The Merry Spinster: Tales of Everyday Horror(7)
The girl tilted her head and waved cheerfully down at them. Then she bound her hair at the back of her neck, pulled her legs back up from the edge of the ship, and disappeared inside the cabin.
The girl drew back the curtain covering the marriage-bed, and saw the prince sleeping against his bride’s chest. She bent down and kissed his brow, then hers, and then his, then hers once again for good measure. It would be too bad to have suffered so without getting the prince for it, but now it was his and his bride’s turn to suffer. Since the girl had already done her suffering cheerfully, she saw no reason why they should complain either. The knife jumped a little in her hand, and then it jumped first in the prince’s throat, then his bride’s, and a red line trailed after it. Then the girl flung the knife into the sea.
“Oh, that’s lovely,” she said, and she found that she had a voice again, and that she was not suffering in the least. “That’s so much better. That’s wonderful.” She wriggled her toes around in the blood and left scrunched-up little footprints behind her as she returned to the railing.
“Hello, sisters,” the girl called out as she waggled her bloody legs over the side. “Oh, but it’s a relief to see all of you. I can’t begin to tell you the extent of my troubles. I’m covered in little fissions—or fissures, I misremember which is which, but I’m split all over like a reef—and I can only move in four directions, none of them interesting, and I don’t care if I never see another soul as long as I live. I want to come home, and be around sensible people, and dig up my garden, and never have to look at the sun again.”
Then she looked down to see that she had been fully restored to herself, flexing joyfully in every direction, and found her body just as it had been, and she loved the prince and his bride better than she ever had before.
“I’m coming, sisters,” she said, and she felt three voices humming all at once in her throat—her own, and the prince’s, and the prince’s bride (her prince, now, and her bride, too). And she had two souls inside her, and they both belonged to her, and she smiled, and she slipped back into the sea.
TWO
The Thankless Child
After every meal came the Invocation to Combat Ungratefulness. All three girls had been catechized in the simple prayers that preceded the salt-ration years earlier but for a long time were without a godmother to chant the clarification. Meals were always taken outside, weather permitting, and only once the sun had gone down, with their godmother alone on one side of the low stone table in the garden. The girls sat on the other side, whomever had finished her work the soonest seated closest to the head.
This had been the order of things: Paul, the eldest, had a dead mother who had been reduced to salt a decade since. The bones had been gathered in a square of fabric, bundled neatly, and buried at the northwest end of the family grounds; a false cypress, which was not by the strictest definition a tree but an overgrown shrub, grew over them, and dropped fat pale spiders from its branches. After an appropriate but not elaborately drawn-out mourning period, Paul’s father was taken husband again, and produced her sisters in quick succession. Gomer and Robin were equally black-eyed and charming, quick with both work and a smile, handsome of face and of person, less eager to please than universally pleasing.
Gomer and Robin’s mother had no training in the motherly arts and confined herself to matters of business and household management. Their father knew the primary psalms, his place, and not much else. The godmother had appeared on the day of Gomer’s baptism and supplied the family with water she had conjured herself to mark the occasion. She joined the household as godmother and doctrinal master that same evening. Gomer, who had little native interest in religion but a placid desire to be generally approved of, took to her godmother at once. Robin took to her too, although with none of Gomer’s innate placidity; Robin created the unique impression of always seeming to be on the verge of spilling something on herself, despite not being in the least bit clumsy. Paul’s comparative reserve could not help but draw the godmother’s attention, and Paul was often the worse off for it.
The godmother could read, and write a little when the situation called for it; she could walk in the noonday sun without fainting; commission deacons; haggle with the grocer; perform minor miracles; turn a dog into a man for upward of three hours; cast out territorial spirits; slaughter a chicken without spilling a drop of blood; initiate mysteries; and she could name over one thousand neurotoxins. She made all her own clothing, and the children’s too, and she was neither bent nor stooped with age. The garden, since she began to tend to it, produced both onions and cabbage and several other eatable things beside, and no birds ever landed in it.
“Receive all things,” the godmother began. “Bless all things, mind all things; guard against ingratitude and the waste of water. Build your seat on a high place and watch for thieves; mind in what manner, when, whence, how many, and what kind come to break in and steal. When the watch grows weary, stand up and enter into the guard of the mind, then sit down again and attend to the task.” She turned her head to Paul. “What is it to be grateful, girl?”
“To be grateful is to be wakeful and watchful,” Paul said. “To be grateful is to remember. To be grateful is to acknowledge one’s lawful debts and keep a balanced ledger.”
“Attend, and affirm, the reasons you are grateful to me,” the godmother said. “Eldest first.”