sigrid nunez writes

“some things it would be death to forgive”

 

hansel and gretel’s witch

— evil, as expected —

but how to blame her,

when famine has swept the land,

divided heart and head,

body and soul,

families.

has not their own father

left them to die?

(the authors, men of course,

will blame the step-mother.)

 

one of many differences

between witch and hero:

the hero forgives

forgetting,

but witches want too much.

(perhaps this

is what makes them witches)

would a witch leave her child

for any man?

witches lock little girls in towers,

just to keep them.

they will not part

with a single bean.

 

riding home with my father,

ten years old, tactless,

delicately soled. I have

upset him—not difficult

to do. (seratonin is not

a playground word.)

“they run over dogs

all the time in burma,”

he tells me, and I know

he has said it only

to hurt me.

 

if my father left me

in the woods

I would not come back.

 

many years would pass.

until he found me

on his third honeymoon,

innkeep, at a candied house,

(rebranded, of course —

no hint of uncanny cannibals,

in The Lemondrop Inn.)

 

perhaps he apologizes perhaps he

smiles the smile he saves for strangers,

asks my name.

(teeth, the most misleading

of bones,

elusive, illusive,

not white stones but breadcrumbs,

not swan but snow-white bird.)

 

supercilious, collected,

I give him his roomkey

and change.

I’ve cleaned all the floors,   

I’ve cleaned out my purse,   

I cleaned out the bathroom,  

but there’s one place way worse.  

 

My brain needs spring cleaning.  

It’s crammed full of facts.   

Are some true, I wonder,  

Or the whole lot just trash?

 

Something to ponder,   

as you’re lying in bed.  

Is theory more useful  

or a hole in your head?  

 

Wrappers in my wrinkles,  

cobwebbed synapses.   

My thoughts move slower   

than frozen molasses.  

 

I’m stuffed, soft and stale,   

I’ve the Rust Belt’s red rust,  

tip me over to find  

the desert’s own dust.    

 

In spring I’ll start sweeping,  

Cortexes, lobes galore,  

I’ll sweep from noon to night,  

then sweep a little more.  

 

I’ll invite back old friends,   

Fancy and Delight,    

call Curiosity,  

meet Beauty for a bite.  

 

We’ll spend a night dancing  

tell the tallest of tales.   

Each one, oil for lamplight.  

Each one, wind for the sails.  

glass like a fish bone

pierces my foot

thin, long, choking-sharp.

I twist up recalcitrant ankles,

make eyes of my fingertips,

and the shard becomes a glittering tear

on – not in – my right thumb.

thank god, I think,

for little things.

for the thick soles of my feet

(why did I ever buff them down?)

and my hard, hard head.

People like to say that you can hurt a person’s body, but not their soul, though you and I know it isn’t true.

For when the king’s army came, they took the singers’ first, and cut out their tongues, and threw them in the river; and where were their souls then, if not swimming like fish in the waters.

And they took the players’ various masks, the writers’ index fingers and thumbs, my husband’s hands. They stole the eyes of newsmen and professors, pulled the lawyers’ canines, stripped the confessors of their ears after shaking them for loose change secrets.

Little of the teachers survived—a open hand, here, a still-beating heart, there. Where the faces, where the tongues, where the ears, where the—  

They emptied out the students and the children.

In the river they all went, and since there were no eyes, no tongues, no ears, certainly the soldiers couldn’t have known better, nobody left to warn them, the books that could have told them stacked and burned months before the Grand Mutilation.

It didn’t happen instantly, mind you. It was years before the heads found their way to the necks, before the shoulders began to remember themselves. Frankenstein’s monster, creating himself? Certainly he had all the best to work with.

A beautiful nightmare, the thing that loped from the river. A theatre mask for a face, a voice like honey, the confessors’ ears. He remembered every word he heard, and some you’d heard besides—perhaps he’d found the students’ brains. Was that Orpheus’ head it wore?

I invited it into my house, and fed it everything I had—too polite to admit it was still hungry, strange thing, but a cook knows. The soldiers watched from outside, smiling uncomfortably, like sick dogs. But it asked them in and spoke to them and flattered them decently, and so they left to bring their superiors.

“You know you won’t get far, with a face like that,” I told it, glancing outside. It dabbed its mouth with its napkin. The blacksmith’s hands, whiteblue, hard as river stones, glanced over mine, settled a single moment, and I wondered whose heart he—it—had taken.

Soon it appeared in all the papers. Creation of the Republic! The End of Death! The best of everything in one, it said—a triumph of science and discovery.

No one seemed to mind when it took the general’s face, and one day the king came to meet the creature, so splendidly it spoke and put on. I spread the picnic for them myself upon the riverbank, kept my face away from the cameras. The creature allowed itself to be made over, the blacksmiths’ hands curled stiffly behind its back. Something feminine, tentative about the way it moved, a curious bend to its back whenever it thought you weren’t looking, as though used to long years of stooping. How long it must have slept, hibernating, waiting for richer harvests.

