump of a soup spoon, and admired the salvaged eyesore she’d become.

ALTHOUGH HE IS WEARING A PAPER BAG OVER HIS HEAD, I INSTANTLY recognize Gary. Gary is my brother, and he is making a movie. Don’t get me wrong, the eyes were cut out. I mean, Gary could see. “What’s the name of the movie, Gary?” “The name of the moobie,” said Gary, “is My Family.” “You said moobie, Gary.” “No, I didn’t. I said, moobie.”

“You did it again, Gary.”

Gary’s eyes moved very quickly back and forth. Gary was miffed. “I’m going to flip out!” shouted Gary. “I’m sorry, Gary.” Gary had trouble with words. It was his sorest spot. Sometimes he was so tragically far off I wanted to gather him up in my arms, climb a tree, and leave him in the largest nest I could find. He’d mean to say “human” and it would come out “cantaloupe.” He’d mean to say “dad” and it would come out “sock.” Even my name he malapropped. He called me Mouse.

“Did you build that camera yourself, Gary?” The camera was an old tin can with a bunch of leaves pasted to it. Gary held the tin can up in the air. A few leaves fluttered off. “Action?” he whispered. And then, even softer, he whispered, “Cut?” “May I make a suggestion, Gary?” “What is it, Mouse?” “Maybe you want to point the camera at something.” “Like what?” “Maybe like an actor, Gary. Like an actor who is saying words.” “Like these actors?” asked Gary. I was proud of his pronunciation. He led me behind the couch.

The actors groaned in a heap. “Is that Grandpa, Gary?” It was unquestionably Grandpa. He was on the very, very tippy top. “Hi, Grandpa,” I said. “Hello,” said Grandpa. He was not excited to see me. I had married a black man, and he was still ticked off. “This is not about you,” said Grandpa. “This is about Gary, and his burden of dreams.”

“Look!” said Gary. “There’s Sock.” Gary meant our dad. “Hi, Dad.” My father gave a little wave. He was about four actors from the bottom. My eleven other brothers also were there: Eugene, Jack, Sid, Benjamin, Daniel, Saul, Eli, Walter, Adam, Richard, and Gus. They groaned. Aunt Rosa was shoved between my mother and grandmother. A bunch of cousins were balled up at the bottom.

“Hand me that shovel,” said Gary. “What shovel?” I asked. But Gary already was pointing his tin can straight at the heap. “Lights,” said Gary. “Turn off the lights!” I turned off the lights. “Camera,” said Gary. “Action,” said Gary. “Cut,” said Gary.

“May I ask a question, Gary?” “What is it, Mouse?” “Why are you shooting in the dark, Gary?”

“I’ve had it,” yelled my mother. “We’ve been here for six goddamn years.” Aunt Rosa made little clucking sounds. I turned on the lights. Gary went into the kitchen and returned with a large tray filled with tiny cups of water.

“I can’t live in a heap this close to your father,” yelled my mother.

I began to wonder about footage.

“I need a mani-pedi,” yelled my mother. “I need a goddamn blowout.” “You look beautiful,” I said. “This is not about you,” yelled my mother. “This is about Gary and his burden of dreams.” I handed her a cup of water. “This water tastes fake,” yelled my mother. “It is fake,” said Gary.

My father’s beeper went off. His patients were dying.

“Did you know,” asked Grandma, “that the fear of being touched is called aphenphosmphobia?” My mother rolled her eyes.

“What’s the movie about, Gary?” “The moobie’s about the Holocaust,” said Gary.

“Is there a script, Gary?” “Bring me that ladder,” said Gary. I brought him the ladder. He leaned it against the heap, climbed all the way up, and stood on top of Grandpa. Grandpa smiled.

Gary pulled the paper bag off his head. His silver hair tumbled out. The actors oohed and aahed. Gary blushed. He turned the paper bag inside out, and off of it he read the script: “Thou shalt have no other Gods; Thou shalt not make any graven images; Thou shalt not take the Lord’s name in vain; Remember the Sabbath day; Honor thy father and mother; Thou shalt not kill; Thou shalt not commit adultery; Thou shalt not steal; Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor; Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s house. nor anything that is his.”

“Such a good boy,” said Aunt Rosa. “Such a good boy,” said Grandpa. “Such a good boy,” said my father. “Go to hell,” said my mother. My eleven other brothers groaned.

“Did you know,” said Grandma, “that the fear of the skins of animals is called doraphobia?” I began to wonder whose heart was a doomed spoon. Mine or Gary’s.

The best I could do for Gary at this point was hold him, and ask him what he was going to do after.

“After what?” asked Gary. “After shooting,” I said. “I’m going to Barcelona,” said Gary. Now, that really ceiled me. I would’ve said “that really threw me off the heap,” but I wasn’t invited to be on the heap. Wasn’t really sure I ever wanted to be on the heap. “There are these scrambled eggs in Barcelona,” said Gary, “I really need to try.” “Oh, come on, Gary. You know you’ll scream the whole way.” In the States Gary was just fussy. Overseas he screamed.

And then I remembered Gary’s problem with malapropping. “Barcelona?” I asked. “Barcelona,” said Gary. “Scrambled eggs?” I asked. “Scrambled eggs,” said Gary. I looked over at the heap. My mother was halfway out of there. “Six more years,” she yelled, “and then I quit.” My father gave Gary an idealistic thumbs-up. “Did you know,” said Grandma, “that the fear of puppets is called pupaphobia?” “Well,” said Grandpa, “bye.” “I’m not going yet,” I said. I was still holding Gary. I held him as tightly as I hold my breath when I pass the cemetery. “Why do you do that?” asked Gary. “Do what?” “Hold your breath when you pass the cemetery?” I looked over at the heap. Aunt Rosa smacked her hand over her mouth to muffle her laughter, but she wasn’t even laughing. She wasn’t even smiling. “Because I don’t,” I whispered, “want to make the ghosts jealous.” “This isn’t about you,” said Gary.

“This is about me and my burden of dreams.” “I know, Gary.” “I know you know,” said Gary. He picked a few leaves off the tin can and handed them to me. I put them in my mouth, chewed, and swallowed. A month later I was pregnant.

I stayed on the set until my husband, the black man, came to pick me up.

OUR STORE WAS EXPENSIVE, I MEAN EX-PEN-SIVE, AS ANYTHING would be if all its requests were clothing in the colors of natural elements. The Duke’s son wanted shoes the color of rock, so he could walk in the rock and not see his feet. He was vain that way, he did not like to see his feet. He wanted to appear, from a distance, as a floating pair of ankles. But rock, of course, is many colors. It’s subtle, but it is not just one plain gray, that I can promise, and in order to truly blend in, it would not do to give the Duke a regular pair of lovely pure gray-dyed shoes. So, we had to trek over as a group to his dukedom, a three-day trip, and take bagfuls of the rocks back with us, the rocks he would be walking on, and then use those, at the studio, as guides. I spent five hours, one afternoon, just staring at a rock, trying to see into its color scheme. Gray, my head kept saying. I see gray.

At the shop, in general, we built clothing and shoes, soles and heels, shirts and coats; we treated the leather, shaped and wove the cloth, and even when an item wasn’t ordered as a special request, one pair of shoes or one robe might cost as much as a pony or a month’s food from the market stalls. Most villagers did not have this kind of money so the bulk of our customers were royalty, or the occasional traveler riding through town who had heard rumors of our skills. For this pair, for the Duke, all of us tailors and shoemakers, who numbered about twelve, were working round the clock. One man had the idea to grind bits of rock into particles, and then he added those particles to the dye washing bin. This helped, a little. We attended visualization seminars, where we tried to imagine what it was like to be a rock, and then, quietly, after an hour of deep thought and breathing, returned to our desks and tried to insert that imagery into our choices about how long to leave the shoes in the dye bath. We felt the power of the mountain, in the rock, and let that play a subtle subtextual role. And then, once the dye had reached ultimate power, and once the shoes were a beautiful pure gray, a rocky gray, but still gray, we summoned the Color Master.

She lived about a half mile away. In a cottage, behind the scrubby oak grove. We summoned her by sending off a goat down the lane, because she did not like to be disturbed by people, and the goat would trot down the road and butt on the door as her cue. She’d set up our studio and shop, in the first place, years ago; she does the final work. But the Color Master has been looking unwell these days. For our last project, the Duchess’s handbag, which was supposed to look like a just-blooming rose, she wore herself out thinking about pink, and was in bed for weeks after, recovering, which had never happened before. Pink, she kept saying, as she tossed around, in her bed. Birth, sex, blushes, kisses. She had a very high fever, and lost too much weight. Dark circles ringed her eyes. Also her younger brother suffers from terrible back problems and cannot move or work and lives with her, on the sofa, all day long. Also she is growing older, and she is certainly the most talented in the kingdom and gets zero recognition. We, the tailors and shoemakers, we know of her gifts, but does the King? Do the townsfolk? She walks among them, like an ordinary being, shopping for tomatoes, and no one knows that the world she’s seeing is about a thousand times more detailed than the world anyone else is looking at. When you see a tomato, like me, you probably see a very nice red orb with a green stem, smelling fresh and delectable, with a gentle give to the touch. When she sees a tomato, she sees blues and browns and yellows and curves, and the vine it came on, and she can probably even guess how many seeds are in a given tomato based on how heavy it feels in her hand.

So, we sent over the goat, and when she came into the studio, with the goat, we’d just finished the fourth dying of the rock shoes. They were drying on a mat, and they looked pretty good. I told Cheryl that her visualization of the mountain had definitely helped, because it was a deeper, stronger gray than I’d expected. Cheryl blushed. She’s one of the nicer ones. I said, too, that Edwin’s addition of the rocks to the dye had added a useful kind of rough texture. He kicked a stool leg, pleased. I hadn’t done much; I’m not the most skilled, but I like to commend good work when I see it. But the thing is, even with all our hard work, with all our deepening, they still looked like really beautiful gray shoes. The kind any normal person would love, if they didn’t have this curious vanity about vanishing feet.

The Color Master walked in, wearing a linen sheath woven with blue threadings. Her face hinting at gaunt. She greeted us all by nodding, and stood at the counter where the shoes were drip-drying.

Very nice work, she said. Esther, who had fronted the dying process, curtsied.

We sprinkled rocks into the dye, she said.

A fine choice, said the Color Master.

Edwin did a little dance in place, over at his table.

The goat settled on a pillow in the corner, and began to eat the stuffing.

The Color Master rolled her shoulders a few times, and when the shoes were dry, she laid her hands upon them. She lifted them up, to the sunlight. She picked up a rock, next to the shoe, and looked at the rock, in the light, next to the shoe. She circled both, inside different light rays. Then she went to the palette area and took out a handful of blue dust. We have about 150 metal bins of this dust, in a range of colors. The bins stand side by side, running the perimeter of the studio. They are narrow, so we can fit a whole lot of colors, and if someone brings in a new color, we hammer down a new bin and slide it into the spectrum, wherever it fits. One tailor found an amazing deep burgundy off in the driest part of the forest, on a series of leaves; I located, once, a type of dirt that was a deeper brown than sand but not like rich mud, over by the reddish iron deposits near the lake. Someone else found a new blue, in a dried-out pansy flower, and another in the feathers of a dead bird. We have instructions to hunt for color everywhere, at all times. The Color Master toured the room, and then took that handful of blue dust (and always, when I watch, I am thrilled — blue? How does she know, blue? It was a darkish blue, too, seemingly far too dark for shoes this light, unless he wanted wet rock shoes) and she rubbed the dust into the shoe. Back to the bins and then she got a black, a dusty black, and then some sage green. All rubbed into the gray shoe. While she worked everyone stood around, quiet. We dropped our usual drudgery and chit-chat.

The Color Master worked swiftly, but she added, usually, something on the level of forty colors, so the process, even quickly, took more than two hours. She added a color here, a color there, sometimes at the size of salt particles, and the gray in the shoe shifted and shaded under her hands. She would reach a level and ask for sealant and Esther would step forward and the CM would coat the shoe to seal in the colors and then return to the sunlight, holding a shoe up, with the rock in her other hand. This went on for about four rounds. I swear, I could start to feel the original mountain’s presence, in the room, the great heavy lumbering voice of it.

When she was done, the pair was so gray, so rock-like, you could hardly believe they were made of leather at all. They looked as if they had been sheared straight from the craggy mountainside.

Done, she said.

We circled her, bowing our heads.

Beautiful, I said.

Another triumph, murmured Sandy, next to me, who cannot color-mix to save her life.

The Color Master swept her gaze around the room, and her eyes rested on each of us, searching, slowly, until they finally settled on me. Me?

Will you walk me home? she said, in a deep voice, while Esther tied an invoice to the foot of a pigeon and then threw it out the window in the direction of the dukedom.

I would be honored, I said. I took her arm. The goat, full of pillow, tripped along behind us.

I am a quiet sort, except for the paying of compliments, and I didn’t know if I should ask her anything on the walk. As far as I knew, she didn’t usually ask for an escort home at all. Mainly I just looked at all the stones and rocks on the path, and for the first time saw that blue hint, and the blackness, and the shades of green, and that faint edge of purple if the light hit just so. She seemed relieved that I wasn’t asking questions, so much so that it occurred to me that that was probably why she’d asked me to walk her home in the first place.

