witch in the forest, and the hapless couple, the nature of the configuration occurred to me, and I knew which fairy tale I was dealing with — if not why. All I had to do was transpose the brother and sister into a recently and already unhappily married couple. I had been listening to the Mozart trio nonstop, and so it naturally became the soundtrack played in the witch’s lair. And the next thing I knew, as so often happens, Albanians popped into the story.
KEVIN BROCKMEIER. A Day in the Life of Half of Rumpelstiltskin
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.
9:05 A.M. He goes to work.
Half of Rumpelstiltskin works three hours every morning, until noon, standing in for missing or vandalized mannequins at a department store in a nearby strip mall. Until recently, he worked in the warehouse, processing orders, cataloging merchandise, and inspecting enormous cardboard boxes with rusted staples the size of his pinkie finger. Lately, however, a spate of mannequin thefts — the result, police suspect, of a gang initiation ritual — has left local shopping centers dispossessed of display models, and Half of Rumpelstiltskin has been transferred in to fill the void. He considers this ironic.
— You’re five minutes late, his boss tells him when he arrives. Don’t let it happen again.
Half of Rumpelstiltskin’s boss smells of cigar smoke and seafood.
— And from now on, I expect to see you clean-shaven when you come in, he says gruffly. Nobody likes a hairy mannequin. Now get changed and get to work.
Half of Rumpelstiltskin nods in reply. Cod, he thinks.
Half of Rumpelstiltskin soon emerges from wardrobe wearing a junior-size vinyl jumpsuit with a zippered front and a designer label. Around his head is swathed a stocking cap several sizes too large for him. It rests heavy on his eyebrow and plunges to the small of his back in a series of broad, rambling folds. His jumpsuit, on its right side, is as flaccid as the inner tube of a flat tire. Half of Rumpelstiltskin takes his place between two cold, trendy mannequins — one slate gray with both arms halved at the elbow, its head severed as if by a huntsman’s ax from right ear to left jawbone, and the other a metal figure composed of flat geometric shapes with a polished black sheen, jointed together with transparent rods to resemble the human form. Half of Rumpelstiltskin feels himself a true and vital part of the society of mannequins. With them, he fits right in.
An adolescent with close-cropped hair, a pierced eyebrow, and a scar extending like a smile from the corner of his lip to the prominence of his cheek approaches Half of Rumpelstiltskin near the end of his shift. Half of Rumpelstiltskin stands as still as a tree in the hope that the boy will walk past, but instead he circles and draws closer, like a dog bound to him by chain. Upon reaching the platform where Half of Rumpelstiltskin stands, the boy threads his arm through the jumpsuit’s empty leg and takes hold of Half of Rumpelstiltskin’s spleen. He appears surprised. He removes his hand — spleenless — and sniffs it. Shrugging, he reaches again for the jumpsuit’s empty cuff.
I wouldn’t do that if I were you, says Half of Rumpelstiltskin, and the boy backs calmly away. He stops, crooks his neck, and looks quizzically into Half of Rumpelstiltskin’s eye. Then he brushes his fingers along the underside of his jaw and flicks them past the nub of his chin. His eyes glare scornfully at Half of Rumpelstiltskin. He strides confidently away, as if nothing at all has happened. Half of Rumpelstiltskin watches him exit the building through a pair of sliding glass doors. His boss steps out from behind a carousel hung with heavy flannel shirts.
— What was that all about? he asks.
Nothing, responds Half of Rumpelstiltskin.
— No fraternization with the customers. You should know better than that.
Okay, says Half of Rumpelstiltskin.
His boss shakes his head disapprovingly and, turning to leave, mutters under his breath.
— Fool, he whispers. Meathead. Hayseed. Half-wit.
Half of Rumpelstiltskin checks his wristwatch. It’s quitting time.
12:15 P.M. He eats lunch in the park.
Beside the wooden bench on which he sits is a tree stump, its hollow banked with wood pulp and a few faded soda cans. Half of Rumpelstiltskin can’t help but wonder what has become of the tree itself. A year ago it rose within the park, housing the sky, a thousand tatters of blue, within its overspread branches. Now it is gone, and this bench is here in its place. Possibly the bench itself was once a part of the tree — hewn, perhaps, from its thickset trunk — but if so, what had become of the rest? The only certainty is that it fell, releasing from its branches a host of harried birds and vagrant squirrels, galaxies and planets and the sure and vaulting sky. With so much restless weight between its leaves, it could just as well have burst like a balloon. When you’re trying to hold the sky inside you, thinks Half of Rumpelstiltskin, something is bound to fail. The sky is inevitable. The sky is a foregone conclusion. Overhead, the sun pulses behind swells of heat, wobbling like an egg yolk. The jet trail has dispersed,
