The Merry Spinster: Tales of Everyday Horror(2)
“Not unless you were willing to get into a great deal of trouble for the keeping of it,” her grandmother said.
“But that’s unreasonable,” she said. “What right has a front door to keep me from anything? My goodness, I keep clams and things out of my garden, but I don’t expect them to stop trying just because I put a few rocks around it. It’s my garden because I till it, not because the world stops trying to grow things at my say-so.”
“Nevertheless,” her grandmother said, “they set a great store by it, and wouldn’t give up their front doors for anything.”
“You can’t have understood it properly,” the girl said.
“Front doors,” her grandmother repeated, “they’re absolutely mad for them, and their fish are covered in soft scales, and roost in stiff pods of kelp that don’t move in the slightest, and scream at one another from their nests all day long, for everything that lives there hates quiet. All day long a hot coal rakes its way across the roof of the world, and all night they freeze as little white maggots peep out all over the sky to watch them.”
“It isn’t decent,” she added, and the general opinion was that she was right.
“Decent or not,” the girl said, “I’d like to see it for myself.”
“And you will,” said her grandmother. “When you’re of an age, and your affairs are in order, and you have your family’s consent, you may sit on the rocks by the coast and watch the ships go by moonlight. Then you will come home, and you can think about what you have seen.”
At last the girl came of an age, and her affairs were in order, and she had the consent of her family tucked under the wallet strung round her waist.
“Now you are grown up,” said her grandmother, “and you must let me turn you out so everyone who sees you will know your rank,” and she placed ropes of nautilus on her neck and ordered eight solemn oysters to clamp onto her hair.
“But this hurts so,” said the girl, who had never suffered before and did not like it in the least.
“I would not hurt you unless I could bear the same thing. You are not being asked to do anything without precedent,” said her grandmother, “and no one likes to hear someone talk about their aches and pains. Have the decency at least to be quiet about it.”
“All the same,” the girl said, twisting her mouth, “I don’t believe I should like to suffer again. As a matter of fact, I don’t believe I will suffer again at all. Good-bye, for now at least.” And with that, she drew herself up and vanished into the blue haze overhead.
The sun had set just before she broke her head into the air. Nearby, a large ship rested on the water. The sea and the sky alike were still and cool, but the surface of the ship seethed in continual motion against the waves. Dark figures crawled all along the rigging with a great shouting and waving of arms. Lanterns had been tipped up all around the deck and stuffed with fire, and pennants flashed from every spar. A lurching, crashing music tipped over the sides of the ship and scattered on the waves so that the girl sputtered and thrust her head back under the water, where everything was blessedly dark and quiet. She swam closer to the cabin windows and looked in through the glass. There she saw a smaller crowd of people, not moving about so wildly as the first, but richly dressed, who smiled at each other and spoke in soft voices.
Among them was a young prince—“for practical purposes, much the same thing as a daughter, at least to them,” her grandmother had said. His rank was obvious from the deference offered him, despite the conspicuous lack of nautilus and clamshells on his person. He was dark-eyed and solemn, or at least civil, and the girl thoroughly approved of him for it. The celebration was for him; it was the prince’s birthday, and they were marking it with tremendous merriment, for they had only a single prince to share among all their people.
The girl remembered what her grandmother had told her: “They aren’t made as you or I were made. Here, a king knows exactly the number of daughters—or sons, if he wants any—he needs, and produces them as necessary. They have to go to a great deal more trouble than that if they want to get up more people. And they can make only one or two at a time, which makes for a devil of a time with planning, so that sometimes there are too many, and sometimes not nearly enough, and always there is the question of who they are going to make new people with. They can’t make daughters as individuals or as a body politic, nor bud nor generate colonies, as sensible people do. They have to split off into two first, and commit sexuality against one another. I told you it wasn’t decent.”
When the prince moved from his cabin to the deck, a terrible shouting came from the sailors gathered there, and more than a hundred rockets shot out across the bow, singeing the sky with such a brightness that the girl could hardly bear to look. She had to bathe her eyes in salt water before she could open them again. When she did, it appeared as if every star in heaven had been wounded, and that they were unspooling themselves into blazing white threads that dripped into the sea. Everything was freezing cold and burning hot all at once. The ship itself was so brilliantly lit that everything onboard seemed lost in half radiance, half shadow. No one seemed in the least bit frightened, and everyone who saw the prince smiled at him. In this way the girl figured he must be lovely, so she smiled at him, too.
It grew late, yet the girl did not take her eyes from the ship, nor from the prince once they had adjusted to the glare. One by one, the lanterns drooped lightless, the music paled, and the ship grew quieter. The sea became restless, and every wave began to hiss foam, but still the girl remained by the cabin windows, bobbing up and down in the water. Then suddenly the deck was no longer quiet; sailors moved in a black line up the mast, seizing at the rigging, but the waves threw themselves to yet greater heights, where they were joined by fat lashings of lightning. The sails were soon swamped, and the ship dove down like a swan, and all of it made for great sport for the girl, who had long been cradled by storms such as these.