At her door, she fixed her eyes on me: gray, steady, aging at the corners. She was almost twice my age, but had always had a sexiness I’d admired. A way of holding her body that let you know there was a body there, but that it was private, that stuff happened on it, in it, to it, but it was stuff I would never see. It made me sad, seeing that, while also knowing about her husband who had gone off to the war years ago, and had never returned, and how it was difficult for her to have people over because of her brother with the bad back, and how long ago she had fled her own town for a reason she never spoke of, plus she had a thick cough and her own money issues, which seemed so unfair when she should’ve been living in the palace, as far as I was concerned.

Listen, she said. She held me in her gaze.

Yes?

There’s a big request coming in, she said. I’ve heard rumors. Big. Huge.

What is it? I said.

I don’t know yet. But start preparing. You’ll have to take over. I will die soon, she said.

Excuse me?

Soon, she said. I can feel it, brewing. Death. It’s not dark, nor is it white. It’s almost a blue-purple, she said. Her eyes went past me, to the sky.

I will do my best, she said. I will do a fair bit of prep. But start preparing your color skills, Missy.

She lowered her brow, and her look was stern.

My name is Patty, I said.

She laughed.

How do you know? I said. Do you mean it? Are you ill?

No, she said. Yes. I mean it. I’m asking for your help, she said. And when I die, it will be your job to finish.

But I’m not very good, I said. Like at all. You can’t die. You should ask Esther, or Hans—

You, she said, and with a little curt nod, she went into her house, and shut the door.

The Duke’s son loved his shoes so much he sent us a drawing, by the court illustrator, of him, in them, floating, it appeared, on a pile of rocks. I love them, he said, in swirly handwriting, I love them, I love them! And then he added a small cash bonus, including horse rides, and a feast at the dukedom. We all attended, in all our finery, and it was a great time. It was the last time I saw the Color Master dancing, in her pearl-gray gown, and I knew it was the last, even as I watched it, her hair swirling out as she glided through the group. The Duke kept tapping his toe on the side, holding the Duchess’s hand, her free one grasping a handbag the perfect pink of a rose, so vivid and fresh it seemed to carry over a sweet scent, even across the ballroom.

IN THE STORIES YOU LIKED BEST AS A CHILD, MY LOVE, THERE WAS always a terrible repetition of tests. The hero, in order to win a wife and make his fortune, set out full of confidence to retrieve some object not even precious to himself. He was driven by the father-king who, facing the wobbling end of his reign, was in an unusually selfish, wheedling mood. And, let’s face it, this father had never been a noble fellow: forever trying to steal a kingdom, or defend his own against imagined enemies.

Three times the hero plunges back into the unknown world he has by dream or accident discovered, where the treasure — coveted by the king, whose hungers are unconscious and therefore impossible to sate — lies surrounded by obstacle, tedium, dragon. Three times he plunges in, three times risks his life to get the prize: first it’s the golden apple; second, the magical linen woven of thread so fine the whole cloth can pass through the smallest needle; and at last, the tiniest dog in the world, who can be heard barking inside a corn kernel, itself enclosed in a walnut shell.

The trouble is, in that other world, there appears someone more alluring than the object of the quest, for instance a beautiful white cat who begs the hero to stay — without words, of course. Please stay. Take the treasure back to the king, but come back. I need you here. I am forbidden to say why.

The mystery of the white cat’s need, not to mention her startlingly human beauty and intelligence, is far more deep and fulfilling and morally necessary than the foolish king’s demand for a golden something-or-other. It in fact turns the quest trivial, wrong, and inconsequential.

With each successive journey it gets harder and harder to cross the border back to the king, the real world. The reward — wife and land and future fortune — goes dim, the whole thing revealed for what it is, a repetitive, pointless exercise, an exchange of commodities: golden apple for king’s kingdom, princess-bride, etc. The taste of ashes in his mouth, the hero travels into middle age. Meanwhile, deep in the woods of his awakened imagination, the cat-queen, who can offer no material reward or even a logical reason why he should give up the world for her, waits helplessly by the midnight gates of her kingdom, bound by an ancient curse of silence, forbidden to ask favors or tell her story. Who is she? You don’t know, but the prince’s third and final return to his father’s castle, with apple, linen, dog at last acceptable to the king, and the earthly reward achieved, always left you feeling hollow, incomplete.

By now the lost domain, with its caverns and balustrades, its pointed gates and absolute danger, had gotten hold of you.

Meanwhile, back in the king’s palace, the elusive world is dismissed with shocking ease by courtiers and peasants alike. The prince himself is now bound by silence, too, his story trapped behind walls and briars and the hills in the distance, until, like the blurry cluster of the Pleiades, it is only visible when you gaze to the side.

But it’s too late: your heart’s been surprised, its true domain awakened. A domain that will haunt you until you go looking for it once more, on your own and without assignment, without hope that it will bring you anything useful in this world. Certainly it won’t make your fortune. It will, in fact, destroy you, as far as the king and his courtiers are concerned. Is this the world you lean toward, the one you cannot reenter a fourth time without dying, without abandoning the life lived reasonably, dutifully, under the king? Do you fear that if you put your sword to that life, everything, including the white cat, your silenced queen, might turn to ash along with everything else?

In the fairy tales of your childhood, my love, recall that the hero never came to this pass. He stayed home after the third journey, ever dutiful, and was rewarded by the last-minute appearance of a girl, strangely familiar, but from another kingdom entirely. And in that same moment, the father-king is released from the terrible grasp of his desires. Who can say which is the greater miracle? Never mind: the kingdom rejoices.

You rejoice, too, but even at the height of celebration you suspect the truth. I do, too: I watch you sleeping. I know that when you look across the border in your dreams, you see her plainly there, the white cat lost in her castle, her woods, her kingdom, she of fantastic, inhuman dignity, forever awaiting rescue. Observe her closely: she is your own kerneled heart, woven of miraculous thread and thrice-protected from human view, she whose life will open like a palm on the day — please, God, far from now — of your death.

White cat, I am revealed for what I am: his human wife. Be patient. Keep by the gate as you must. Silent sufferer, cruelly bound, wait as we wait, but on the other side.

WHEN WE WALKED TOGETHER HE HELD MY HAND UNNATURALLY HIGH, at the level of his chest, as no man had done before. In this way he made his claim.

When we stood at night beneath the great winking sky he instructed me gently in its deceit. The stars you see above you, he said, have vanished thousands of millions of years ago; it is precisely the stars you cannot see that exist, and exert their influence upon you.

When we lay together in the tall cold grasses the grasses curled lightly over us as if to hide us.

A man’s passion is his triumph, I have learned. And to be the receptacle of a man’s passion is a woman’s triumph.

He made me his bride and brought me to his great house which smelled of time and death. Passageways and doors and high-ceilinged rooms and tall windows opening out onto nothing. Have you ever loved another man as you now love me? my blue-bearded lover asked. Do you give your life to me?

What is a woman’s life that cannot be thrown away!

He told me of the doors I may unlock and the rooms I may enter freely. He told me of the seventh door, the forbidden door, which I may not unlock: for behind it lies a forbidden room which I may not enter. Why may I not enter it? I asked, for I saw that he expected it of me, and he said, kissing my brow, Because I have forbidden it.

And he entrusted me with the key to the door, for he was going away on a long journey.

Here it is: a small golden key, weighing no more than a feather in the palm of my hand.

It is faintly stained as if with blood. It glistens when I hold it to the light.

Did I not know that my lover’s previous brides had been brought to this house to die? — that they had failed him, one by one, and had deserved their fate?

I have slipped the golden key into my bosom, to wear against my heart, as a token of my lover’s trust in me.

When my blue-bearded lover returned from his long journey he was gratified to see that the door to the forbidden room remained locked; and when he examined the key, still warm from my bosom, he saw that the stain was an old, old stain, and not of my doing.

And he declared with great passion that I was now truly his wife; and that he loved me above all women.

Through the opened windows the invisible stars exert their power.

But if it is a power that is known, are the stars invisible?

When I sleep in our sumptuous bed I sleep deeply, and dream dreams that I cannot remember afterward, of extraordinary beauty, I think, and magic, and wonder. Sometimes in the morning my husband will recall them for me, for their marvels are such they invade even his dreams. How is it that you of all persons can dream such dreams, he says — such curious works of art!

And he kisses me, and seems to forgive me.

And I will be bearing his child soon. The first of his many children.

“YES, THE PEOPLE ARE WONDERFUL,” GEORGE ALLENSON HAD TO agree, there in Kenmare. His wife, Vivian, was twenty years younger than he, but almost as tall, with dark hair and decided, sharp features, and it placed the least strain on their marriage if he agreed with her assertions. Yet he harbored an inner doubt. If the Irish were so wonderful, why was Ireland such a sad and empty country? Vivian, a full generation removed from him, was an instinctive feminist, but to him any history of unrelieved victimization seemed suspect. Not that it wasn’t astonishing to see the eighty-room palaces the British landlords had built for themselves, and touching to see the ruins — stone end walls still standing, thatched roofs collapsed — of the hovels where the Irish had lived, eaten their potatoes and drunk their whiskey, and died. Vivian loved the hovels, inexplicably; they all looked alike from the outside, and, when it was possible to enter a doorless doorway or peek through a sashless window-hole, the inside showed a muddy dirt floor, a clutter of rotting boards that might once have been furniture, and a few plastic or aluminum leavings of intruders like themselves.

Vivian could see he was unconvinced. “The way they use the language,” she insisted, “and leave little children to run their shops for them.”

“Wonderful,” he agreed again. He was sitting with his, he hoped, not ridiculously much younger wife in the lounge of their hotel, before a flickering blue fire that was either a gas imitation of a peat fire or the real thing, Allenson wasn’t sure. A glass of whiskey whose one ice cube had melted away added to his natural sleepiness. He had driven them around the Dingle Peninsula today in a foggy rain, and then south to Kenmare over a narrow mountain road from Killarney, Vivian screaming with anxiety all the way, and it had left him exhausted. After a vacation in Italy two years ago, he had vowed never to rent a foreign car with her again, but he had, in a place with narrower roads and left-handed drive. During the trickiest stretch today, over fabled Moll’s Gap, with a Mercedes full of gesturing Germans pushing him from behind, Vivian had twisted in her seat and pressed her face against the headrest rather than look, and sobbed and called him a sadistic fiend.

Afterwards, safely delivered to the hotel parking lot, she complained that she had twisted so violently her lower back hurt. What he resented most about her attacks of hysteria was how, when she recovered from them, she expected him to have recovered, too. For all her feminism she still claimed the feminine right to meaningless storms of emotion, followed by the automatic sunshine of male forgiveness.

As if sensing the sulky residue of a grudge within him, and determined to erase it, she flashed there by the sluggish fire an impeccable smile. Her lips were long and mobile but thin and sharp, as if — it seemed to him in his drowsy condition, by the gassy flickering fire — her eyebrows had been duplicated and sewn together at the ends to make a mouth. “Remember,” she said, offering to make a memory of what had occurred mere hours ago, “the lady shopkeeper out there beyond Dingle, where I begged you to stop?”

“You insisted I stop,” he corrected. She had said that if he didn’t admit he was lost she would jump out of the car and walk back. How could they be lost, he had argued, with the sea on their left and hills on their right? But the sea was obscured by fog and the stony hills vanished upward into rain clouds and she was not persuaded; at last he had slammed on the brakes. Both of them had flounced out of the car. The dim-lit store looked empty, and they had been about to turn away from the door when a shadow materialized within, beyond the lace curtains — the proprietress, emerging from a room where she lived, waiting, rocking perhaps, watching what meagre channels of television reached this remoteness. He had been surprised, in south-western Ireland, by how little television there was to watch, and by the sound of Gaelic being spoken all about him, in shops and pubs, by the young as well as the old. It was part of his own provincialism to be surprised by the provincialism of others; he expected America, its language and all its channels, to be everywhere by now.

This was indeed a store; its shadowy shelves held goods in cans and polyethylene packets, and a cloudy case held candies and newspapers bearing today’s date. But it was hard for the Allensons to see it as anything but a stage cleverly set for their entrance and exit. The village around them seemed deserted. The proprietress — her hair knotted straight back, her straight figure clad in a dress of nunnish gray — felt younger than she looked, like an actress tricked out in bifocals and a gray rat, and she described the local turnings as if in all her years on a cliff above the sea she had never before been asked to direct a pair of tourists. There was a grave ceremoniousness to the occasion that chastened the fractious couple. To pay her for her trouble, they bought a copy of the local newspaper and some bags of candy. In Ireland, they had reverted to candy, which they ate in the car — Licorice Allsorts for him, for her chocolate-covered malt balls called Maltezers.

They had got back into the car enhanced by the encounter, the irritating currents between them momentarily quelled. Yet, even so, for all those theatrically precise directions, Allenson must have taken a wrong turning, for they never passed the Gallarus Oratory, which he had wanted to see. It was the Chartres of beehive chapels. In Ireland, the sights were mostly stones. Allenson found himself driving endlessly upward on the north side of the Dingle Peninsula, and needing to traverse the Slieve Mish Mountains to avoid Tralee, and being tail-gated by the Germans on Moll’s Gap, while Vivian had hysterics and he reflected upon the gaps between people, even those consecrated to intimacy.

