My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales

SHELLEY JACKSON. The Swan Brothers

YOU ARE WALKING DOWN A FAMILIAR STREET AT DUSK. MEAT IS cooking. In the shadows down the block, you see a cardboard box, flaps open. The street is deserted; you will either be the first to look inside the box, or it has already been plundered; either way, there’s no reason to hurry, but you do. There is a limited variety of things left in boxes in your neighborhood: shoes gone the shape of feet, dusty videos, mugs with ceramic frogs amusingly glued inside them. You are hoping for books, and that’s what you find. Not many — others have preceded you — but you stoop anyway and poke through the pile, pushing aside The Big Book of Birds and What to Expect When You’re Expecting.

You are drawn to the shape, the color, the design of the book before you have made out the title. It is a durable old Dover paperback, its thick cover leathery with use and still bright red, except for a pink band along the top where a shorter neighboring book allowed sunlight to hit it. It is a small, fat, leather-bound book with marbled edges, its morocco binding glove-soft and chipped at the spine. It is a vintage pocket paperback with a keyhole on the spine, a map on the back, and a still life on the front: a quill pen, a bottle of ink, and a spindle.

When you flip through the book, more to feel the thick pages ruffle smoothly across your thumb, like an old deck of cards, than to check the contents, you find, pressed between two pages, a feather. It is white, it is black with an iridescent sheen, it is pigeon-gray, in any case you pin it to the left-hand page with your thumb as you begin reading, walking on. You like to start books in the middle. Maybe you like the challenge of trying to figure out what’s going on. Maybe you just like doing things differently. In any case, you are soon engrossed, though the page waxes and wanes as you pass under the streetlights, and it is sometimes hard to make out the words.

It’s a good thing you read so much when you were a child, or you wouldn’t know what to think — you read — when you turn the corner on the greasy little street — a pigeon startles up, leaving a lone feather stuck to the asphalt — and see the dusty storefront into which the woman, her hands, wrists, and forearms so swollen that she appears to be wearing down opera gloves, is dragging a stuffed, heavy-duty lawn-and-leaf bag with numerous rents out of which what must be nettles are protruding. But since you have read every single one of Andrew Lang’s color-coded Fairy Books, even the ugly olive-green one, you recognize at once that she is a daughter and, more important, a sister, who is involved in the long, difficult, and not always rewarding work of saving her brothers from — you duck reflexively at a whirring vortex in the air: that pigeon again.

The woman, who has held the door open with her rump while she edged the bag inside, turns into the brightly lit interior and lets the door slam shut. It doesn’t matter, you can watch through the big shop window, despite the posters pasted all over it. Because you’ve read a lot of stories, you’re not surprised when she seats herself at a spinning wheel, behind which a row of brown, bristly little shirts hang from hooks screwed into the wall.

Because you’ve also lived — you’ve been living and reading for years, sometimes both at once — you are not surprised that people often repeat their most unpleasant experiences. It’s probably for the same reason we tell the same stories over and over, with minor variations—“The Seven Ravens,” “The Seven Doves,” “The Twelve Ducks,” “The Six Swans.” It is cozy to have one’s expectations met, though there is also, always, the possibility — is this is a happy thought or a sad one? — that things will turn out differently, this time.

THE PERFORMANCE ARTIST REMEMBERS

A young woman, who must be rather good at the domestic arts, to spin thread out of nettles, to weave cloth from that thread, to sew shirts from that cloth — or who will certainly, in six years, become good at them — is sitting in a room made of stone, her tongue a stone. She has been silent for two years, three months, four days. The sun is slanting through an unglazed hole in the thick wall, warming her knee, lighting up one leg of the spinning wheel and the rim of the basket of nettles. A bug buzzes up from them and whacks the rim of the basket, crawls along it, crawls all the way around it.

She has wicked thoughts. For instance:

Is self-sacrifice always a virtue?

If their positions were reversed, would her brothers do the same for her?

Would she want them to?

What is it like to fly?

Here’s how she imagines it: in a room just like this one, a basket of nettles at her knee, she is spinning. The stool knocks on the uneven floor as she foots the treadle. The thread is passing through her fingers, burning. Her skin prickles, comes out in bumps, more blisters no doubt, but on her chest, her ass, her back, her shoulders — that at least is new. Then she goes hot all over with tiny bursting pains, as if the blisters have broken all at once. Every pore is the head of a needle through which a thread is passing, or cloth through which a needle is passing; she is like a sun in an old painting, sending zips of light in every direction. Only it’s quills now crowding through her skin. They are pinkish gray, tightly curled and wet from her insides, but in the air they unfurl and dry to white until she is thatched all over with feathers, and at the same time her legs are tightening, hardening, shrinking. She walks out of the neck of her suddenly gigantic gown. A great force is pulling on her fingers, stretching them; feathers as strong as fingers shoot out of her wrists and the backs of her hands. She presses her lips together to keep herself from crying out and her whole face pouts and tightens. And then she cries out after all and, amazed by the sound she makes, spreads her wings and hurls herself through the window into the rushing sky.

