end had gotten chopped down completely. Mary’s parents’ house and the houses to either side of it had been changed into condominiums so you couldn’t tell where one stopped and the next began. Eddie’s parents’ house looked more or less the same, except that the sloping front lawn his father had worked so hard to maintain was turned to chaff, the grass dead or dying and overrun with dandelions, and instead of the lush ivy plant his mother had kept in the front bow window there was a hideous gold lamp shaped like a naked woman.
Eddie was an old man now. The hair he still had left was white and his teeth false, the youthful promise of his career all but forgotten, the portraits he had painted so many years ago possible to track down with some effort in private collections, but considered stylistically quaint. The big yellow cat was dead, also the coroner, the cat’s ashes in a plastic bag in Eddie’s shoe box, the coroner’s in a cemetery Eddie sometimes visited before he moved away from the city. The Poole estate had been sold to a developer who built a retirement community there, Poole Village, which included the nursing home where Eddie’s father lived the last years of his life. But Eddie’s father was dead, too.
As he walked along the neat brick pathways of Poole Village, Eddie could barely remember what it was he was supposed to have come back to do. The day was mild, the air sweet but with a smell of autumn in it, of burning leaves, and in the blue sky he could see a small wavering V of geese making their way south, hear the plaintive far-off sound of their honking. Mary had always made fun of him, of the way the end of summer made him sad — her eyes would mock him, lovingly. He remembered how she would sit on the porch stoop with one of the other girls, the two of them apparently in deep negotiation for some card, a dog or a horse or what the girls all referred to as a “scene,” meaning a painting from the Romantic period showing a world where beautiful places like the Poole estate had once existed. Mary’s head would be bent over the cigar box, her shoulders hunched, but he could tell she was more focused on him than she was on nothing else. No one or nothing else in his life had given him that same degree of attention.
Now a young woman orderly approached on the path, pushing an old woman toward him in a wheelchair. The young woman reminded him a little of his old elementary school teacher, Miss Vicks — she had the same red lips and fingernails, the same birdlike way of tilting her head when she talked, and her name, amazingly enough, was Vicky. The old woman was just an old woman; she wore the kind of sunglasses with side shields a person needed after cataract surgery, and her silver hair had been put up in a bun. “Are you going to lunch?” the old woman asked Eddie. “Today is Friday,” she added, clapping together the swollen joints of her hands. “Swordfish!”
Eddie was about to say no, that while Poole Village certainly seemed nice enough, he wasn’t yet a resident. But then he was once again filled with a sense of having forgotten something important, something he was supposed to have come back there to accomplish. He seemed to remember something about a sorcerer, but that was in a fairy tale he’d heard in his childhood. Something about someone wearing a diadem of star stickers, about a girl wearing a diadem of star stickers on her forehead.
The three of them — Eddie and Vicky and the old woman — were making their slow way along an avenue of shade trees, the leaves casting moving shadows across their faces. Eddie felt cold; what the stickers signified, it suddenly came to him, was more than the fact that one girl had been set apart from the other girls. Something had happened to her, something bad.
He followed Vicky and the old woman into the building. “Whatever you do,” the old woman told Vicky, laughing, “don’t push me down there.” She was pointing toward the blue hallway that led to the level-three nursing home; when you went down that hallway you never came out again except as a cadaver.
Eventually they arrived at the dining room. The room was full of old people sitting in groups of four or six around tables covered with white tablecloths. It was a pleasant room, almost like a restaurant, with artificial floral centerpieces and aproned waitstaff, except all the waitstaff could perform CPR. Eddie put the shoe box on the table beside him. There was a plate in front of him with a piece of fish on it and a pile of peas and a pile of rice but he had no appetite.
“What have you got there?” asked the attractive young man who came to wait on their table.
“You have to speak up,” Vicky said. “Otherwise he can’t hear you.”
The old woman reached across the table and put her hand on his and held it and he could feel a tremor run through his whole body that either came from him or from her, he couldn’t tell the difference.
He also couldn’t tell where he was but he thought he could see a sky like gray padding with a handful of black specks swirling just beneath it, birds busy looking for things to use to build their nests. There was the smell of knotweed, a little like the smell of cat urine, and sure enough there was his yellow cat, big and sleek the way he used to be when Eddie first saw him, scratching in the dirt. Eddie’s hands were shaking so hard he almost couldn’t open the shoe box.
“See if he can manage this,” the attractive young man said to Vicky. He set a bowl of broth on the table.
“Here, let me help you,” she said, propping up Eddie, who had slid so far down in his chair he couldn’t reach the table. “I’m going to break an egg into it to give it more body,” she explained. Then she reached into the shoe box for the curved knife and gave the egg a whack, separating the two halves of the shell and dropping the contents into Eddie’s broth.
The room grew very quiet. Shadows padded along the walls, poured over Eddie like rain.
The old woman leaned closer. “Uh-oh,” she said. “It looks like he’s wet himself.”
She took off her sunglasses to get a better look.
She was wearing a long robe of a heavy lustrous fabric like the satin they stopped making years ago, and it set off her skin — she allowed just the right amount of animal fat in her diet to keep it thick and creamy, hydrated it just enough to keep it translucent. “I have something to tell you, Mister,” she said to Eddie, looking up over her fork at him, lifting her eyes which weren’t cloudy and dull but alive and dark and lit by the fire of her spirit, which, like the sun, couldn’t be confronted directly but had to be filtered through the vitreous humor of her material self. Eddie remembered those eyes watching him, and as he did he heard the sound of the crickets, a sound he hadn’t heard in a very long time, and with it the voice of his mother calling him in, and his father whistling as he adjusted the sprinkler, its lazy arc above the freshly mowed lawn, and there was Mary in her plaid shorts and white T-shirt, standing on one leg like a stork.
“You look like you just saw a ghost,” the attractive young man said. It was the very last thing Eddie heard before his soul flew out of his body.
My story has two sources. The first is the Italian fairy tale “Body-without-Soul.” I was attracted to its obsession with the physical body, as well as its elaborate and gruesome set of rules for tracking down the soul, and I took elements of its plot for my own. The second source is less specific but stems from the role time plays in the fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen, where it overpowers everything, including magic. In his fairy tales it’s time above all else that is magical, elastic, strange — even with otherworldly help you can’t escape it. I wanted to write a story reflecting this condition, and I thought “Body-without-Soul” would provide a good container.
KELLIE WELLS. The Girl, the Wolf, the Crone
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