He had had three wives. He had meant Vivian to see him into the grave, but unexpected resistances in her were stimulating, rather than lulling, his will to live. In his simple and innocent manhood he had taken on a swarming host of sexist resentments — men were incompetent (his driving in foreign lands), men were ridiculous (his desire to see, faute de mieux, old Ireland’s lichened gray beehive huts, dolmens, menhirs, and ruined abbeys), men were lethal. Two years ago, out of sheer political superstition, this youthful wife had become furious in Gabriele D’Annunzio’s estate above Lake Garda, all because the world-renowned poet and adventurer had enshrined himself and his thirteen loyal followers in matching sarcophagi, lifted up to the sun on pillars. Men were Fascists, this had led Vivian to realize. She proved to be violently allergic to history, and her silver-haired husband loomed to her as history’s bearer. So he had, for their next trip abroad, suggested Eire, a land whose history was muffled in legend and ignominy. Just its shape on the map next to Great Britain’s spiky upstanding silhouette, suggested the huddled roundness of a docile spouse.

“You insisted,” he repeated, “and then we got lost anyway, and saw none of the sights. I missed the Gallarus Oratory.”

Vivian brushed his resentful memory away, there by the hotel fire. “The whole countryside is the sight,” she said, “and the wonderful people. Everybody knows that. And all day, with you jerking that poor Japanese compact this way and that like a crazy teenaged hood, I couldn’t enjoy looking out. If I take my eyes off the map for an instant, you get lost. You’re not getting me back into that car tomorrow, I tell you that.”

Itching to give the fire a poke, he gave it to her instead. “Darling, I thought we were going to drive south, to Bantry and Skibbereen. Bantry House in the morning, and Creagh Gardens in the afternoon, with a quick lunch at Ballydehob.” Allenson smiled.

“You’re a monster,” Vivian said cheerfully. “You really would put me through a whole day of you at the wheel on these awful roads? We’re going to walk.”

“Walk?”

“George, I talked it over with the man in the office, the assistant manager, while you were putting on a shirt and tie. He couldn’t have been sweeter, and said what the tourists do in Kenmare is they take walks. He gave me a map.”

“A map?” Another whiskey would sink him to the bottom of the sea. But would that be so bad? This woman was a talking nightmare. She had produced a little map, printed by photocopy on green paper, showing a pattern of numbered lines surrounding the phallic thrust of the Kenmare estuary. “I’ve come all this way to take a walk?” But there was no arguing. Vivian was so irrational that, because her predecessor wife had been called Claire, she had refused, planning the trip, to include County Clare, where the good cliffs and primitive churches were, and off whose shore part of the Spanish Armada had wrecked.

MOTHER ISSUED DIRECTIONS AND HER ASSISTANTS CLEANED. ONE scrubbed the floor and mopped, covering it with lye, and the other suctioned dust out of the living room. Mother fanned her magazines out on the coffee table, making sure that each title could be discerned at a glance. I had nothing better to do than witness.

I reached for my brush, combed and combed my hair, a ritual of untangling. “I’m a mess,” I announced.

Mother hesitated, stopped what she was doing for only an instant. “I dislike that word.”

“I am a mess.”

“All right,” she said. “You may be a mess, but you’re clean. You’re a clean mess.”

“I’m a fine mess.”

“Well, you’re my mess,” Mother said, “and today we’re going to fix you,” and she began washing her hands. She had a smile on her face, or maybe a grimace. You cannot decipher nuance through plastic.

I was a mess. I had SCID (no dirty jokes about skid marks, not that kind of mess — ha, ha), Severe Combined Immunodeficiency. No B cells, no T cells, nothing to protect me from any organism wishing to penetrate my body. A walking, talking gossamer. It sucked.

Thirteen years — thirteen years of living inside an antiseptic bubble, making sure my environment was scoured clean, daily scrubbing of every inch of skin, keeping the world and its dangers at bay. It double sucked.

Mother was sure the nuns would be able to cure me — sure of it, emphatic about it, double emphatic, triple emphatic. She’d heard about them, talked to them, and believed in their miracles. But she couldn’t convince them to come to us no matter how much she offered them. The healing chamber couldn’t be moved. I had to leave my bubble for the first time in years and go there. We had to travel hundreds of miles to some suckhole castle in some podunk village in the middle of nowhere.

How would you pack for that?

SUBJECT 525, A CAUCASIAN FEMALE IN HER EARLY TO MID-TWENTIES, entered an emergency medical facility at around 11 P.M. presenting symptoms of an acute psychotic episode. Paranoia, heightened sensitivity to physical contact, and high-volume vocal emanations were noted at triage by the medical staff. The subject complained of the hearing of voices, specifically “a chorus of amphibians” who were entreating the subject to “pretty please guard the product from the evil frog prince.” The staff reported that the subject’s bizarre behavior was augmented by an unusual sartorial style, commenting that she was “an ethereal young woman wearing a Renaissance-type dress, with huge knots in her long, otherwise flowing hair.” She was accompanied by a strange odor, tentatively identified as “cat urine.”

During the intake interview, the subject volunteered the information that she had nasally inhaled “crystal,” estimating that she had nasally inhaled (snorted) between 50 and 250 mg of “crystal” in the twenty-four hours prior to hospital admission. “Crystal,” it was determined, is a slang term for methamphetamine, a central nervous system stimulant similar to prescription amphetamines such as Benzedrine. Methamphetamine is a “street” drug-of-abuse that has become popular in recent years due to its easy manufacture possibilities (Osborne, 1988). It’s sometimes referred to by the terms crystal, speed, zoomazoom, and go fast (Durken, 1972). In a brief moment of lucidity, Subject 525 theorized that her psychotic state might be due to the large quantity of methamphetamine she had “snorted,” and the staff agreed to put her in a “nice, quiet, white room” for a period of observation. The head resident thought it advisable to administer antipsychotic medication, but the subject, who by all accounts exhibited an uncanny amount of personal charm, prevailed upon the staff to give her a can of beer instead.

After approximately sixty minutes of observation, a member of the nursing staff noted that the subject had begun to complain that “a beslimed prince” was causing certain problems for her, namely “using copper fittings” and “not ventilating right.” This “prince” was, as the nurse understood it, acting “all mean and horrible” concerning the manufacture of methamphetamine, which the subject had cheerfully volunteered as her occupation during the intake interview. The nurse, who was formerly employed in a federal prison and had considerable experience treating denizens of the demimonde, theorized that “Prince” might be a moniker used by the subject’s “old man”; this was particularly likely, the nurse indicated, since the manufacture of methamphetamine is the customary province of “gangs” of motorcycle riders, who often use colorful nicknames as a way of asserting their “outsider” status in society (Ethel Kreztchner, RN, 2002).

The nurse further asserted that this would explain why the subject had offered, at intake, only the name “Princess,” and would indicate no surname. By then the hour had grown rather late, and as the emergency room was quiet, much of the staff gathered around the subject (“Princess”), who began to tell a lively tale of capture and imprisonment by a handsome but wicked “Prince” who was, in fact, “an evil enchanter.” The tradition of shape-shifting sorcerers is a familiar one in old German folktales (Grimm, ca. 1812), though these tales have been widely regarded as fanciful narratives concocted to intimidate and control unruly juveniles (twelve and under) in diverse cultural contexts and are rarely considered historical evidence. Nevertheless, the Princess claimed that the Prince had captured her from an orphanage near Eloy, Arizona, where she had spent her days climbing trees in pursuit of nuts. Chasing butterflies, according to the subject, was another activity she enjoyed in her youth. But that all changed when a handsome young man approached the girl and offered her a pony made of candy. The pony was beautiful and delicious, and though the Princess wished to save it forever, she found she devoured it anyway. With every bite the pony grew smaller. And with every bite the handsome “young man” became more fearsome and wicked-looking.

The staff gathered close, listening with great interest. The Princess went on to indicate that the Prince/Sorcerer had bewitched her with the candy horse, and had since imprisoned her in a prefabricated “home” near a foul-smelling landfill, where she was kept locked up in a “tin can with carpet taped over the windows.” There, the Prince had prevailed upon her to undertake the smelly and dangerous manufacture of methamphetamine by means of his sorcerer’s power. All day long, the Princess said, she was forced to “boil down Mexican ephedrine in a triple-neck flask, bubble hydrogen through a stainless steel tank, or titrate ethyl ether out of lock defrosting fluid, dressed only in filthy rags,” while the Prince rode his shiny “hog” through tall pines in the mountains to the north of town. Or the Prince would “relax and kick back with a can of brew” while the Princess “slaved over a hot chemistry set.” The only positive aspect of the experience, the Princess noted, was that she “cooked the best damn product in Arizona,” a substance that was uncommonly potent and white, she said, with a “real clean buzz.”

The Princess explained, in a sweetly chiming voice, that these endeavors were dangerous, particularly under the conditions imposed by the Prince, who habitually smoked marijuana cigarettes in the vicinity of fumes. She had survived because she was protected by a special angel, one with “gills” who could exist underwater or possibly “inside a solution.” She referred to this angel as “Gilbert” (possibly “Gillbert”), and noted that Gilbert appeared to her when she imbibed heavily of “the product.” The manifestation of angels, seraphim, djinns, and Elvis Presley is common during episodes of psychosis (Hotchkiss, 1969), and much of the staff believed that the Princess was describing an aspect of methamphetamine-induced hallucination. Others on staff found themselves strangely moved by the Princess’s story of forced enslavement and the high-risk game of organic chemistry, and wondered if there might be some sort of truth to it.

The head resident, in particular, took an interest in the subject’s case, indicating to researchers that he was “bored that night, as usual” and that he found the Princess “interesting.” The resident further indicated that his prodigious academic success was based on his above-average intelligence, which was also “a curse” because it led him to feel a feeling of “boredom” and intolerance with all of “the idiots around him,” which, he made clear, also applied to the researchers gathering data on this case. Researchers in turn described the resident as rather “vain and haughty,” or “arrogant,” though most theorized that these traits covered up insecurity about his youth combined with a doomed romanticism undercut by a persistent tendency toward bitterness.

The Princess was exhibiting fewer symptoms of psychosis, and had become quite comfortable in her surroundings, curling up in a nest of pillows “like a cat” (Overhand, 2002). She said that she loved the medical staff and was grateful to them for helping to save her from the evilness of the Prince and the pungent squalidness of methamphetamine manufacture. The head resident shuffled his feet and pointed out that the Princess herself had actually contributed to her own care by wisely seeking medical treatment when she felt overwhelmed by drug-induced psychosis, whereas a lot of “tweaked-out idiots” just went ahead and did something stupid or violent. Then the two stared for a while into each other’s eyes.

It was then that lateness of the hour was nervously remarked upon by all, and several staff members complained that they had been on duty for an excessive length of time. The Princess made a “general comment” that her product could “give a person a little pick-me-up” that theoretically might make the staff members feel like “they were operating at one hundred and fifty percent.”

The staff was curious about the efficacy of the Princess’s homemade methamphetamine, though their enthusiasm abated somewhat after a phlebotomist (a “pretty plump girl who never wore any makeup and never smiled or said hello to nobody beneath her,” according to the environmental control officer) recited aloud in a high and quavering voice a list of the possible effects of nasally inhaling methamphetamine, including “nervousness, sweating, teeth-gnashing, irritability, incessant talking, sleeplessness, and the obsessive assembling and disassembling of machinery” (PDR, 2002). Interest swelled once again when the Princess pointed out that the young phlebotomist had mumbled while mentioning one of the chief effects of the substance: euphoria.

After that, the staff cleared from the small room where the Princess was being kept sequestered by herself, though occasionally a lone member would disappear inside, to emerge a few moments later wiping their nose with eyes unusually wild. Such staff members were also observed tidying their work areas, peering into the mirror, smoking cigarettes, and talking to one another with great animation and enthusiasm but little content (Overhand, 2002). The receptionist was observed taking apart a telephone, so that she could “clean it.” The overall effect was that the staff was unusually energetic and “happy” (see below).

Shortly before dawn, several nurses returned to the Princess’s bedside, where they adjusted the lighting in the small room so a warm glow bathed the subject. They worked with combs to untangle the knots in the subject’s hair. The head resident had entered the room as well, and kept his boyish face, so incongruous beneath his balding head, hunched toward his chest while he made notes in the subject’s chart.

It was then that the subject began to speak softly about a set of ponies she had made out of old tires. The Princess explained how she had “freed” the ponies from the rubber with a cutting implement, and that a “herd” of such ponies hung from ropes in the trees around her prefabricated housing unit, where they blew back and forth in the breeze, bumping against one another with hollow thuds. They possessed the spirit of “running things,” she explained, though they had no “legs to speak of ”; she could look at them and feel the feeling of “something wild and running away.” The subject further explained that nasally inhaling or “skin popping” (subcutaneous injection) of methamphetamine gave her relief from a feeling that “nothing important would ever happen to her” and replaced it with the sensation that she was, like the ponies fashioned from discarded tires, something “wild and running away.”

She indicated that these feelings of flight accounted for the only times that she ever truly felt like a princess.

