Little, Big

said; and as she said it she remembered her wedding journey: she remembered Smoky asking, about a stand of trees over by Rudy Flood’s, whether those were the woods Edgewood was on the edge of. She remembered the night they had spent in the cave of moss. She remembered walking through the woods on the way to Amy and Chris’s house. “Dense,” he had said; “Protected,” she’d answered. As each of these memories and many others awoke in her, unfolding as vivid as life, Alice seemed to remember them for the last time, asthough they faded and dropped as soon as they blossomed; or rather that each memory she called up ceased, as soon as she called it up, to be a memory, and became instead, Somehow, a prediction: something that had not been but which Alice, with a deep sense of happy possibility, could imagine one day being.

“Well,” George said. “This is about as far as I go.”

They had approached the edge of the wood. Beyond, sunny glades went on like pools, sunlight falling in square shafts upon them through tall trees; and beyond that, a white, sunlit world, obscure to their eyes accustomed to the dimness.

“Goodbye, then,” Alice said. “You’ll come to the banquet?”

“Oh, sure,” George said. “How could I help it?”

They stood a moment in silence, and then George, a little embarrassed for he’d never done this before, asked her blessing; and she gave it gladly, on his flocks and on his produce, and on his old head; she bent and kissed him where he knelt, and went on.

So Big

The glades like pools, one after another, continued a long way. This part, Alice thought, was the best so far: these violets and these new moist ferns, those graylichened stones, these bars of benevolent sun. “So big,” she said. “So big.” A thousand creatures paused in their spring occupations to watch her pass; the hum of newborn insects was like a constant breath. “Dad would have liked this place,” she thought, and even as she thought it she knew how it was that he had come (or would come) to understand the voices of creatures, for she understood them herself, she needed only to listen.

Mute rabbits and noisy jays, gross belching frogs and chipmunks who made smart remarks—but what was that in the further glade, standing on one leg, lifting alternately one wing and then the other? A stork, wasn’t it?

“Don’t I know you?” Alice asked when she had entered there. The stork leapt away, startled and looking guilty and confused.

“Well, I’m not sure,” the stork said. It looked at Alice first with one eye, and then with both eyes down its long red beak, which gave it a look at once worried and censorious, as though it peered over the tops of pince-nez spectacles. “I’m not sure at all. I’m not sure of much at all, to tell you the truth.”

“I think I do,” Alice said. “Didn’t you once raise a family at Edgewood, on the roof?”

“I may have,” the stork said. It made to preen its feathers with its beak, and did it very clumsily, as though surprised to find it had feathers at all. “This,” Alice heard it say to itself, “is going to be just an enormous trial, I can see that.”

Alice helped her loose a primary that had got folded the wrong way, and the stork, after some uncomfortable fluffing, said, “I wonder—I wonder if you would mind my walking a ways with you?”

“Of course you may,” Alice said. “If you’re sure you wouldn’t rather fly.”

“Fly?” said the stork, alarmed. “Fly?”

“Well,” Alice said, “I’m not really sure where I’m going at all. I sort of just got here.”

“No matter,” the stork said. “I just got here myself, in a manner of speaking.”

They walked on together, the stork as storks do taking long, careful steps as though afraid to find something unpleasant underfoot.

“How,” Alice asked, since the stork said nothing more, “did you just get here?”

“Well,” the stork said.

“I’ll tell you my story,” Alice said, “if you’ll tell me yours.” For the stork seemed to want to speak, but to be unable to bring itself to do it.

“It depends,” the stork said at last, “on whose story it is you want to hear. Oh, very well. No more equivocation.

“Once,” it said, after a further pause, “I was a real stork. Or rather, a real stork was all I was, or she was. I’m telling this very badly, but at all events I was also, or we were also, a young woman: a very proud and very ambitious young woman, who had just learned, in another country, some very difficult tricks from masters far older and wiser than herself. There was no need, no need at all, for her to practice one of these tricks on an unwitting bird, but she was young and somewhat thoughtless, and the opportunity presented itself.

“She performed her trick or manipulation very well, and was thrilled at her new powers, though how the stork bore it—well, I’m afraid she, I, never gave much thought to that, or rather I, the stork, I thought about nothing else.

“I had been given consciousness, you see. I didn’t know that it was not my own but another’s, and only loaned to me, or rather given or hidden in me for safe-keeping. I, I the stork, thought—well, it’s very distressing to think of, but I thought that I was not a stork at all; I believed myself to be a human woman, who by the malice of someone, I didn’t know whom, had been transformed into a stork, or imprisoned in one. I had no memory of the human woman I had been, because of course she retained that life and its memories, and went gaily on living it. I was left to puzzle it out.

“Well, I flew far, and learned much; I passed through doors no stork before had ever passed through. I made a living; I raised young—yes, at Edgewood once—and I had other employments, well, no need to speak of them; storks, you know… Anyway, among the things I learned, or was told, was that a great King was returning, or re-awaking; and that after his liberation would come my own, and that then I would truly be a human woman.”

She paused in her tale, and stood staring; Alice, not knowing whether storks can weep or not, looked closely at her, and though no drop fell from her pinkish eye Alice thought that in some storkish sense she did weep.

“And so I am,” she said at length. “And so I am, now, that human woman. At last. And still only, and for always, the real stork I always and only was.” She lowered her head before Alice in sorrowful confession. “Alice, you do know me,” she said. “I am, or was, or we were, or will be, your cousin Ariel Hawksquill.”

Alice blinked. She had promised herself to be surprised by nothing here; and indeed, after she had contemplated the stork, or Hawksquill, for an astonished moment, it did seem that she had heard this tale before, or to have known that it would happen, or had happened. “But,” she said, “where, I mean how, where is…”

“Dead,” said the stork. “Dead, spoilt, ruined. Murdered. I really, she really, had no place else to go.” She opened her red beak, and clacked it shut again, a sort of sigh. “Well. No matter. Only it will take time to get used to. Her disappointment, the stork’s I mean. My new—body.” She raised a wing and looked at it. “Fly,” she said. “Well. Perhaps.”

“I’m sure,” Alice said, putting her hand on the stork’s soft shoulder. “And I should think you could share, I mean share it with Ariel, I mean share it with the stork. You can accommodate.” She smiled; it was like arbitrating a dispute between two of her children.

The stork stepped on in silence a time. Alice’s hand on her shoulder seemed to soothe her, she had stopped her irritable fluffing. “Perhaps,” she said at length. “Only—well. Forever and ever.” There was a catch in her throat; Alice could see the long apple move. “It does seem hard.”

“I know,” Alice said. “It never comes out like you think it will; or even like you thought they said it would, though maybe it does. You learn to live with it,” she said. “That’s all.”

“I’m sorry now,” Ariel Hawksquill said, “of course too late, that I didn’t accept your invitation of that night, to go with you. I should have.”

“Well,” Alice said.

“I thought I was separate from this fate. But I’ve been in this Tale all along, haven’t I? With all the