She spins faster, to punish herself for her thoughts. The wheel thumps. The spindle twirls. Nettles race through her fingers. The pain is extraordinary. Her hands are no longer hands, but flames, or stars, or voices singing.

THE PERFORMANCE ARTIST DREAMS

The performance artist has two kinds of dreams about flying. In one, she is swimming in air, doing a strenuous frog kick just to stay a few feet out of reach of the murderer who is calmly waiting for her to tire. In the other, after a running start, she simply lifts her feet and swoops up and away. She rises effortlessly, the sky is hers; suddenly, though, she is frightened, it seems that she is not flying but falling upward, she has gone too far, she may never return to earth, or to the murderer far below, who is now the only one who remembers her, but who has already stopped looking up at the shrinking speck in the sky, and is trudging home with the spade over her shoulder, thinking about dinner.

THE PERFORMANCE ARTIST WORKS

In a storefront gallery in a big city, a performance artist sits at a spinning wheel, spinning nettles into thread, sits at a loom, weaving thread into cloth for little shirts. She has made five and a half shirts. This has taken her five and a half years. In the beginning she had a lot of visitors. You wouldn’t believe how fabulous they looked or how loudly they commented on her spinning wheel, her loom, her nettles, her blisters, and her patience. But no matter what they said, she did not speak or smile. The visitors commented on that, too, saying, smiling, that it would be harder for them not to speak or smile for six years than to spin thread out of nettles, weave that thread into cloth, make that cloth into shirts. That was probably true, thought the performance artist, severing a thread with her teeth.

Attendance fell off. The gallery owners, who had interests in Buenos Aires, Barcelona, Hong Kong, St. Petersburg, Istanbul, went on a long business trip. Her dealer stopped calling. The windows grew streaked and dusty. A row of posters advertising a burlesque show was pasted up — a woman dancing, naked as a prawn, within a storm of her own extraordinarily long, blond hair. Then flyers, their fringes of phone numbers fluttering: LOST RING, LOST DOG, LOST CHILD.

Occasionally a woman with silver hands comes, bringing pears.

The performance artist watches the sun move across the dusty glass while her hands twist and pluck. Once in a while, a winged shadow intersects the light.

HER YOUNGEST BROTHER’S LOVER

He was sitting on the edge of my bed. I was on my knees in front of him, face in his lap, and suddenly there was this. wind.

Later I found feathers in my sheets, in my shoes. A small one floating, curved and lovely, in my water glass.

He has a huge, bulging forehead, like Edgar Allan Poe, and thin lips. Little round eyes, one raised shoulder. So no, he isn’t handsome. I had him down as a one-night stand, but I couldn’t stop thinking about it. The wing, beating. Flying.

Yes, every time he comes.

HER PARENTS

“My sons were the flighty ones. My daughter was always super down-to-earth,” says the father. “It was a surprise when she told us she wanted to be an artist. We tried to steer her toward something more practical. My wife suggested she take Home Ec. That’s where she learned to sew, so we feel that we’ve contributed. Indirectly.”

HER SILENCE

Words rise in her throat like gas. She swallows them back.

HER HANDS

look like gloves, or fake hands inside of which her real hands are hidden.

HER EXPERIENCE OF TIME

Read this sentence; repeat for six years.

THE OPENING

One day, someone turns up with a bucket of soapy water, a razor blade, and a squeegee, and scrapes the years off the window. A janitor climbs a ladder and replaces a bulb. The floor is washed, a folding table is covered with a paper cloth and plastic cups, and then the gallery owners sweep in with great tans and lots of friends and the gallery is full again. There are five nettle shirts hung on the wall, dry and spiky and brown. They look dangerous, though also a little sad. A sixth shirt, laid out on the table, is finished except for the left sleeve.

The performance artist, at the loom, where the material for the last sleeve is slowly growing, doesn’t look up.

A reporter leans over her with his pen poised over a notebook. “Tsk. Not until eight o’clock!” says the dealer, drawing him away.

When the minute hand snaps to twelve, an uncertain cheer goes up. It’s eight, but the performance artist hasn’t quite finished the last sleeve. But she gets right up. Her smile looks a little odd, but then, she hasn’t smiled for six years.