The king said that of course it would have to come to the capital and be shown around; the creature’s eyes fixed rigidly, perhaps remorsefully, on the river. Is that what it woke up for, after a thousand years? Perhaps it had forgotten to acquire a spine, while plumbing the river’s depths for human pieces. Perhaps there were not many to be found.

There was only dessert left, and I gritted my teeth as I prepared it. Of course the soldiers hadn’t bothered to take anything from me; of course I saw none of myself in the monster. But why should that offend me?

The monster only ate meat, and so of course he did not eat the dessert. He watches, curiously impassive, as the king began to falter, the slow lean forward, the suddenly unblinking eyes. He turned to me. I missed his theatre-mask face, hated the chill of his hands in mine even as I squeezed them tighter.

“Where do you think he keeps his soul?” I asked quietly, attempting a smile. Steel against my temple. I knew I would be mutilated, now that I was no longer harmless, and I found myself forgiving while I still could. Could I borrow the confessors’ ears, if only for a moment?

What, I wonder, will they take from me?

“Stomach, of course,” said the monster, answering a question I had forgotten asking. He looked up at the soldier beside me, his expression merely curious. Then he took the king’s crown up, gently moved the soldier’s gun away from my head, and walked forward toward the cameras. He no longer loped, but moved slowly, regally. I collapsed forward, weak with anxiety, and my eyes began to close. I could see the cameras, the screens, as he approached them.

He gave them a smile—the one I had greeted him with, each day he had come home to the inn, insincere in everything except its hope—and in not one but many voices, he began to speak.

Winds always did woo badly.

Eyes large and dark-lashed, a grin like a wolf, she could not help but catch the eye. He saw her swimming in her complex’s pool and made the mistake of shivering through the trees.

“Is it winter already?” She murmured, and with that she was out, dressed and gone. There was nothing to do but bring a courting gift—the best of fall leaves on her apartment doorstep, some brilliant, some dark with decay.

“At least the fall is beautiful,” she admitted, and the wind smiled, for she had liked both the golden and the grey.

He could swear she heard him when he spoke to her. When he met her, (he claims by chance), he sometimes told her the wind himself admired her for all she did. And while she had rolled her eyes more than once, hadn’t she also bought a bright red kite? Best of all are the gifts that can be shared.

Certainly no one looks up Boreas and “stress-induced auditory hallucinations” in the same hour by chance?

She was kind, strong, incomprehensibly solid, and she sang as though she were dying. One winter night, he realized he did not know her name and howled outside her windows, begging for syllables.

She turned up the heat, and checked the locks.

“Fuck this noise,” she muttered, closing the curtains. A clear dismissal. He heard her swearing as she warred with her long winter socks.

The wind decided that perhaps the Upper East side, and not Brooklyn, needed a chill that night.

The peak of winter, and therefore his power. She had begun to flirt with a coworker, and he realized he must take drastic measures if he was to catch her attention. Bone and flesh did not come easily to him, at first; and it took longer still to become handsome—symmetry never did come naturally—then striking, then finally himself.

Mediocrity reflected in a lover’s eyes was, he decided, the worst of curses. The blue of this scarf suited him. Didn’t it?

He knocked on the door. She had already taken off her bra and her makeup, and was none too interested in guests. The deadlock remained well in place.

“Selling something?” she drawled. He held a stolen shawl in his hands, a peace offering.

(The North Wind of New York steals scarves from plenty of people, and resents the South Wind’s accusation of “childlike infatuation” as the cause of this particular theft. “You should see the Eastern Wind of New York’s hat collection,” he has said, defensively, when asked.)

“I was wondering where that got off to,” she growled. “You know it has my name on the tag.”

He swallowed. His hair forgot, for a moment, what he had told it to be, climbed ruefully over his eyes.

“It’s not a kind thing,” she told him. “Stealing a woman’s name.”

“It was not my intention,” he answered. “I haven’t read it,” he added, and this seemed to placate her. She looked the shawl over, as though she would be able to read in it the honesty of his heart. Satisfaction, curiosity, consideration.

“You could always ask for my name, you know.” He could see the wolf now, quiet and patient in her eyes. Perhaps one of her ancestors was a witch. Perhaps not just one of her ancestors.

He began to smile. He could not quite remember how to speak; it had been so long, and he was, most recently, a fox rather than a man.

“You look cold,” she said. He leaned forward. She closed the door.

On it, her name, precious as first snow.

(The North Wind of New York, again, denies all claims of infatuation.)

The sound of the deadlock being undone.

“Are you sure we’ve never met before?” She asked. “Besides the, uh, scarf stealing.”

“Which, I might add, was entirely accidental,” he said. She snorted, looked him over with tentative familiarity.

“So you… live around here?”

He nodded.

“You’re not… crazy, are you?” I’m not crazy, am I? The unspoken question.

“I make no promises,” he replied. She rolled her eyes.

“Well, I’ve got a taser and some hot chocolate,” she decided. “Since you do look half-frozen. But I’ll only let you in on one condition.” She tilted her head, biting her lip.

“Anything,” he said, knowing full well he had almost nothing to offer.

“Your name,” she replied. He bowed his head to hide his smile.