The notes in the subject’s chart at this point become “tiny and very, very neat,” according to researchers (Plank et al., 2002). The notes themselves indicate that the subject was “an exceptionally attractive woman,” and that the medical staff found her “enchanting.” She was “like them but different — more perfect — yet at the same time more glassine and fragile.” The chart noted that the subject had become sleepy, perhaps due to the fatigue that often follows the ingestion of methamphetamine (Nintzel, 1982). It was indicated that some members of the staff wished to allow her to sleep, while others had an urgent need to “pester her; to poke her in the leg with a stick over and over,” to keep her awake.

Verbal accounts indicate that not all the members of the night staff were equally smitten with the subject. Several members demurred, in particular the phlebotomist, who commented that the subject was “a disgusting drug addict” who was “manipulative.” She added that she hated men “who fall for those poor lost creatures,” even though such “creatures” were in the process of getting “exactly what they signed up for.” The phlebotomist indicated that it was futile to try to help the subject, save medically, because the subject had freely chosen her own seedy destiny, despite her weird story of kidnapping, adding that “not everybody who suffers has a burning need to dramatize it with scarves and eyeliner.”

Videotapes from the security cameras in the waiting area provide a clear visual record of the intrusion that occurred at approximately 4:12 A.M. The tapes show a clean, tiled area violently rent by the shiny chrome form of a very large motorcycle (or “hog”) piloted by the “Prince,” who gained ingress by method of riding through the glass doors, where he continued to gun his motorcycle in circles through a reception area furnished with chairs which became smashed. The “Prince” was reported to be a large, muscular male of indeterminate race sporting “a pair of sideburns as big as teacups.” He was reportedly clad in “enough black leather to denude several cows,” though naturally it has not been determined how many cows would have been needed to provide the amount of leather the Prince was wearing. Much of the hospital staff on duty also reported that the intruder had a “tail, slimy and black, sort of like the tail of a tadpole.” Careful scrutiny of security videotapes does reveal the presence of a whiplike appendage dangling from the back of the Prince’s “hog,” though the possibility that this might in fact be a literal “tail” has been discounted by researchers, who have chalked up this and several other aspects of the medical staff ’s report to group suggestibility (Johansen, 2002). (For example, the hospital staff also reported that the Prince had “eyes that glowed red like coals” and that “lizards and snakes slithered from his boots.”)

It was reported that the Prince then parked his “hog” and proceeded past the reception area, stalking the warren-like halls of the emergency treatment facility in his heavy boots, scuffing the floor, screaming that someone had taken his “woman,” and wondering aloud, in a yelling tone, where he could find his “kitten.”

At this the Princess and hospital staff fled to a supply closet, where they cowered, leaving the issue of how to properly control the “Prince” open for resolution. It was agreed that the police, as well as the hospital security guards, should be alerted; it was lamented however that there was no available phone in the supply closet and such action would require someone to dash out into the hallway where the Prince was raging and overturning carts and smashing his hammer-like hands into walls while eating candy reserved for children who were unfortunate enough to wind up in the emergency room. The Princess, whose melodic voice was muffled due to the press of bodies in the supply closet, pointed out that the Prince possessed special evil magic powers and that anyone who challenged him must be good in heart and clever both, and carry with him or her a small silver bell which the Princess kept on a chain around her neck.

As the destructive noises of the Prince’s rampage became louder, the head resident indicated that he felt he should be the one to make an effort to save himself, the staff, and the once psychotic but now quite sweet Princess. The staff was surprised to hear this, as they had never noticed any behavior related to bravery or even simple kindness on the part of the head resident. They continued to be surprised when they heard him say, in a quavering voice, that though it was true he might not be good-hearted, he certainly was clever enough, so why not give it a go? Everyone in the closet gave him a quiet but heartfelt round of applause. The Princess begged him to be careful and hung the bell around his neck with a trembling hand. She bestowed upon him a soft kiss as he slipped out the door.

The “rescue” of women by handsome, effeminate men is a staple of old folktales, engineered to reconcile a young woman’s inclination toward feckless independence with the prevailing custom of marriage by casting the potential husband as really nice and sort of harmless and at the very least a whole lot better than the alternative of living with her fucked-up family (cf. Cinderella, Grimm, 1812). Despite the tradition of the effeminate male triumphing over the more sexual, “animal” challenger, it seemed uncertain to all present that the head resident could defeat the “Prince” using the tools at his disposal — a stethoscope, some pens, and a pager. It’s difficult to determine, though, what kind of damage the resident may have been capable of inflicting with these devices, since, according to his own account, when confronted with the fierce and gruesome “Prince,” who “smelled like burning rubber and had white stuff hanging off his beard,” he froze, then mutely raised a traitorous arm to point to the supply closet where the Princess and the rest of the staff were hiding.

The Prince wrenched open the door with a huge paw, and out popped the Princess.

According to the staff, the Princess screamed with a high-pitched yelp when the Prince grabbed her, smearing her lovely Renaissance-style dress with grease. The records note that the Prince and the Princess together presented quite an odd picture, one that brought to mind “a nightmare creature clawing a plate of petit fours” (Petix, 2002). The Princess is reported to have said, “It’s okay,” and, “No, but I want to go with him, really,” and, “He’s my old man!” in a tone of tense brightness, but the staff plainly did not believe her and theorized that she was simply trying to “appease her oppressor” in order to minimize the likelihood of domestic violence. Before the staff was able to contact the authorities, the “Prince” settled himself astride his hog and pulled the Princess up behind him.

The Prince and Princess roared out of the building and vanished into the night in a cloud of exhaust.

After the Prince and Princess had departed, the staff grumbled that the head resident had behaved “most cowardly,” and complained that the Princess had been “sacrificed,” to be “whisked off to a prefabricated house where everything is always fast and tinged with madness, or else dark and sad and falling asleep.” Much of the staff argued that something should have been done to help the girl, though some felt it was the curse of the phylum Princess to be always at the mercy of one prince-type or another, and that her best chance was to save herself, which seemed unlikely. The resident, for his part, quickly aligned himself with the phlebotomist, agreeing that the Princess was “just an addict” who had come in “exhibiting drug-seeking behavior anyway,” and implying, in word and action, that drug addicts were by nature less than human and so deserved whatever nasty fate they got. Then he skulked off down a fluorescent-lit hallway with his hands shoved into his pockets.

Though he wore the silver bell around his neck to the end of his days.

(Third Subject’s Responses to Investigator’s Written Questionnaire)

1. Jemima Glorfindel Petula Ramsey.

2. 17 on June the 9th.

3. The last 5 years. Before that we lived in Glasgow (Scotland). Before that, Cardiff (Wales).

4. I don’t know. I think he’s in magazine publishing now. He doesn’t talk to us anymore. The divorce was pretty bad and Mum wound up paying him a lot of money. Which seems sort of wrong to me. But maybe it was worth it just to get shot of him.

5. An inventor and entrepreneur. She invented the Stuffed Muffin(TM), and started the Stuffed Muffin chain. I used to like them when I was a kid, but you can get kind of sick of stuffed muffins for every meal, especially because Mum used us as guinea pigs. The Complete Turkey Dinner Christmas Stuffed Muffin was the worst. But she sold out her interest in the Stuffed Muffin chain about five years ago, to start work on My Mum’s Colored Bubbles (not actually™ yet).

6. Two. My sister Nerys, who was just 15, and my brother Pryderi, 12.

7. Several times a day.

8. No.

9. Through the Internet. Probably on eBay.

10. She’s been buying colors and dyes from all over the world ever since she decided that the world was crying out for brightly colored Day-Glo bubbles. The kind you can blow, with bubble mixture.

11. It’s not really a laboratory. I mean, she calls it that, but really it’s just the garage. Only she took some of the Stuffed Muffins(™) money and converted it, so it has sinks and bathtubs and Bunsen burners and things, and tiles on the walls and the floor to make it easier to clean.

12. I don’t know. Nerys used to be pretty normal. When she turned 13 she started reading these magazines and putting pictures of these strange bimbo women up on her wall like Britney Spears and so on. Sorry if anyone reading this is a Britney fan;) but I just don’t get it. The whole orange thing didn’t start until last year.

13. Artificial tanning creams. You couldn’t go near her for hours after she put it on. And she’d never give it time to dry after she smeared it on her skin, so it would come off on her sheets and on the fridge door and in the shower leaving smears of orange everywhere. Her friends would wear it too, but they never put it on like she did. I mean, she’d slather on the cream, with no attempt to look even human-colored, and she thought she looked great. She did the tanning salon thing once, but I don’t think she liked it, because she never went back.

14. Tangerine Girl. The Oompaloompa. Carrot-top. Go-Mango. Orangina.

15. Not very well. But she didn’t seem to care, really. I mean, this is a girl who said that she couldn’t see the point of science or maths because she was going to be a pole dancer as soon as she left school. I said, nobody’s going to pay to see you in the altogether, and she said how do you know? and I told her that I saw the little quick-time films she’d made of herself dancing nuddy and left in the camera and she screamed and said give me that, and I told her I’d wiped them. But honestly, I don’t think she was ever going to be the next Bettie Page or whoever. She’s a sort of squarish shape, for a start.

16. German measles, mumps and I think Pryderi had chicken pox when he was staying in Melbourne with the Grandparents.

17. In a small pot. It looked a bit like a jam jar, I suppose.

18. I don’t think so. Nothing that looked like a warning label anyway. But there was a return address. It came from abroad, and the return address was in some kind of foreign lettering.

19. You have to understand that Mum had been buying colors and dyes from all over the world for five years. The thing with the Day-Glo bubbles is not that someone can blow glowing colored bubbles, it’s that they don’t pop and leave splashes of dye all over everything. Mum says that would be a lawsuit waiting to happen. So, no.

20. There was some kind of shouting match between Nerys and Mum to begin with, because Mum had come back from the shops and not bought anything from Nerys’s shopping list except the shampoo. Mum said she couldn’t find the tanning cream at the supermarket but I think she just forgot. So Nerys stormed off and slammed the door and went into her bedroom and played something that was probably Britney Spears really loudly. I was out the back, feeding the three cats, the chinchilla, and a guinea pig named Roland who looks like a hairy cushion, and I missed it all.

21. On the kitchen table.

22. When I found the empty jam jar in the back garden the next morning. It was underneath Nerys’s window. It didn’t take Sherlock Holmes to figure it out.

23. Honestly, I couldn’t be bothered. I figured it would just be more yelling, you know? And Mum would work it out soon enough.

24. Yes, it was stupid. But it wasn’t uniquely stupid, if you see what I mean. Which is to say, it was par-for-the-course-for-Nerys stupid.

25. That she was glowing.

26. A sort of pulsating orange.

27. When she started telling us that she was going to be worshipped like a god, as she was in the dawn times.

28. Pryderi said she was floating about an inch above the ground. But I didn’t actually see this. I thought he was just playing along with her newfound weirdness.

29. She didn’t answer to “Nerys” anymore. She described herself mostly as either My Immanence or The Vehicle. (“It is time to feed the Vehicle.”)

30. Dark chocolate. Which was weird because in the old days I was the only one in the house who even sort-of liked it. But Pryderi had to go out and buy her bars and bars of it.

31. No. Mum and me just thought it was more Nerys. Just a bit more imaginatively weirdo Nerys than usual.

32. That night, when it started to get dark. You could see the orange pulsing under the door. Like a glow-worm or something. Or a light show. The weirdest thing was that I could still see it with my eyes closed.

33. The next morning. All of us.

34. It was pretty obvious by this point. She didn’t really even look like Nerys any longer. She looked sort of smudged. Like an after-image. I thought about it, and it’s. Okay. Suppose you were staring at something really bright, that was a blue color. Then you closed your eyes, and you’d see this glowing yellowy-orange after-image in your eyes? That was what she looked like.

35. They didn’t work either.

36. She let Pryderi leave to get her more chocolate. Mum and I weren’t allowed to leave the house anymore.

37. Mostly I just sat in the back garden and read a book. There wasn’t very much else I really could do. I started wearing dark glasses, so did Mum, because the orange light hurt our eyes. Other than that, nothing.

38. Only when we tried to leave or call anybody. There was food in the house, though. And Stuffed Muffins(™) in the freezer.

39. “If you’d just stopped her wearing that stupid tanning cream a year ago we wouldn’t be in this mess!” But it was unfair, and I apologized afterward.

40. When Pryderi came back with the dark chocolate bars. He said he’d gone up to a traffic warden and told him that his sister had turned into a giant orange glow and was controlling our minds. He said the man was extremely rude to him.

41. I don’t have a boyfriend. I did, but we broke up after he went to a Rolling Stones concert with the evil bottle-blond former friend whose name I do not mention. Also, I mean, the Rolling Stones? These little old goat-men hopping around the stage pretending to be all rock and roll? Please. So, no.

42. I’d quite like to be a vet. But then I think about having to put animals down, and I don’t know. I want to travel for a bit before I make any decisions.

43. The garden hose. We turned it on full, while she was eating her chocolate bars, and distracted, and we sprayed it at her.

44. Just orange steam, really. Mum said that she had solvents and things in the laboratory, if we could get in there, but by now Her Immanence was hissing mad (literally), and she sort of fixed us to the floor. I can’t explain it. I mean, I wasn’t stuck, but I couldn’t leave or move my legs. I was just where she left me.

45. About half a meter above the carpet. She’d sink down a bit to go through doors, so she didn’t bump her head. And after the hose incident she didn’t go back to her room, just stayed in the main room and floated about grumpily, the color of a luminous carrot.