There’s a man looking at an empty hook on the wall. She hangs the last shirt there. “I thought it was you.”

“Of course it’s me.”

“I’m not going to ask where the others are.” She prods with a fingernail at a blister pillowing the tip of her baby finger. It looks like a drop of clear water.

“At happy hour, probably. Stop picking.” He puts his wing around her. “What do you expect? They have their happy ending.”

AFTERWARD

Your brothers are billing and cooing around you, nibbling their arms and puffing up their chests. One wing shudders, is stilled by a jeweled hand. The smell of burning meat hangs in the air; it is the king’s mother, your mother-in-law, cooked like a goose. No one is sorry, not even the king, so smile. Do you remember how to smile?

THE OPENING, CONTINUED

“Fabulous,” said a member of the Stepsisters’ Collective, beetles spilling from her mouth. “I love it!”

The performance artist catches sight of her reflection in the window. She should not have put on lipstick, she can never remember that she is wearing it. It looks as though she has been eating something bloody.

No, it is her dealer whose lipstick is smeared, and who is now weaving purposefully through the crowd, one hand clenched in the sleeve of the critic, her smile hard.

No, what happened is that her dealer kissed her; possibly she intended a European peck on the cheek, and it was the performance artist’s clumsiness that caused their mouths to meet. Or possibly that was the dealer’s intention in the first place, since her mouth clung longer than necessary. But was that because she actually desired the performance artist, or because she wanted others to think they were sleeping together? And if the latter, was that to raise herself up, or to lower the performance artist, or both, or to make the art critic jealous so that he attached himself more firmly to the performance artist — or perhaps to the dealer herself — or to drive him away, so that if the dealer could not have him, neither could the performance artist?

Maybe it is not lipstick at all but sweet-and-sour sauce from the six little drumsticks that she served herself from a waiter who looked like her father, the bones of which are still folded in her napkin; she was always an enthusiastic eater.

Or, she has been eating something bloody.

ALSO ON DISPLAY

A teacup full of sand.

Three poppies.

A ball of yarn.

MAGIC

The ball of yarn rolls by itself, leading the way. All you have to do is hold on to the end.

FACT

A story is sometimes called a “yarn.”

THE OPENING, CONTINUED

She pushes through the crowd and closes herself in the bathroom, swiping at the light switch, and hissing as she catches, as well, the sharp tip of a nail. She pops her pinkie in her mouth, smearing blood on her lips.

The bathroom doubles as a storeroom; there are six small narrow wooden beds jumbled or stacked in the corner or spaced neatly along the wall. They are the perfect size for her brothers, who, coincidentally, have just flown through the window, dropped their feathers in six neat heaps, and now crowd around her, goose-pimpled but human, congratulating her on her big night. But they can’t stay, her brothers tell her, they will only retain human form for fifteen minutes, an hour, a night, and then the robbers whose den this is will return, and she, too, should leave at once.

How convenient that there were precisely six robbers, she thought. And such small ones!

I’m going, I’m going, she says. But do you have a Band-Aid?

THE YOUNGEST BROTHER’S LOVER

Once I caught him plucking it. The tip was already bare — a sorry raw red-spotted naked prong sticking out of a nest of feathers. I went down on it, which I think confused him more than it excited him. Me, too, really. Afterward I said, “Don’t you ever do that again. I want you exactly the way you are.” Which surprised me, because all I’ve ever thought about my whole life was turning into something else. That’s something we have in common.

THE PERFORMANCE ARTIST DREAMS

Nettles sprout from her shoulder blades, sheathing her arms.

She awakes, a strange taste in her mouth. Where are her brothers — that is, her children? Has she eaten them? Have they flown away? Did she ever even have children?

THE OPENING, CONTINUED

Looking for gauze, she opens the small supply cabinet beside the sink. Reek of pine disinfectant, and she is in the forest. She can make out the path only by the slight tug of the yarn running drily through her fingers, that and the dark shapes of the recycling bins pulled out to the curbs for the Friday night pick-up. A shadow heaves up before her; her shoulder dashes into someone else’s and a hand squeezes her arm apologetically. The blackout has made everyone temporarily friendlier, and she wonders whether she shouldn’t just sit down on a stoop, or a stump, and wait for someone to sit next to her.

Now headlights slide over the ball of yarn, which is pausing, turning, continuing on its way. The yarn tugs at her hand and she keeps going, or someone does. Maybe it is her father, coming to see her! But no, it is a woman, so she hangs back. Her hands clamped on the cold stone, wishing her brothers weren’t so trusting. Her chest is pressed against the parapet, which is so high she can barely see over it, and so cold it stifles her breath. Her youngest brother bends to scoop up the traitorous ball of yarn and the visitor throws something over him — a little white changing shape like a ghost: a shirt — and something happens. Then it happens again, and again, and again, and again, and again. Six times, dear reader.

