Grasshoppers landed lightly on the brown grass. They balanced on the beaks of the motionless ravens and buzzed wildly in the air around the cops and paramedics and everyone else who stopped at the edge of the police line to watch.
The paramedic cupped his hands around his eyes. He crouched down to get a better view. The grasshoppers seemed familiar, though he did not know why. He seemed to recall a girl perched on the top of a stone chimney, and another girl who shared her face crying on the ground beneath. He remembered a woman, tall, with long, dark hair and shockingly blue eyes, kneeling next to the girl on the ground, her eye fixed on her child clinging to the edges of the stone.
“Ronia Drake,” he started to say, but a grasshopper flew into his mouth.
“Hush,” he thought he heard it say. Or maybe it was “Tzzz.”
A moment later, the cloud lifted as quickly as it came, tumbling over the twisted bramble and down to the river. By the time the cops and paramedics registered their astonishment and looked down at the ground, at the places where they had marked the locations of the remains of Ronia Drake, the markers still lay on the grass, untouched, but the severed, bloodless pieces of the body were gone.
12.
The night after her husband left her, Ronia Drake lay alone in her bed and cried herself to sleep. During the night she had a dream. She dreamed she had fallen off the path in the park and then tumbled in the bramble as it fell to the river. She rolled until she reached a narrow ledge, where she found a table and two chairs. She sat down. An old woman sat on the other side. She had hair so white it seemed to glow and delicate skin that folded again and again upon itself.
“Tea,” the old woman said, handing her a cup.
They drank.
“Watch out for puddles,” the old woman told her.
“All right,” Ronia Drake said, her mouth inside the teacup.
“And take this.” She reached across and fastened a pendant around the neck of Ronia Drake.
“What is it?”
“Change,” the old woman said. “Change is good.”
When Ronia Drake woke up, her legs were covered in red scratches and cuts, and a pendant was fastened around her neck. She never took it off.
13.
Once upon a time, there was a man who had a wife that he lost and another wife who was locked up and was therefore as good as lost. He could not remember his first wife, though he knew he should. He had an inkling of daughters, as well, but that came and went.
Still, he felt lonely.
Still, he felt lost. Once, someone told him that there was a freedom in being lost. And in abandonment too, if he thought about it right. But he could only think about the blank spaces where a family ought to have been.
The man’s other wife lived in a tower far away. He rode to see her when he could. Once upon a time, this wife was pretty. Pretty as a princess. But not anymore. Not since they plucked the baby, purple and twisted and waterlogged, from her distended womb. Not since she was found in the bathroom with the hand of a dead woman and razor slices up and down her arm. Now she lived in a white tower with white walls and a long white gown that tied in the back. Now, her feet were large and ungainly, her face lopsided and haphazard, like a potato left too long in the ground. Now, she whispered stories of witches and insects and a wicked, wicked woman named Ronia Drake.
Each time he heard that name, he felt a jolt in his heart. Ronia Drake, the man thought, and though he could not place it, he liked the sound of that name. It had a comforting heft and weight. It was familiar, somehow.
Once, the man went walking in the park and fell off the path. He had been warned never to stray from the path, you never did know who lived in those woods. Although for the life of him, he could not remember who had warned him, if anyone had. He fell off the path and tumbled into the greening wood. Halfway down, he reached a ledge of sorts and stood. The ledge became a path that switched back and forth. He followed it. He couldn’t go up, but he assumed the path would lead him to a boat landing, or maybe a road.
As he walked, he became aware of something following him, something with soft, sure steps. He turned.
A deer stood in front of him, brown and sleek and lovely, her coat shining like a queen’s. Her narrow head tilted slightly to the right, and breath clouded prettily from a damp, black nose. Her eyes were wide and intelligent and blue.
Do deer normally have blue eyes? He couldn’t remember.
Above each eye rested a grasshopper, glimmering like a green jewel. The grasshoppers tilted their iridescent faces toward the man, and he could have sworn that one of them winked.
“You,” he said.
“Tzzz,” said the grasshoppers. Or perhaps it was the deer. Or perhaps it was the wood.
Once upon a time there was a prince who searched for his lost love in the deep, dark forest. He never returned.
1.
The Insect has never been in love.
The Astronomer has never been alive.
It is important that you understand this.
2.
The Insect paces his office, allowing the tips of his forelegs, the ooze and suck of the pulvilli between his tiny, delicate claws, to graze against the stacks of books, the stacks of papers, the stuff and rustle of a life dedicated to learning and study and endless pontification. He has been, until now, and in his own estimation, a grand professor and a great scholar.