46. Complete world domination.

47. I wrote it down on a piece of paper and gave it to Pryderi.

48. He had to carry it back. I don’t think Her Immanence really understood money.

49. I don’t know. It was Mum’s idea more than mine. I think she hoped that the solvent might remove the orange. And at that point, it couldn’t hurt. Nothing could have made things worse.

50. It didn’t even upset her, like the hose-water did. I’m pretty sure she liked it. I think I saw her dipping her chocolate bars into it, before she ate them, although I had to sort of squint up my eyes to see anything where she was. It was all a sort of great orange glow.

51. That we were all going to die. Mum told Pryderi that if the Great Oompaloompa let him out to buy chocolate again, he just shouldn’t bother coming back. And I was getting really upset about the animals — I hadn’t fed the chinchilla or Roland the guinea pig for two days, because I couldn’t go into the back garden. I couldn’t go anywhere. Except the loo, and then I had to ask.

52. I suppose because they thought the house was on fire. All the orange light. I mean, it was a natural mistake.

53. We were glad she hadn’t done that to us. Mum said it proved that Nerys was still in there somewhere, because if she had the power to turn us into goo, like she did the fire-fighters, she would have done. I said that maybe she just wasn’t powerful enough to turn us into goo at the beginning and now she couldn’t be bothered.

54. You couldn’t even see a person in there anymore. It was a bright orange pulsing light, and sometimes it talked straight into your head.

55. When the spaceship landed.

56. I don’t know. I mean, it was bigger than the whole block, but it didn’t crush anything. It sort of materialized around us, so that our whole house was inside it. And the whole street was inside it too.

57. No. But what else could it have been?

58. A sort of pale blue. They didn’t pulse, either. They twinkled.

59. More than six, less than twenty. It’s not that easy to tell if this is the same intelligent blue light you were just speaking to five minutes ago.

60. Three things. First of all, a promise that Nerys wouldn’t be hurt or harmed. Second, that if they were ever able to return her to the way she was, they’d let us know, and bring her back. Thirdly, a recipe for fluorescent bubble mixture. (I can only assume they were reading Mum’s mind, because she didn’t say anything. It’s possible that Her Immanence told them, though. She definitely had access to some of “the Vehicle’s” memories.) Also, they gave Pryderi a thing like a glass skateboard.

61. A sort of a liquid sound. Then everything became transparent. I was crying, and so was Mum. And Pryderi said “Cool beans,” and I started to giggle while crying, and then it was just our house again.

62. We went out into the back garden and looked up. There was something blinking blue and orange, very high, getting smaller and smaller, and we watched it until it was out of sight.

63. Because I didn’t want to.

64. I fed the remaining animals. Roland was in a state. The cats just seemed happy that someone was feeding them again. I don’t know how the chinchilla got out.

65. Sometimes. I mean, you have to bear in mind that she was the single most irritating person on the planet, even before the whole Her Immanence thing. But yes, I guess so. If I’m honest.

66. Sitting outside at night, staring up at the sky, wondering what she’s doing now.

67. He wants his glass skateboard back. He says that it’s his, and the government has no right to keep it. (You are the government, aren’t you?) Mum seems happy to share the patent for the Colored Bubble recipe with the government though. The man said that it might be the basis of a whole new branch of molecular something or other. Nobody gave me anything, so I don’t have to worry.

68. Once, in the back garden, looking up at the night sky. I think it was only an orangeyish star, actually. It could have been Mars, I know they call it the red planet. Although once in a while I think that maybe she’s back to herself again, and dancing, up there, wherever she is, and all the aliens love her pole dancing because they just don’t know any better, and they think it’s a whole new art-form, and they don’t even mind that she’s sort of square.

69. I don’t know. Sitting in the back garden talking to the cats, maybe. Or blowing silly-colored bubbles.

70. Until the day that I die. I attest that this is a true statement of events. Signed: Date:

“Sun, come you in,” sing the giants in R. A. Lafferty’s

PSYCHE MET CUPID ONLINE. THEY HAD ALREADY BEEN THROUGH A lot of failed relationships at this point so they were both wary. Psyche’s last relationship was with a guy who said he was divorced but turned out to be separated from his wife, whom he was still in love with. When Psyche had told this man she loved him, before she knew about the wife, he had said, “I love you, too. I love everybody. We are all one.” Cupid’s last relationship involved a narcissistic, domineering actress who broke up with him suddenly while he was out of town visiting his narcissistic, domineering mother. “You’re too subservient,” she’d said, although she hadn’t seemed to mind when he behaved that way around her. But in spite of these experiences, Cupid and Psyche were also both very attracted to each other’s profile so they got over their fears and talked on the phone a few times. They got along so well on the phone that Psyche kept expecting Cupid to ask her to coffee or tea, which was customary after a few good phone calls, but he never did. One night she drunk-dialed him after a party she had been to where none of the men interested her in any way or ignored her entirely and she and Cupid stayed on the phone laughing and flirting for hours. Finally, Psyche invited Cupid over. It was two in the morning and he came.

Psyche told Cupid to come in through her back door — it would be unlocked. Psyche lived in a cottage apartment near the beach. She could smell the sea from her bedroom and there was a small courtyard garden with a jacaranda tree that tossed purple flowers into a small pond surrounded by a ring of mossy stones. Psyche liked to imagine that fairies lived in that garden.

She held her breath as she heard the back door open. Why was she doing this? she wondered, suddenly feeling a tender nostalgia for her cute fairy apartment that was in walking distance from the beach. Cupid could have been a serial killer and he could kill her and she would be dead and never be able to live in her adorable rent-controlled apartment again. But his voice had sounded so warm and natural; she was sure he wasn’t a serial killer. What if he just wasn’t cute? In his pictures he looked gorgeous but he could have used fake pictures.

Cupid was wondering these same things about Psyche. Were her pictures old? Had she gained a large amount of weight since they were taken? Were they her pictures at all? Was she an alcoholic (Cupid was sober)? Was she a psycho-girl who would decide she was in love with him right away and stalk him when he rejected her? These were the reasons why you were always supposed to meet in a public place first.

But neither Cupid nor Psyche had had sex in a long time and there was so much chemistry on the phone that they gave in to their loneliness and desire. It was dark in Psyche’s room but as soon as their lips met and they felt each other’s bodies, smelled each other, fell to the bed, they knew they had not made a mistake about their attraction. (He’s not a serial killer! She’s not psycho!) Cupid felt huge and strong in Psyche’s arms and Psyche felt lithe and soft and her long, light brown curls wrapped around him and tickled his lips.

The attraction was so strong that Cupid came to Psyche’s bed every Saturday night for a month and they made love ecstatically and then held each other and talked. Psyche was a kindergarten teacher who had had one unsuccessful relationship after another for the past eight years. Both her parents were dead. Her best friend had recently gotten married and was pregnant so they rarely saw each other anymore. Psyche liked to read poetry and do yoga in her spare time. Cupid was an aspiring actor who had given up his dream and now worked a delivery job. He had a tumultuous relationship with his mother and hadn’t seen his dad since he was a little boy. Cupid attended weekly AA meetings where he was currently the meeting secretary. Like Psyche he did yoga and he liked to read books on spirituality. Cupid and Psyche had similar taste in music and movies. They had both listed Led Zeppelin IV and Wings of Desire as two of their favorite classics, respectively. They both loved dogs but couldn’t own one where they lived.

These were the facts — the things they had learned from reading each other’s profiles and talking on the phone. There were other things they could not have learned, like how Cupid snorted in a soft, charming way when he laughed and how Psyche giggled like a little girl so that their laughter formed a perfect song; how Cupid’s body temperature always ran a little high and Psyche’s a little low so that they balanced each other out in exactly the right way; how they both knew how to kiss fiercely but tenderly and knew how to adjust their force or gentleness to work with what the other was doing; how the chemicals that each of their bodies produced blended together to make some kind of perfume that, especially mixed with the smell of the sea and the garden, would have taken a master chemist years to create. They could not have known that the other would know exactly what to say at exactly the right time, like how Psyche told Cupid gently that she thought he was probably a wonderful actor — she could tell by his comic timing, magnetic personality, and beautiful voice, and how Cupid told Psyche, as he was coming, that she had a beautiful, beautiful soul.

The sex was great. The pillow talk was great. But it only happened at night.

Psyche wanted more. After she and Cupid made love she wanted to have him sleep over and take her out for omelets. She wanted them to sit on her bed in the afternoon watching movies and eating pizza with mushrooms and caramelized onions or reading aloud to each other. Psyche wanted to do Cupid’s laundry with him. She wanted them to go to the farmers’ market together and buy baskets of strawberries. She wanted to give Cupid natural supplements for depression and fatigue. Someday she wanted to have a child with him, a baby girl named Joy. (Cupid had once wondered aloud to her, “If you know right away when you meet someone that you want a baby with them, is that because you are supposed to have babies with them or is it just hormones and projection?” She had been afraid to answer so she had shrugged in the dark and kissed him again.) Besides wanting to have his baby, Psyche wanted to buy Cupid shirts the color of his eyes, or at least the color she imagined his eyes were, because she could not see them — he always came in the dark, made love to her, and left before it was light.

In fact, she did buy him a shirt at a thrift store, a size large cream-colored French cotton shirt covered with blue irises (she hadn’t been shopping for him; she’d been trying to find a vintage dress with roses on it but the shirt had caught her eye), but she knew she could not give it to him yet because it would scare him away even more (although less than the knowledge that she had already picked out the name of their unborn daughter), and so she put it in the back of her closet to save it for the day when he was no longer afraid. She imagined giving it to him then with a casual smile: “Oh, yeah, I just found this today. Hopefully it fits.” (It would in fact fit; she had measured the breadth of his shoulders with her hands while they were making love).

Psyche was right; Cupid would not want the shirt even though it did in fact match his eyes and fit his shoulders. The shirt would have felt like a symbol of some kind of commitment and he was afraid of commitment; he knew he even had trouble committing to himself. His day job was draining him. Cupid was a gifted actor — he had been in a theater group in college and had gotten the attention of a number of agents — but he was afraid that if he fully devoted himself to his art he might fail. He had gone out for auditions after he graduated but he hadn’t had any luck. He began to drink more heavily. Finally his agent fired him. Now he was sober but he didn’t even do theater anymore; he told people he didn’t have time for it, he was too drained from his job. He was fond of Psyche and loved being with her but she scared him a little. She sent him such passionate poems by her favorite poets like Pablo Neruda and Sappho, and she didn’t even know him yet! It seemed as if she wanted to drag him into the daylight, dress him up like a doll and take him out with her to show him off to the world. He came to her in the dark for a reason. The reason was not, as she suspected, that he was ashamed of being seen with her in the world (after all the bad relationships Psyche was feeling a little insecure about her appearance) or that he didn’t want to look at her in the sunlight or that he didn’t care about her as a person, but only as someone to fuck. No, he knew that in the dark he could hold onto himself. Cupid did not want to lose himself in anyone. He knew what it was like to go on a date with someone, then see her the next night and the next. By the fourth or fifth time he knew what it was like to feel as if he were completely invisible. That was why he came to Psyche only at night. He would not get lost in her. He was already invisible in the darkness so he could not disappear. For this reason he insisted that Psyche never see him in the light.

Psyche was in therapy and knew that she was projecting a lot onto Cupid. The fact that he came to her only at night allowed her to project onto him even more. She felt blind with Cupid and panicky, the way she had felt when she was a child playing hide-and-seek and she was the blindfolded one. “It.”

One night Cupid fell asleep after they had made love. Psyche was hoping that he would sleep through until morning so that she could see his face in the light and they could go out to breakfast. She lay awake for a long time watching the clock and waiting for the sun to rise. The room felt hot and stuffy. Finally Psyche could not wait anymore. She got up, lit a candle, and watched Cupid as he lay sleeping beside her. She saw that he was not a beast as she had sometimes suspected when she felt the fur on his chest and the prick of his horn (not that she would have cared if he were a beast; she would still have wanted to buy him groceries and supplements — maybe even more supplements! — and go out to breakfast with him) but a tall beautiful man with eyes like blue irises, as she had also suspected. He did look exactly like his online pictures. He took her breath away and tears came to her eyes suddenly like a pang in your chest. But then some candle wax fell on Cupid’s chest, above his heart. He woke and saw Psyche watching him. There was so much love and need in her eyes and it scared him. He wanted to run away.

“You don’t love me as much as I love you,” Psyche cried when she saw the fear lit in his eyes. “I’ve been in relationships like this before. I can’t do this again.”

This made Cupid more afraid and he said, “I don’t know how I feel about you. I am fond of you and I love being with you but that’s all I know. I haven’t seen anyone else.”

“You’ve been seeing someone else?” Psyche shouted, all her senses distorted now with fear.

This made Cupid angry. He spoke slowly. “No. Psyche. I haven’t seen anyone else.” Then he added, coolly, “But I might have tea with somebody if it came up.”

“Tea?” Psyche shouted. “What does tea with somebody mean? Is tea a euphemism for fucking? I can’t do this.” Psyche said I can’t do this too often. She said it whenever she got scared in a relationship and then she regretted it because the man she said it to heard her and decided, in that moment, he couldn’t do “this,” either.

