I see now I was wrong. This is not the same story.
My porcelain poodles, my palace, my park, my predictable past—all of it belongs to a life well thumbed with familiarity and repetition, and no longer mine; and in any case, my once-happy ending has proved to be only another beginning, a prelude to a tale dimmer, grittier, far more ambiguous, and far less suitable for children than the story I believed mine when I was young.
Silent, I stand at the crossroads, twisting and untwisting the hem of my nondescript cloak.
The old hag’s eyes are shrewd and flinty, but when she speaks, her tone is a study in indifference. “Madam, I am a busy woman, and there are few things more odious to me than my time being wasted.” She shakes her wrist out of her sleeve, glances at it. “As a matter of fact, I have another client, a spurned miller’s wife, coming shortly, so I must proceed to my office without delay if we are all finished here. I suggest you make haste to return to your husband before your absence is noticed and he grows incensed. Wives must be obedient. Good night to you, madam.”
The first drops of rain splash on my shoe, on my cheek. Turning her back upon me, the witch starts to gather her pungent satchels and gruesome bundles, sort them with fastidious efficiency, and pack them away in the crevices and furrows of her robe. In mere minutes, I see, the crossroads will cease to be the hallowed place howling with four-cornered winds and pregnant with the workings of destinies, and revert once again to a barren stretch of stunted land where a few gray brambles struggle in the desolate dust and one potholed dirt road runs across another, both leading from nowhere to nowhere.
I hear someone ask: “What do you want?”
And it is my voice, it is I who have spoken.
Instantly, the witch swings back upon me, her eyes alive with glee, her rags swirling, her knees popping, her mad hair snaking, the crossroads crackling with restored magic.
“What do I want, what do I want,” she croons as she dances around me. I wait, imprisoned by the chilly drizzle that falls harder and harder. “The spell you’ve asked for, it’s ancient, it’s dark, and it doesn’t come cheap, not for the likes of you. What I want is a royal-sized payment. Let me see, let me see here. Your youth is gone, your voice won’t be missed by anyone, and your firstborn is only months away from a woman’s curse, more bother than it’s worth . . .” She stops and laughs, a sharp, baleful laugh like the crack of a whip. “Ah, I know just the thing.”
“My soul,” I whisper, with doomed certainty.
“Not your soul, silly girl, of what earthly use would your soul be to me? Brimstone and damnation are ever men’s unsubtle threats and crude bargains, and they’re welcome to them. What I want is your life’s spark.”
I stare at her through the rain that has become a thousand daggers of cold stabbing me over and over.
“Your spark,” she repeats with impatience. “Your warmth. Your passion. You know. You’ll get your wish, you’ll go back to your life, and you’ll go on, sure as rain, but from now on, everything around you will seem deadly dull. Flat, like. The cheer of singing, the taste of good food, the touch of a lover—you can have them all you want, but they’ll be like pages from a book in a tongue you don’t speak, like a tedious aunt droning on and on about her dressmaker’s cousin’s ailments. Like that children’s counting rhyme: A garden with no flowers, a summer with no sun, a forest with no birdies . . . Well, you know how it goes. I want your joy. Ah, I see by the look on your pretty doll face that you understand. So, what say you, my pet chicken? Yes or no?”
No, I want to scream back. No, no, no! But I never scream at anyone, I do what people tell me, I bend to everyone’s will, an obliging sort of woman, am I not—and just as I think that, the hate in my heart unfurls its great burning wings, and smashes and smashes anew against my rib cage until I cannot breathe, until I cannot think, and the wolf winds are howling, and the storm is raging around us, and the world is black and red, black of my fear, red of my anger—and “Yes,” I say. “Yes. Take it all, take it now.”
I close my eyes.
“That’s right, keep them closed, my precious, it’ll all be over in a moment,” the witch sings out. “And it won’t hurt a bit, or perhaps it will, but only a little, only a stab, one teensy-weensy little stab, a little pinch in exchange for a lifetime of no pain at all, not such a bad bargain—”
I have never had much physical courage. I brace for the violation, my eyes screwed shut, my face dissolving, the water and the tears all running together. But the moment stretches, and stretches, and stretches, and nothing is happening. The rain has become a deluge; all is dark, wet misery. The witch is hemming and mumbling, fussing about me. I am suddenly conscious of my satin slippers swiftly growing soaked through; my toes are quite frozen, and a sneeze is creeping upon me.
“Well, now,” the witch mutters, and she is close, so close I can smell the stench of her breath. “This is peculiar. Very peculiar.”
I sneeze and, gingerly, open my eyes. Her nose almost pressed against mine, she is squinting at me through the downpour, which is starting to abate, ever so slightly. I wait, hardly daring to breathe.
She makes a noise in her throat and moves her face away.
“How big is that sapphire of yours, anyway?” she asks gruffly.
Without a word, I plunge my hand into the glacial water flooding the pouch, and fish for the brooch, and show it to her; and the stone is quite big indeed, the size of a phoenix’s egg. She considers it briefly before her spider fingers pounce upon it, and it vanishes somewhere in the soggy crannies of her robe.
“And that locket with rubies. One fine-looking man, your husband.”
She explains nothing, and I know better than to ask questions, for it is unwise to pry into the caprices and causalities of magic, the give-and-take of fate. I will never know what has just happened, why I have been spared. Feeling limp with relief, I hand her the locket. She scratches at its inside with a crusty nail to dislodge the enameled oval of the portrait, drops the picture absently into the potion, and pockets the locket itself.
The rain has dwindled to a trickle.
“And the trinket on your finger,” she says now.
I gasp. The diamond has been in my husband’s family for many a generation, has served as a boon in many a royal quest. Shell-encrusted sea monsters have swallowed it, only for its dazzle to be revealed beneath a curlicue of parsley in the mouth of a garnished bream on some king’s dinner platter; prophetic golden-eyed eagles have flown off with it, so that some bewildered maiden with bleeding feet could climb a glass pinnacle to retrieve it from a hungry fledgling’s beak and later, limping still, exchange its hard brilliance for her pocket-sized happy ending; sorcerers with indecipherable accents have sworn dreadful oaths on its flawless facets. He will surely notice its absence, and he will be furious, I think in an agony of indecision—and then remember that, once I am done here, he will never be furious with anyone, not ever again.