Her father went to speak to him. Maura went inside.
Sometimes summer guests left cups and sometimes hairpins. These guests had left a letter, a cradle, and a baby.
The letter said: “My brother told me you could be trusted with this child. I give him to you. My brother told me you would make up a story explaining how you’ve come to own this house and have this child, a story so good that people would believe it. This child’s life depends on you doing so. No one must ever know he exists. The truth is a danger none of us would survive.”
“Burn this letter,” is how it ended. There was no signature. The writing was a woman’s.
Maura lifted the baby. She loosened the blanket in which he was wrapped. A boy. Two arms. Ten fingers. She wrapped him up again, rested her cheek on the curve of his scalp. He smelled of soap. And very faintly, beneath that, Maura smelled the sea. “This child will stay put,” Maura said aloud, as if she had the power to cast such a spell.
No child should have a mother with a frozen heart. Maura’s cracked and opened. All the love that she would someday have for this child was already there, inside her heart, waiting for him. But she couldn’t feel one thing and not another. She found herself weeping, half joyful, half undone with grief. Good-bye to her mother in her castle underwater. Good-bye to the summer life of drudgery and rented rooms. Good-bye to Sewell in his castle in the air.
Her father came into the house. “They gave me money,” he said wonderingly. His arms were full. Ten leather pouches. “So much money.”
When you’ve heard more of the old stories, little one, you’ll see that the usual return on a kindness to a stranger is three wishes. The usual wishes are for a fine house, fortune, and love. Maura was where she’d never thought to be, at the very center of one of the old stories, with a prince in her arms.
“Oh!” Her father saw the baby. He reached out and the pouches of money spilled to the floor. He stepped on them without noticing. “Oh!” He took the swaddled child from her. He, too, was crying. “I dreamed that Sewell was a grown man and left us,” he said. “But now I wake and he’s a baby. How wonderful to be at the beginning of his life with us instead of the end. Maura! How wonderful life is.”
My son was born with a hole in his heart, which had to be fixed when he was eighteen months old. The operation left him with a curved scar on his back, exactly the scar you’d expect if you’d had a single wing surgically removed. Because of this and because “The Wild Swans” was one of my own favorite fairy tales as a child, I often read it to him. I could see that, same as me, he would have liked to have a wing. Lucky youngest brother!
As an adult, it does bug me, though — those clear instructions to the princess: if you speak before the task is finished, your brothers will die. How could the task be considered finished when the final shirt was not? How did she know it was okay to speak with that wing still in evidence? Isn’t there, at the heart of the story, kind of a cheat? Am I okay with that? (And can I get away with something similar in my own work?)
The image of the single wing creeps into my writing a lot. It’s all over my first novel, Sarah Canary. I’ve written poems about it, seen it in dreams. It has a hold on me. If I haven’t read the fairy tale in a while, there are things about it I forget. But, just as it does in the story, in my memory and imagination, that wing persists.
RIKKI DUCORNET. Green Air
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.
She has a matchbox in her pocket, an artifact from when she was the only one, or so she believed, to light his cigar. But now the victim of his bitter policy, she sighs all day till evening and the long night through, attempting to decipher his robber’s mind, the reasons for her ritual incubation. Sleepless, she has all the time in the world to recall the looks of doubt and evil that often come to crowd his eyes and for which she once made a thousand excuses.
“My love!” she recalls now with horror her persistent request, “look kindly upon me!”
Yet he remains aloof, seemingly displeased with the roasted fowl, her failed attempts at conversation, the tenacity of her affection.
In her company he boils over with impatience when he is not deadly weary. She considers that if some aspire to the realms above the moon, her husband has chosen to dwell beneath it and so shoulder that planet’s shadow. Surely it is this that has corrupted his mind and darkened his mood. Yet in the whore’s booths he rallies, his laughter clattering into the streets like hail. Dressed to kill he takes his ease in unknown places as she staggers under the load of his many inexplicable absences. Still she persists in her folly.
“Smile upon me, my beloved,” she begs, pressing peaches upon him, the ripest fig. His eyes bright with malice, his snorted amusement frustrates her virtue. With real longing she watches his beautiful hand stroke down his beard. When for the last time he kisses her, he viciously bites her tongue. As the blood spills down her chin, he expulses her from their bed and drags her thrashing to the cedar chest although she cries out, “No! No! For I am no crone! But in the heat of youth! Even the beetles!” she shrieks, “move freely about! The insignificant snails! The tent pitchers! The camel drivers! Even the serpents make their way beneath the sun, the cool of dawn!”
That first night locked away, she notices how outside in the streets the hubbub decreases before ceasing altogether. Sprinkled with blood, the others in the chest are silent. Silenced their sobs, their barking tongues. The winter is a bitter one; no one recalls such cold! Catching a whiff of smoke from the merchant’s coffee fires she lights a match. For an instant the world is kinder.
There in the drawer she is taught the final lesson: her nature — humble, generous, and kind — does not assure interest or compassion. Her one hope: that her dreadful condition may turn out to be unforeseen luck of a kind. Something might come of it; the ways of the world are mysterious. Something. dare she imagine it! Wondrous. (This is what the little dog had said, his tail held high, his eyes like two saucers, each set with a black yolked egg. “Wait and see! Wait and see! Something wondrous will come!”)
The drawer is the only place where it could have ended because that is where it all began. Or rather, to be more precise, where she came upon the artifacts that caused her to consider that something was going on and not only in her head, mind you! That the marriage, so new! Barely begun! The prior wife’s body still warm! — was a figment. And the drawer — as are all things belonging to husbands — was strictly taboo. As were his pockets holding small silver and keys: taboo! But then one day, sweetly occupied by the innocence of her own wifely tasks, the house flooded with light, she found herself propelled toward the very drawer in which she now languishes.
It was the fault of the little dog, you see, until then always so uncannily quiet, who at once began to raise a ruckus with all its throat, calling and calling out to her: “Come look at this!” Insisting, “Come! Here! Look at this!” And then it happens.
She goes to the chest, her heart thrashing, not only because what she is about to do is forbidden but because what she is about to find will change everything.
A box of gold rings. His sharp pencils and pens. The small brass instruments with which he navigates the streets. A box of matches she pockets without thinking. And she finds some little sticks meant to keep his shirt collars stiff. (It is prodigious how in the morning he arises an old man suffering desolation of mind as though in the night he had seen firsthand, perhaps even participated in, all the horror of the world, only to step into the shower, his dressing room, and so transform himself into a prince. Glad-eyed, he leaves the breakfast nook with a lion’s muscled ease, sweetening her mind with longing throughout the day as the sun lifts and lowers in the deepening