“I can’t talk anymore,” Cupid said.

“Wait,” said Psyche, softening as the adrenaline drained from her body, as she realized how far she had gone, like the other times with the other men, and that it was probably too late. “I just want to tell you that I think you are wonderful and I don’t want us to hurt each other anymore. No one is right or wrong. We just want different things.”

Cupid, also softening with resignation and with compassion for Psyche, replied, “You are beautiful and wonderful and I don’t want this to get fucked up. It’s no one’s fault. We just want different things.”

Then he blew out the candle, went out the back door, and left her shaking with regret in the darkness.

The darkness was not safety for Psyche. If she disappeared in it she felt she might never return.

But there were so many tasks to do there. It was where she had to be.

Psyche worked hard in the figurative darkness. She taught her kindergartners, marketed, did the laundry, cleaned her apartment, did yoga until she was soaked through with sweat, meditated in her fairy garden, ran on the beach, worked out with weights, paid all the bills. She also tried to keep up her appearance. She got haircuts, facials, manicures, pedicures, and went shopping for cheap cute clothes at thrift stores (she scrupulously avoided the men’s section) so that she would not feel as if she had completely vanished into the dark. Even though her life looked light and bright and happy, and she was happy with her children at school and by herself in her sunny little apartment on weekends — the walls covered with the construction paper, tissue, crayon, and glitter art the kids had made for her — she felt so dark and empty when the sun went down, as if someone had stolen her organs and run off with them and she was left hollow as a scooped-out gourd, rotting in the night. She felt like an old pumpkin that you could smash with your fist, that would crumple in on itself if you even touched it. After Psyche got in bed and read a few chapters of a novel, she cried herself to sleep in the dark. She was always surprised, in the morning, when she was still there.

On Monday afternoons, Psyche saw her therapist Sophia. Luckily, Psyche had a really great therapist who kept the rates low so Psyche could see her every week. (If your name is Psyche you really better have a fucking great therapist like this one.) Sophia had been away for a month in Italy when Psyche confronted Cupid. If her therapist had not been away, Psyche would probably not have lit the candle at all. She would not have attacked Cupid and they would still be making love in the dark. Psyche had a history of breaking up with men while her therapists were away. None of the other therapists had been as good, though. One of them had been an actual psycho and called Psyche a bitch when she told the therapist things weren’t working out and that she wanted to move on. One of them got a rare disease and died soon after the vacation during which Psyche had broken up with her boyfriend at the time. Psyche did not have a good pattern around therapists on vacation and boyfriends. But Sophia, she was very wise. When she got back from her vacation in Italy, Sophia told Psyche a few very important things:

ONCE, IN A PLACE FAR AWAY FROM THIS PLACE, IN A TIME THAT WAS before this time, a woman named Ngoc lived in a village. Although she lived in a village, she wanted to live in a city. Cities, you see, offer riches and rich men and rich husbands and rich suitors, and villages, you see, offer none of these things.

Ngoc means “jade” or “treasure.” It’s a fitting name. Not only is she a treasure in and of herself — a real gem of a gal! — but she also desires treasure.

This is a story like all other magic stories. Don’t be fooled. Just because our characters have different names does not make them fundamentally any different from the archetypal characters you’ve come to know and love. These names are just markers, a way to signal to you that they are set in a place that is not this place. These names are just markers to explain that their values and culture may be slightly variant from yours, but you really don’t need to be scared. We understand: things that are different can be frightening, but this is not a ghost story. This is a magic story, and although it ends with sadness, those who are good will be rewarded and those who are bad will be punished. We are a just people, even though we look different and speak a different language and our people have different names. We, too, believe in justice.

Now, Ngoc lived in a village, a very poor village, and although she was very beautiful — as all female characters in magic stories are — she was stuck. How beautiful was Ngoc? Well, we probably shouldn’t indulge in encouraging her propensity for superficialities, but her hair was the deepest black, stained darker than shadow. This magnified her bright skin, which turned rosy in the sun. Her eyes were simple slits, more eyelash than eye. They were illusive smoke. And her body, well, let us suffice to say she was a dream. She was naturally what women today can achieve only through science and artificialities.

But all of this meant nothing because Ngoc and her family had no money, and so like all women — beautiful or not — who come to a certain age, her family married her to a man. Although she didn’t eat much, her family was so poor that providing anything at all was providing too much.

IT WAS A COLD DAY IN LATE AUTUMN. ON A PATH RUNNING STRAIGHT through the village, a young girl crouched down, looking at the ground. She tilted her head and breathed deeply. “Who was hopscotching here?” she wondered aloud.

Hopscotch rings, drawn in chalk, continued endlessly on the path — across the bridge and toward the mountains. The girl stood up. “What a long hopscotch!” she cried, widening her eyes. When she hopped into a ring, her body became as light as a bouncing ball.

One foot, one foot, two feet, one. With her hands in her pockets, the girl hopped forward. She hopped across the bridge and down a narrow path through cabbage fields, then past the only tobacco shop in the village.

“Oh, you have a lot of energy!” said an old woman who minded the shop. Panting for breath, the girl smiled proudly. In front of the candy shop, a large dog barked and bared its teeth.

“Who on earth drew a hopscotch this long?” the girl thought as she hopped. When she reached the bus stop, snow flurries began to blow. The hopscotch rings kept going. The girl kept hopping, her red face sweaty.

One foot, one foot, two feet, one. The sky had turned dark, and a cold wind blew. The snow started to fall heavily and left white spots on the girl’s red sweater.

“It may turn into a blizzard,” the girl thought. “Maybe I should go home now.”

Then she heard a voice from behind her: “One foot, two feet, hop, hop, hop.” Surprised, she turned around and saw a snow-white rabbit hopscotching after her.

“One foot, two feet, hop, hop, hop.” When the girl looked closely, she saw another rabbit behind that one. As the snow kept falling, many more white rabbits began following her. She gaped in amazement.

This time she heard a voice from ahead. “White rabbits behind you, white rabbits in front. One foot, two feet, hop, hop, hop.”

When she looked ahead, the girl saw a long line of white rabbits hopping. “Oh, I had no idea.” She felt as if she were in a dream. “Where are you going?” she asked. “Where does this lead to?”

The rabbit in front of her answered, “To the end, to the end of the world. We’re snow rabbits who make snow fall.”

“What?” The girl was startled. She remembered a story her grandmother once told her. On the first day of snow, a herd of white rabbits came from north. They went from village to village, dropping the snow. They moved so fast humans saw only a white line.

“You have to be careful,” her grandmother said. “If you’re caught in the herd of white rabbits, you can never come home. You hop to the end of the world with the rabbits and turn into a chunk of snow.”

When the girl first heard this story, a chill ran down her spine. Now she was about to be taken away by the rabbits.

“I’m in trouble!” the girl screamed inside her head. She tried to stop. She tried to stop her feet from stepping into the next ring.

Then the rabbit behind her said, “Don’t stop! We’re right behind you. One foot, two feet, hop, hop, hop.” Her body bounced like a rubber ball, hopping along the hopscotch rings.

While hopping, the girl remembered her grandmother telling a story. Her grandmother had stopped sewing for a moment and said, “Once there was a girl who came home alive after being taken away by rabbits. She chanted with all her might: ‘mugwort, mugwort, mugwort in spring.’ Mugwort is a charm against evil.”

“I’m going to do the same,” the girl thought. As she hopped, she imagined a mugwort field. She thought about the warm sunlight, dandelions, honeybees, and butterflies. She took a deep breath. When she was about to say, “Mugwort, mugwort,” she was interrupted by the rabbits’ singing.

The girl covered her ears with her hands. But the rabbits’ singing became louder and louder and spilled into her ears through the gaps between her fingers and kept her from chanting the mugwort charm.

The herd of rabbits and the girl went through a fir forest, crossed a frozen lake, and reached faraway places she had never seen. She saw villages lined with small grass-roofed houses, small towns strewn with sasanqua blossoms, and big cities crowded with factories. But no one noticed the rabbits and the girl. “Oh, it’s the first snow of winter,” people mumbled and hurried away.

As she hopped, the girl tried to chant the charm, but her voice was drowned out by the rabbits’ song.

The girl’s limbs were numb with cold, as cold as ice. Her cheeks turned pale, and her lips quivered.

“Grandmother, help!” she thought. Then she hopped into a ring and found a leaf. She picked it up and saw it was a mugwort leaf, bright green. On the back, it had fluffy white hairs.

“Oh! Who dropped this for me?” the girl thought. She held the mugwort leaf to her chest. Then she felt someone cheering for her. She felt many small creatures rooting for her.

She could hear the voices of seeds under the snow, breathing, enduring the cold beneath the ground.

A wonderful riddle came into her mind. She closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and cried, “Why is the back of a mugwort leaf so white?”

Hearing this, the rabbit ahead of her tottered. He stopped singing and turned around. “The back of a mugwort leaf?” he said.

“I wonder why?” said the rabbit behind her, stumbling. The rabbits’ singing broke off, and their pace slowed down.

Seizing the moment, the girl said, “That’s easy. It’s rabbit fur. Rabbits roll around in the field and shed their hair on mugwort leaves.”

“Yes, you’re right!” said the rabbits, delighted. They started singing a new song:

I AM ANJUHIMEKO, THREE YEARS OLD.

In stories, it seems to me the person they refer to as father usually wasn’t around or was absence itself, no matter what story I happened to hear, the person called father would be dead in the house or out somewhere traveling or listening to whatever the stepmother was telling him to do, but in my house, there is someone called father, and he is intent on killing me, he is always doing his best to do so, but I don’t know what to do, I’ve had nothing but hardship since I was born.

My father said this baby’s mouth is so monstrously big it seems to stretch all the way to her ears, her eyelids have folds in them, her face is flat, she’s got moles and birthmarks all over, her ears are big, big, big, something is wrong with her, it’s like she’s the freakish baby of some old priest, no way she’s mine, no way, I’ll call her Anjuhimeko, after those Anju — those lowly priests living in little cells for hermits — that’s what I’ll call her, and I’ll bury her in the sand, and if she can survive for three years then she can be my child.

Something’s the matter with me, he says, look, I was born and here I am now, who cares if I’ve got one or two heads, who cares if I’ve got one or two hands, one too few or one too many? none of that really matters anyway, but that’s not what father says, he says let’s try burying her in the sand and waiting for three years, mother was willing to just go along with that, that was a big disappointment, but, well, here’s the problem, I’m just a newborn who can’t even see, and I can’t even utter a word to talk back, so I was wrapped in my mother’s silk underclothes and buried in a sandy spot near a river.

Speaking of which, the sandy place near the river is the place where everybody buries their babies.

To both the right and left of the place I was buried, there were so many buried babies that they jostled against one another, some were breathing, some weren’t, some had struggled partway out of the sand and then dried up, some had managed to escape all the way out of the sand and crawl away.

Just crawl a little bit and there is a big bush, mosquitoes and flies sting any baby who tries to get there, but if they are able to escape from the fierce sun and take shelter from the rain and wind, they can pluck grass or leaves to eat, and if they manage to make it to the river, they can just go right in and live in the water, even though I was still buried in the sand, I watched the others around me, I watched the babies as they died, the ones who were already dead, and the ones who managed to survive and get away.

THE TWINS STOWED BENEATH THE SPARE TIRE TELL US A STORY ABOUT a small, square jardín in deep Jalisco with neatly trimmed laurel trees and a cast-iron bandstand where Porfirio Díaz once stood and scratched his balls. Where Pancho Villa farted. Where Lázaro Cárdenas spat. Where Vicente Fox picked his teeth. This was the exact spot where Subcomandante Marcos, Tía Chila’s big-balled, black Chihuahua, peed and peed and peed and then mounted little diaperless Natividad. People came running. Nobody had seen a hybrid baby since before the war, since Juan el Oso, whose mother was taken to Acapulco by a circus bear from León.

The twins were waiting on the curb, they say, watching the procession of the bloody martyr, when Coyote finally came out of the cantina. The silver scorpion on his belt buckle clacked its claws and made seven blind sisters dance.

“Will you take us?” the twins asked.

Coyote sniffed the air and measured the moon between his thumb and his forefinger. It was more than half full and the twins had had a strange delivery. But Coyote wasn’t concerned. He led them across the bridge and down through the park to the dry creek bed where we were all asleep in the Nova among the stained herons, busted appliances, tires, maricóns, and used condoms. A woman was weeping on a television.

“Move over, little ones,” Coyote whispered. “Make room, periquitos.”

A few leaves fall for no reason in this story. And even now we hear the band playing, just as the twins say it is: the trumpets and clarinets spiraling like crazy rockets, exploding into pink sparks above the crowd. This all happened at a time of balloons and marionettes, they say. Is that the engine or the tuba? The transmission or the snare drum? Dust and stones become asphalt. A desert appears at blue sunrise. Some rocks, a red-flowering nopal, a thin horse, a goat.

It’s fine, we say. That sounds like a beginning. We can believe in that. Éste era and we’re gone.

