berries shook and spun on the ground, and as they cleared a hole around Mother, she and her ax dropped down right through the earth. Father and Marlene ran over just in time to see the white line of Mother’s scalp disappear into a thick powder of ash, to see the ash harden back to soil, to see Mother’s Bible fall to the ground. Its pages flew open and fluttered, then turned into white birds that sailed away. The berries lifted from the ground like a swarm of bees.
Their mass moved toward Brother as if to attack him; they landed everywhere upon his body and face and guitar until he was fully covered. Then, as if giving him juice to use as blood, the berries deflated and fell from his skin one by one, like dried scabs, flatter than onionskin. Marlene ran to him, breathless. “Look Father,” she cried, “Brother is pink and new!”
But Father loomed quiet beneath the tree. He was bent over, running his fingers along the ground, searching for some trace of either wife below.
As a child, what fascinated me most about Grimms’ tale of “The Juniper Tree” was that the father could not detect that he was eating his son; it seemed that such a bond would somehow be — dare I say — tasteable. Perhaps this is why I was so impressed years later when I discovered Angela Carter’s “The Bloody Chamber,” a story where the young woman’s life is saved through her mother’s devoted attention and sharp instinct. I find the primary modern relevance of Grimms’ “The Juniper Tree” as having a great deal to do not only with the perils of mentally or emotionally absent parents but also with ignorance in general and the various ways that being uninformed can open a space for danger: Where are the things we buy coming from? Who is making them? How are they making them? What are our tax dollars funding? Which companies control our food? Hyperbolized as it may be, the original version of “The Juniper Tree” makes a great case for Knowing, for being vigilantly present and aware.
In my rewriting of the tale, I wanted to retain not only the father’s ignorance but also the original source of hope for the murdered brother: his sister, Marlene. “Hansel and Gretel,” a similar story of child abandonment, movingly describes a brother and sister who rely on each other for survival after their father’s wife has convinced him to abandon the children. Most versions of “Hansel and Gretel” describe the pair returning to live with their father after their stepmother has died in the same way that “The Juniper Tree” ends, with the trinity of a father and his daughter and son. I am not a fan of giving these fathers a second chance, although I accept that the children, in their goodness, would grant it. So I wanted my retelling to emphasize that although the children accept their father, his emotional distance has rendered him unnecessary in their lives: the children’s devotion to each other is what allows for their ultimate safety, and their happiness is not dependent upon him.
Although I altered the lyrics of the song, the plot structure of my story and the original tale of “The Juniper Tree” both rely on the transcendental and sorcerous power of music. The line “Bird, moon, fly away soon” is inspired by Bob Dylan’s song “Jokerman,” which is, like so much of Dylan’s music, a fairy tale in itself.
FRANCINE PROSE. Hansel and Gretel
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 Cosi 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
