Stories: All-New Tales

Sarah winced, as if she had taken a blow. Then she turned on her heel and walked out of the room.

Abe sank onto the floor, his fingers speared through his hair. After a half hour, he stood up and walked down the hall to their bedroom. He found Sarah lying on her side, staring at the sun as it shamefully scuttled off the horizon. Abe lay down on the bed, curling his body around hers. “I lost her,” he whispered. “Please don’t tell me I’ve lost you.”

Sarah turned to him, and rested her palm on his cheek. She kissed him, all the words she could not say. They began to comfort each other—a touch here, a brush of lips there, a kindness. But when their clothes had dissolved into pools on the floor, when Abe braced himself over his wife and took hold of her body and tried to settle her curves against his canyons, they did not come together seamlessly, the way they used to. They were off, just enough to make it uncomfortable; just enough for her to say, Let me try this and for him to say, Maybe this way.

Afterward, when Sarah had fallen asleep, Abe sat up and stared down at the end of the bed, at his wife’s feet hanging long and white over its edge.

THE NEXT MORNING, ABE and Sarah lay in the dark. “Maybe I need to be alone for a while,” Sarah said, although it wasn’t what she’d hoped to say.

“Maybe you do,” Abe replied, although it was the opposite of what he meant. It was as if, in this new world, where the impossible had actually happened, nothing fit anymore: not language, not reason, not even the two of them.

When Sarah got out of bed, she took the sheet with her—a modesty she hadn’t needed for fifteen years of marriage. It prevented Abe from seeing what he would have noticed, in an instant: that the growth Sarah had experienced was exactly the same amount Abe himself had diminished; and that, if you could measure anything as insubstantial as that, it would have been exactly the same size and scope as the daughter they’d lost.

SARAH REACHED THE SUITCASE, even though it was stored in the top rafters of the attic. Abe watched her pack. At the door, they made promises they both knew they would not keep. “I’ll call,” Sarah said, and Abe nodded. “Be well,” he answered.

She was going to stay with her mother—something that, in all the years of their marriage, Abe never would have imagined coming to pass; and yet he considered this a positive sign. If Sarah was choosing Felicity, in spite of their rocky relationship, maybe there was hope for all children to return to their parents, regardless of how impossible the journey seemed to be.

He had to pull a chair to the window, because he was no longer tall enough to see over its sill. He stood on the cushion and watched her put her suitcase into the car. She looked enormous to him, a giantess—and he considered that this is what motherhood does to a woman: make her larger than life. He waited until he could not see her car anymore, and then he climbed down from the chair.

He could not work anymore; he was too short to reach the counter. He could not drive anywhere, the pedals were too far from his feet. There was nothing for Abe to do, so he wandered through the house, even emptier than it had been. He found himself, of course, in his daughter’s room. Here, he spent hours: drawing with her art kit; playing with her pretend food and cash register; sifting through the drawers of her clothing and playing a game with himself: can you remember the last time she wore this? He put on a Radio Disney CD and forced himself to listen to the whole of it. He lined up her stuffed animals, like witnesses.

Then he crawled into her dollhouse, one he’d built for her last Christmas. He closed the door behind himself. He glanced around at the carefully pasted wallpaper, the rich red velvet love seat, the kitchen sink. He climbed the stairs to the bedroom, where he could stare out the window to his heart’s content. The view, it was perfect.

GOBLIN LAKE

Michael Swanwick

IN 1646, SHORTLY BEFORE THE END of the Thirty Years’ War, a patrol of Hessian cavalrymen, fleeing the aftermath of a disastrous battle to the north wherein a botched flanking maneuver had in an hour turned certain victory to abject rout, made camp at the foot of what a local peasant they had captured and forced to serve as a guide assured them was one of the highest mountains in the Spessart region of Germany. Among their number was a young officer named Johann von Grimmelshausen, a firebrand and habitual liar who was known to his comrades as Jurgen, which in English translates as Jack.

As the front lines were distant and the countryside unwary, the patrol had picked up a great deal of food and several casks of Rhine wine on their way. So that night they ate and drank well. When the food was done, they called upon their guide to tell them of the countryside in which they found themselves. He, having slowly come to the opinion that they did not intend to kill him when they were done with his services (and, possibly, having plans of lulling them with his servility and then slipping away under cover of darkness when they were all asleep), was only too happy to oblige them.

“Directly below us, not a quarter of a mile’s distance away, is the Mummelsee”—in the local dialect the name meant Goblin Lake—“which is bottomless, and which has the peculiar property that it changes whatever is thrown into it into something else. So that, for example, if any man were to tie up a number of pebbles in a kerchief and let it down into the water on a string, when he pulled it up the pebbles would have turned into peas or rubies or the eggs of vipers. Furthermore, if there were an odd number of pebbles, the number of whatever they became should invariably be even, but if they were even they would come out odd.”

“That would be a very pretty way of making a living,” Jack observed. “Sitting by the banks of a lake, turning pebbles into rubies.”

“What they become is not predictable,” the peasant cautioned. “You could not rely on them turning to gemstones.”

“Even if they did so only one time in a hundred…Well, I have spent many a day fishing with less to show for it.”

By now, several of the cavalry men were leaning forward, listening intently. Even those who stared loftily way into the distance, as if they did not care, refrained from speaking lest they miss something profitable. So, seeing too late that he had excited their avarice, the peasant quickly said, “But it is a very dangerous place! This was the very lake which Luther said was cursed and that if you threw a stone into it a terrible storm immediately blows up, with hail and lightning and great winds, for there are devils chained up in its depths.”

“No, that was in Poltersberg,” Jack said negligently.