THE LOFT WHERE THE DWARVES LIVED HAD A VIEW OF THE CITY AND hardwood floors and skylights, but it was overpriced, and too small now that there were seven of them. It was a fifth-floor walkup, one soaring, track-lighted room. At the far end was the platform where Doc, Sneezy, Sleepy, and Bashful slept side by side on futons. Beneath them, Happy and Dopey shared a double bed. Grumpy, who pretty much stayed to himself, kept his nylon sleeping bag in a corner during the day and unrolled it at night on the floor between the couch and the coffee table. The kitchen was two facing zinc counters, a built-in range and microwave, and a steel refrigerator, all hidden behind a long bamboo partition that Doc had bought and Sneezy had painted a color called Cherry Jubilee. The kitchen and bathroom were the only places any sort of privacy was possible. To make the rent they all pooled their money from their jobs at the restaurant, except for Dopey, who didn’t have a job unless you counted selling drugs when he wasn’t running them up his arm; and Grumpy, who panhandled every day for spare change and never came up with more than a few wrinkled dollar bills when the first of the month rolled around. Sometimes the rest of them talked about kicking out Dopey and Grumpy, but no one quite had the heart. Besides, the Book said there were seven when she arrived, seven disciples of the goddess who would come with the sacred apple and transform them. How, exactly, they would be transformed was a mystery that would be revealed when she got there. In the meantime, it was their job to wait.

“When she comes, she’ll make us big,” said Sneezy. He had the comics section of the Sunday paper, and an egg of Silly Putty, and was flattening a doughy oval onto a panel of Calvin and Hobbes.

“Oh, bullshit,” said Grumpy. “It’s about inner transformation, man. That’s the whole point. Materialism is a trap. Identifying with your body is a trap. All this shit”—Grumpy swept his arm to indicate not just their loft but the tall downtown buildings beyond the windows, and maybe more—“is an illusion. Maya. Samsara.” He shook out the last Marlboro from a pack, crumpled the pack, and tried a hook shot into a wicker wastebasket by the window, but missed. He looked around. “Matches? Lighter? Who’s going for more cigs?”

“She will,” insisted Sneezy. “She’ll make us six feet if we want to be.”

“She can’t change genetics, you dope,” Grumpy said.

At the word dope, Dopey’s head jerked up for an instant. He was nodding on the couch at the opposite end from Grumpy, a lit cigarette ready to fall from his hand. The couch had a few burn holes already. One of these days, Doc thought, he’s going to set the fucking place on fire, and then where will we be? How will she ever find us? He got up from the floor, where he’d been doing yoga stretches, and slid the cigarette from Dopey’s stained fingers. He ground it out in an ashtray on the table, in the blue ceramic water of a moat that circled a ceramic castle. From the castle’s tiny windows, a little incense smoke — sandalwood — drifted out.

“She’s not an alien from outer space who’s going to perform weird experiments,” Doc said. He hunted through the newspaper for the Food section.

“Where is she from, then?” Sneezy said. Sneezy was a sixteen-year-old runaway, the youngest of them. From the sweet credulousness of his expression, you’d never know what terrible things he had endured. He’d been beaten, scarred between his shoulder blades with boiling water, forced into sex with his mother by his own father. Sneezy liked to ask the obvious questions for the sake of receiving the familiar, predictable answers.

“She’s from the castle,” Doc said. “She’s the fairest in the land. She will come with the sacred apple and all will be changed.” This much the Book said. Once upon a time, it said. But when was that, exactly? Doc wondered. They’d been here for more than six years already. Or he had, anyway. Ever since he’d found the Book in a Dumpster — the covers ripped away, most of its pages stained and torn — where he’d been looking for food a nearby restaurant always threw out. He’d been on the streets, addicted to cheap wine, not giving a shit about anything or anyone. He’d slept on cardboard in doorways, with a Buck knife under the rolled poncho he used for a pillow, had stolen children’s shoes from outside the Moon Bounce at the park. He had humiliated himself performing drunken jigs in the bank plaza for change tossed into a baseball cap. The Book had changed all that. It had shown him there was a purpose to his life. To gather the others, to come to this place and make it ready. He had quit drinking and found a job, at the very restaurant whose Dumpster he used to scrounge through. He had gathered his brethren, one by one, as they drifted into the city from other places, broke and down on their luck, headed for the streets and shelters. They had become his staff — two dishwashers, a busboy, and a fry cook. The restaurant’s name was Oz, and the owner had been willing to hire dwarf after dwarf and present them as ersatz munchkins. There had been a feature article in the Weekly, and write-ups in some food magazines, which had drawn a lot of business. The dwarves were mentioned in the guidebooks, so there were often tourists from Canada and Denmark and Japan, who brought their cameras to record the enchanting moment the dwarves trooped from the kitchen with a candle-lit torte to stand around a table and sing happy birthday. They used fake high voices, as though they’d been sucking on helium.

“Why is the apple sacred?” Sneezy said dreamily. He had abandoned the comics and now had a few Magic cards spread out on the floor and was picking them up one by one, studying them.

“Because she will die of the apple and be resurrected,” Doc said. He glanced at one of Sneezy’s cards: Capashen Unicorn. An armored unicorn raced through a glittery field, a white-robed rider on its back. Underneath, Doc read, Capashen riders were stern and humorless even before their ancestral home was reduced to rubble.

“Why do you collect that crap?” Doc said. “And those comic books you’ve always got your nose buried in. Read the Book again. Every time I read it, I discover something new. The Book is all you need. You have to focus on the Book.”

“Check her out.” Sneezy held up another card, of an anorecticlooking woman with green skin in a gold ballerina outfit. One long-nailed thumb and forefinger were raised in the air in some kind of salute. In her other hand she held aloft a green and white flag. A couple of men in armor rode behind her, and behind them rose broccoli-like trees, being erased by mist rising out of the ground. Doc read: Llanowar Vanguard. Creature — Dryad. Llanowar rallied around Eladamri’s banner and united in his name.

“Will she look like that?” Sneezy asked.

“Give it a rest,” Grumpy said, and nudged Dopey with his foot. “Hey, man,” he said. “We’re out of cigs.”

Sneezy will outgrow it, Doc thought. Dryads and unicorns. Made-up creatures and clans and battles. “I don’t know what she’ll look like, exactly,” he sighed. He stood up and began tidying the coffee table. Empty semicrushed cans of Bud Light that Grumpy and Dopey had drunk the night before. A half-eaten bag of tortilla chips. A plastic tub of salsa had spilled on the naked body of a Penthouse Pet. The magazine lay open to her spread legs, her long, slender fingers teasingly positioned above her pink slit; it glistened, as though it had been basted. What would she look like? Maybe she would look like this, would come and drag her fingers through the graying hair on his chest and position her sweet eager hips above him. Maybe she would whisper to Doc that he was the one she came for, the only one; they could leave all the others behind, now that she was there. They would leave the city and move to an Airstream in the woods, overlooking a little river, where he could catch bass and bluegills. She would stand in front of their stove in cutoffs and a white blouse, sliding a spatula under a fish sputtering in a pan. When the moon rose, the two of them would go down to the river and float together, naked. Their heads would be the same height above the water. Doc closed the magazine. He gathered up the beer cans, carried them into the kitchen, and threw them on top of the pile of trash overflowing from the can.

THE COTTAGE INTO WHICH MY COMPANION HAD BROKEN, RATHER than allow me, in my desperately wounded condition, to pass a night in the thick-wooded forest, was one of those miniaturized and hand-carved curiosities from the old German folktales that make people roll their eyes in scorn. This, despite the great popularity of a collection of German stories published the very same year of my birth! As to the justifiability of this scornful reaction: I cannot abide it, nor can I avoid it by altering the facts. This is where I found myself: in a fairy-tale cottage deep in the woods. And I had no use of my legs.

When we came upon the cottage we were certain, by its forlorn appearance, that it had long ago been abandoned to the wind and the night, and that we would be perfectly safe. Or rather, my dear companion was certain of this. As for me, I was certain of nothing — not even of my own name, which still eludes me.

There were but few details for my enfeebled mind to record, as if the cottage had been merely scribbled into existence by a dreamer’s hand. Tiny pot holders hung from the wall in the kitchen, beside tiny dish towels embroidered with the days of the week. In each corner of each room was tucked an empty mousetrap — open and ready but lacking bait. At the entryway, on a rusted nail, hung a minuscule locket, along with a golden key. As to whether the locket ever was opened, and what it contained, I have conveniently misplaced any knowledge. About the key I will not presently speak.

My companion placed me onto a bed, though I would not know it was a trundle bed until morning. I had only vague notions as to how we had arrived at the cunningly thatched cottage, but I believe we had walked through the forest in search of safety. Perhaps we sought some gentle corner where we would not perish at the hands of those who pursued us. Or had we been banished, from a kingdom I no longer recall?

The room in which my companion put me to bed was the smallest and least furnished of all. It lay, strangely enough, down a long hallway and up a stairway — I say “strangely” because the house was so diminutive from outside. I realized, upon waking in morning, that I lay in a turret. Yet from outside, no curved wall was visible. With its thatched roof the house had resembled a square Christmas package, a gift for a favorite stuffed rabbit — a perfect dollhouse of a cottage, the sort I had painstakingly, as a child, decorated with wallpaper, curtains, and beds.

Though there was scarcely any furniture in this turret room, the sparse pieces were exactly correct — nothing more, nothing less: the trundle bed, empty and open; and the walls bedecked with no other ornamentation or decoration save whitework, the same sampler embroidered with the same message over and over. It was embroidered in French, which I do not speak: Hommage à Ma Marraine. In the center of each piece of linen was sewn an image of a priest holding two blackbirds, one on each hand. The edges of all the whitework were tattered, and some even had holes. To these white-on-white sewings, my foggy mind immediately fastened, with an idiot’s interest — so intently that when my dear companion came up to the turret with a hard roll and coffee for breakfast, I became very angry with him for interrupting my studies.

What I was able to discern, looking about me, while nibbling the roll after my companion had left, was that some of the whitework contained a single gold thread as the accent over the a. Why the gold thread was used, I had no idea, and in considering this detail, along with the remarkable fact that blackbirds had been so expertly depicted in white, I finally asked my companion to return to the room. I called him and called him before he returned — disconcertingly, for it seemed he had returned only by accident, to fetch my empty teacup — and when he took the cup from my hand he gazed into it for a very long time without speaking a word.

At last, he closed the shutters of the windows tight, which was my wish, as it allowed me to see the whitework more clearly: I find I see better in the dark. A candle in the shape of a bluebird sat on the floor beside the bed, and I lit it, and turned it just-so, toward the wall. Luminous! I felt I had not, in many years, experienced such nocturnal bliss — even though the broad daylight shone outside the curtained windows, at least a day as broad as a day may shine in a deep and thickly wooded forest where real and grave danger does lurk.

This activity transfixed me for hours upon hours and days upon days.

In time, my companion and I so well established ourselves in the cottage that soon we felt that we had lived there our entire lives. I presume we had not lived there our entire lives; yet of the event that drove us into the forest to the cottage I cannot speak, and not only because I cannot recall it. But I can tell you that we had so well established ourselves in this cottage that I was shocked one morning to discover, under my feather pillow, a miniature book that had not been there before. It proposed to criticize and describe the whitework on the walls.

Bound in black velvet, with a pink ribbon as a placeholder, the volume fit precisely in the palm of my hand, just as if it had been bound for me to hold there. Long — long I read, and devoutly, devotedly I gazed. Rapidly and gloriously the hours flew by and then the deep midnight came. (Not that I knew the day from night with the curtains so tightly drawn.) The bluebird was guttering — just a puddle of blue now, with yellow claws fashioned from pipe cleaners protruding from the edges of the blue puddle. I reached my hand out to try to build the wax once more into the form of a bird, but I achieved merely a shapeless mass of color. Regardless, the candlelight flamed up and shone more brightly than ever upon the black velvet book with onionskin pages.

In my zeal to illumine the onionskin, the better to learn about Ma Marraine and so on, I had, with the candle’s light, also illumined the corners of the room, where sat the mousetraps. Yes, this turret had corners — quite a remarkable thing, as the room was a circle. If I failed to perceive the corners before, I cannot explain. truly this architectural marvel of corners was a marvel inside a marvel, since even the turret itself was not visible from outside.

With the corners of the room thus illumined, I now saw very clearly in one corner, behind a mousetrap, a very small portrait of a young girl just ripening into womanhood. I don’t know how that phrase comes to me—“ripening into womanhood”—for I would prefer simply to describe the portrait as a very small portrait of a young lady. But, to continue, I could not look at the painting for long. I found I had to close my eyes as soon as I saw the portrait — why, I have no idea, but it seems to be that my injury, rather than being limited to my crippled legs, had crept inward to my mind, which had become more. impulsive or secretive, perhaps. I forced my eyes back on the portrait again.

It was nothing remarkable, more a vignette than an exposition. The girl was depicted from top to bottom, smudged here and there, fading into the background, reminiscent somehow of the Kinder- und Hausmärchen yes, you could describe her portrait as an illustration. She was a plain girl, not unlike me. Her eyes were sullen, her hair lank and unwashed, and even in the face and shoulders you could see she was undernourished — also not unlike me. (It is not my intention to plead my case to you or to anyone else, now or in the future; I merely note the resemblance.)

Something about the girl’s portrait startled me back to life. I had not even realized what a stupor I’d lain in, there in the turret, but looking into her sullen eyes, I awoke. My awakening had nothing to do with the girl herself, I believe, but rather with the bizarre execution of this portrait, this tiny portrait — no bigger than that of a mouse, yet life-size. And it was painted entirely white upon white, just like the embroidery on the walls.

Though I felt more awake and alive than ever before, I found that I was also suddenly overcome with sadness. I don’t know why, but I do know that when my companion brought me my nightly black coffee, I sent him away for a pitcher of blueberry wine. I asked for him also to bring me a pink-flowered teacup. My needs felt at once more urgent and delicate, and thankfully he was able to find articles in the cupboards that satisfied them.

For quite some time, drinking the wine, I gazed at the portrait of the sullen girl staring out of miniature eyes. At length, wholly unsatisfied with my inability to decipher the true secret of the portrait’s effect (and apparently unaware that I very nearly was standing), I fell into the trundle. I turned my frustrated attentions back to the small book I had found under the pillow. Greedily, I turned its onionskin pages to the girl’s portrait. “Flat, unadorned,” the page read. The rest of the description was missing — everything except a peculiar exclamation for an encyclopedia to contain:

“And I died.” Those are the words that came to my head. But I did not die then, nor did I many days and nights later, there in the forest, where I lived with my companion quite happily — not as husband and wife, yet neither as siblings: I cannot quite place the relation.

Soon, of course, I thought of nothing else but the girl in the painting. Nightly my companion brought me a teacup of blueberry wine, and nightly I drank it, asked for another, and wondered: Who was she? Who am I? I expected no answer — nay, nay, I did not wish for one either. For in my wonder I possessed complete satisfaction.

It was of no surprise to me, so accustomed to confusions, that one morning I awoke to find the painting vanished — and not only the painting but all the little priests with the little birds from the walls. No whitework, no turret, no companion. No blueberry wine. I found myself in a different small and dark room, again on a bed (not a trundle). An old woman and a doctor sat by my side.

“Poor dear,” the old woman murmured. She added that I would do well to take courage. As you may imagine, the old woman and doctor were at once subjected to the greatest of my suspicions; and as I subjected them privately, I also protested publicly, for I knew I had done nothing to lose all I had learned to love there in that mysterious prison or home. No: I should have been very happy to be lame and blurred, to have my companion bring me teacups of wine at night, and in the morning my coffee and rolls. I never minded that the rolls were so tough to the bite that my teeth had become quite loose in their sockets, as loose as my brain or the bluebirds in the forest when their nests are looted by ravens.

Cheerfully, the doctor spoke over my protests. He said that my prognosis relied on one thing, and one thing alone: to eliminate every gloomy idea. He pointed toward a room I had not noticed before. “You have the key to the Library,” he said. “Only be careful what you read.”

THIS BOOK HAS BEEN MANY YEARS IN THE MAKING. CONVERSATIONS with Maria Tatar about the perils and beauty of fairy-tale editorship provided inspiration and godmotherly guidance, as has her entire body of work. I would not have found John Siciliano at Penguin had Jack Zipes, a kind and most generous thinker, not pointed me toward him, and he is simply a national treasure. When invited to write a foreword to this collection, Gregory Maguire didn’t hesitate for a moment: what a gem! Kristen Scharold at Penguin was a dream to work with throughout the entire editorial process: meticulous, enthusiastic, and kind, she deserves all gratitude. And the book would not exist had Carmen Giménez Smith and I not met after a fairy-tale reading at AWP and discussed our shared vision that a book like this would someday exist. In compiling this volume, odd research needs were fulfilled, often at the very last minute: so thank you, Amanda Phillips, Morgan Fahey, and Hanne Winarsky and Christopher Chung at Princeton University Press. To all the contributors to this volume — you must know that our correspondence over the years of this book’s evolution has been illuminating, moving, and deeply satisfying to me. This book also owes so much to many writers, known and anonymous, past and present, who are the spirit of the tradition, and it belongs, too, to the children who are hearing fairy tales for the first time. From my graduate and undergraduate fairy-tale workshop students at the University of Alabama, I had the privilege of talking to a new generation of avid fairy-tale readers and future authors. To my parents, siblings, in-laws, and their children, your support is invaluable. The University of Nebraska Press, current publisher of Fairy Tale Review, and The University of Alabama Press, its former publisher, are rare and wonderful havens for fairy tales. I would also like to extend my deepest gratitude and admiration to Maria Massie and John Siciliano, who have honored my fairy-tale habit with care. Finally, Brent and Xia, you are my fairy-tale family, full of bliss.

— KB

Kim Addonizio is the author of several collections of poetry, including Lucifer at the Starlite, as well as the novels Little Beauties and My Dreams Out in the Street and the story collection In the Box Called Pleasure.

Chris Adrian is the author of the novels Gob’s Grief and The Children’s Hospital and a collection of stories, A Better Angel. He is a pediatrician in San Francisco.

Rabih Alameddine is the author of the novels The Hakawati, Koolaids, and I, the Divine, and the story collection The Perv. He lives in San Francisco and Beirut.

Naoko Awa (1943–1993) was an award-winning writer of modern fairy tales. As a child, she read fairy tales by Grimm, Andersen, and Hauff, as well as The Arabian Nights. She earned a bachelor’s degree in Japanese literature from Japan Women’s University.

Aimee Bender is the author of the story collections The Girl in the Flammable Skirt and Willful Creatures and the novels An Invisible Sign of My Own and The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake. She teaches at the University of Southern California.

Francesca Lia Block is the author of many books, including Dangerous Angels, the Weetzie Bat books, Wood Nymph Meets Centaur: A Mythological Dating Guide, Pretty Dead, Blood Roses, and The Rose and the Beast.

Karen Brennan is the author of the poetry collection The Real Enough World, the story collection The Garden in Which I Walk, and the memoir Being with Rachel.

Kevin Brockmeier is the author of the novels The Brief History of the Dead and The Truth About Celia, the children’s novels City of Names and Grooves: A Kind of Mystery, and the story collections Things That Fall from the Sky and The View from the Seventh Layer. He has received a PEN USA Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and an NEA grant.

Sarah Shun-lien Bynum is the author of two novels, Ms. Hempel Chronicles, a finalist for the 2009 PEN/Faulkner Award, and Madeleine Is Sleeping, a finalist for the 2004 National Book Award and winner of the Kafka Prize. She has been a recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award and an NEA fellowship, and her fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Tin House, The Georgia Review, and The Best American Short Stories.

Lucy Corin is the author of the story collection The Entire Predicament and the novel Everyday Psychokillers: A History for Girls.

Michael Cunningham is the author of the novel The Hours, which won the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award and was adapted into the Academy Award-winning film of the same name, as well as the novels A Home at the End of the World, also adapted for the screen, Specimen Days, and Flesh and Blood.

Kathryn Davis lives in Vermont and spends part of the year as senior fiction writer in residence at Washington University in St. Louis. She is the author of the novels Labrador, The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf, Hell, The Walking Tour, Versailles, and The Thin Place, and is the recipient of the Kafka Prize, the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim fellowship, and the Lannan Literary Award.

Rikki Ducornet is the author of the novels The Jade Cabinet, a finalist for the National Book Critics’ Circle Award, The Fan Maker’s Inquisition, a Los Angeles Times Book of the Year, and Netsuke, among others. She has received a Lannan fellowship, a Lannan Literary Award, and an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Brian Evenson is the author The Open Curtain, a finalist for an Edgar Award, as well as Last Days, Fugue State, The Wavering Knife, Dark Property, and The Brotherhood of Mutilation. He has translated work by Christian Gailly, Jean Frémon, Claro, Jacques Jouet, and others.

Karen Joy Fowler is the author of several novels, including Sister Noon and Wit’s End, as well as a number of short stories. She has won the Nebula Award, the World Fantasy Award, and the Commonwealth Medal, and has been a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award. Her novel The Jane Austen Book Club was a New York Times bestseller.

Neil Gaiman is the author of many books for adults and children, including Coraline, American Gods, Anansi Boys, and the Newbery Medal-winning The Graveyard Book.

Lily Hoang’s books include Parabola, Changing (winner of the PEN/Beyond Margins Award), The Evolutionary Revolution, and Invisible Women.

Hiromi Itō has published more than a dozen critically acclaimed collections of poetry, several novels, and numerous books of essays. She has won many important Japanese literary prizes, including the Takami Jun Prize, the Hagiwara Sakutarō Prize, and the Izumi Shikibu Prize. For a selection of her work, see Killing Kanoko: Selected Poetry of Hiromi Itō.

Shelley Jackson is the author of the novel Half-Life, the story collection The Melancholy of Anatomy, the hypertext novel Patchwork Girl, several children’s books, and “Skin,” a story published in tattoos on the skin of more than two thousand volunteers.

Ilya Kaminsky was born in Odessa in the former USSR and came to the United States in 1993 when his family was granted asylum by the American government. He is the author of Dancing in Odessa, for which he won the Whiting Writers Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters’s Metcalf Award, the Dorset Prize, and the Lannan fellowship. He teaches at San Diego State University.

Jonathon Keats is a writer and artist. He is the author of the story collection The Book of the Unknown as well as two novels, The Pathology of Lies and Lighter Than Vanity. He is the art critic for San Francisco Magazine.

Neil LaBute is a writer, director, and playwright. His first film, In the Company of Men, debuted at the 1997 Sundance Film Festival and was followed by Your Friends and Neighbors, Nurse Betty, and Possession, among others. For the stage, LaBute has written plays that have been performed around the world, including The Shape of Things, Fat Pig, Some Girls, and the Tony Award-nominated reasons to be pretty. He is also the author of the story collection Seconds of Pleasure.

Kelly Link is the author of the story collections Pretty Monsters, Magic for Beginners, and Stranger Things Happen. Her stories have won Nebula awards, a Hugo Award, a Locus Award, and a World Fantasy Award. Link is cofounder and coeditor of Small Beer Press and of the zine Lady Churchill Rosebud’s Wristlet.

Joyelle McSweeney is the author of the novels Nylund, The Sarcographer, and Flet, as well as the poetry books The Red Bird and The Commandrine and Other Poems. She is a cofounder and coeditor of Action Books and the online quarterly Action, Yes.

Sabrina Orah Mark is the author of the poetry collections The Babies and Tsim Tsum and of the chapbook Walter B.’s Extraordinary Cousin Arrives for a Visit & Other Tales. She has received fellowships from the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, the Glenn Schaeffer Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Michael Martone is the author of many books of fiction and nonfiction, including Michael Martone, The Flatness and Other Landscapes, The Blue Guide to Indiana, Pensées: The Thoughts of Dan Quayle, and Double Wide: Collected Fiction of Michael Martone.

Michael Mejia is the author of the novel Forgetfulness. He has been the recipient of a Literature fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and a grant from the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation.

Lydia Millet is the author of many works of fiction, including Oh Pure and Radiant Heart (shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke Prize), How the Dead Dream, My Happy Life (winner of the PEN USA Award for Fiction), George Bush: Dark Prince of Love, and Love in Infant Monkeys.

Alissa Nutting is the author of Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls, a collection of stories.

Joyce Carol Oates has won the National Book Award and the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction. She is the author of the national best-sellers We Were the Mulvaneys and Blonde (a finalist for the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize), among many other books.

Ludmilla Petrushevskaya is the award-winning author of more than fifteen collections of prose, including There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor’s Baby: Scary Fairy Tales. The progenitor of the women’s fiction movement in modern Russian letters, she is also a playwright whose work has been staged by leading theater companies all over the world. She lives in Moscow.

Francine Prose is the author of more than twenty books. Her nonfiction includes Anne Frank: The Book, the Life, the Afterlife; Sicilian Odyssey; The Lives of the Muses: Nine Women & the Artists They Inspired; Gluttony; and Caravaggio: Painter of Miracles. Her novels include Blue Angel, which was a finalist for the National Book Award, Goldengrove, and A Changed Man.

Stacey Richter is the author of the story collections My Date with Satan and Twin Study.

Marjorie Sandor is the author of three books, including Portrait of My Mother, Who Posed Nude in Wartime, winner of the National Jewish Book Award in Fiction, and The Night Gardener: A Search for Home, which won the Oregon Book Award for Literary Nonfiction.

Timothy Schaffert is the author of the novels The Phantom Limbs of the Rollow Sisters, The Singing and Dancing Daughters of God, Devils in the Sugar Shop, and The Coffins of Little Hope. He is the online editor of Prairie Schooner, a contributing editor to Fairy Tale Review, and the director of the (downtown) Omaha lit fest and the Nebraska Summer Writers’ Conference.

Jim Shepard’s books include the novels Project X and Nosferatu and the story collection Like You’d Understand, Anyway, which won The Story Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Award.

John Updike (1932–2009) wrote more than fifty books, including collections of stories, poems, essays, and criticism. His novels have won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the American Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Rosenthal Award, and the Howells Medal.

Katherine Vaz is the author of the novels Saudade and Mariana and the story collections Fado & Other Stories, which won the Drue Heinz Literature Prize, and Our Lady of the Artichokes, which won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize.

Kellie Wells is the author of the story collection Compression Scars, which won the Flannery O’Connor Prize, and the novel Skin.

Joy Williams is the author of many books, including The Quick and The Dead, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, The Changeling, a finalist for the National Book Award, Honored Guest, and Taking Care.