“The King has six sons,” being what the servants must have said. Not thinking to mention that he also had a daughter.

Let’s be generous, perhaps the servants loved her best, and sought to keep her secret.

Let’s be reasonable, how could they have known that when her six brothers ran forward, she would stay back?

And why did she stay back?

Perhaps she is a reader too, and knows that women are dangerous, especially when they are stepmothers, especially when they are witches or the daughters of witches, especially when they are Queens.

Perhaps the servants did mention her, and the Queen did not choose to sew her a shirt. Wishing to give the boys a fair chance, perhaps. Knowing that daughters can do things that sons can’t, like spin nettles into thread, and keep their mouths shut. Daughters do their duty.

THINGS YOU LEARN FROM READING

Women are trouble — if it isn’t an evil wife, it’s an evil stepmother. Or mother-in-law. Mothers are usually all right, unless they’re witches — watch out for witches. And their daughters.

You might be all right with kings, princes, and fathers, unless, as is usually the case, they’re under the influence of someone else, usually a woman. Men are weak. Sometimes they rescue you, but they always have help — from ants or birds or women. Sometimes you rescue them. This is kind of sweet.

You can trust animals. Sometimes they turn into people, but don’t hold that against them.

Children had better watch out.

THE OPENING, CONTINUED

“I play it back over and over,” said the woman with silver hands. “Every damn time it’s the same. I just put my hands on a stump”—laying them with a clunk on the table—“and say, ‘Yes, father’. That reminds me.” She has been going out with a man with chicken feet. He crams them into motorcycle boots and looks normal until they take off their clothes.

“Is that a problem for your sex life?” the performance artist asks.

“No,” says the woman with silver hands, “I like his feet. I mean, my hands seem to like them, I can feel it.”

“I want to introduce you to my brother,” said the performance artist. “I mean he’s gay but you’d never know.”

The woman with silver hands wasn’t listening. “He sleeps with an axe beside the bed — the window to the fire escape doesn’t lock, he says, but I think he’s tempting me to cut his feet off. Want a pear?”

The performance artist likes the lips of the woman with silver hands — a woman who could eat a pear off a tree with her stumps tied behind her back. She imagines balancing on a bed in boxers and socks, holding a pear by the stem, with the woman with silver hands on her knees before her. Later the woman with silver hands could climb a tree and throw down first her earrings, then her belt, then her boots, then her underpants, until she was naked as a pear.

“Thanks,” says the performance artist, and takes a sweet, juicy bite, and without thinking about it, wipes her mouth with the back of her hand. Now she will have to go fix her lipstick.

WEAVING

Reading, your gaze is moving from left to right, left to right, left to right, like a shuttle across a loom. The page is a figured cloth, swan black, swan white.

ETYMOLOGY

L. texere, to weave; from which we derive textile, and text.

CARELESSNESS

The performance artist has tea at a sidewalk café with the woman with silver hands. Her own healing hands are silvery with scar tissue. “Now I can ask,” she says, but doesn’t. She is watching a pigeon strut and bob, his neck fat with desire. The harried-looking female pecks at a pebble, then suddenly flaps away. The performance artist smiles, inexpertly, and turns back to her friend. “To lose one hand might be regarded as a misfortune,” she says; “to lose both looks like carelessness. I’m quoting. Ish.”

“I was trying to jump a freight train with some friends, a girl I met in the shelter, an older guy who said you could get all the way to Reno that way and that it was cool. They made it, I didn’t.” She stirred her tea with a silver finger.

“Really?”

“No, my father cut them off with an axe. Otherwise, he said, the devil would wrap his tail around his, my father’s, neck and drag him away.”

“Sucks for you.”

“Yep. Though. ” They look at her hands.

THE OPENING, CONTINUED

She looks in the mirror and says, Oh for fuck’s sake, and starts wiping her mouth with mean strokes. She has smeared her lipstick again; she has even managed to get some on her chin.

Or, she has just had oral sex on a hot afternoon with the woman with silver hands, who has previously pulled out her ghastly tampon by the string and slung it whooping out the window (later they would peer out and see it lying on top of the neighbor’s air conditioner, like a dead mouse, and burst out laughing), and has slid up for a kiss that tasted like iron and salt, and caught sight of herself in the shards of mirror glued to the wall, a red halo around her mouth.

Or, she has eaten her own children. The children she made with the art critic. But who disappeared over the course of the six years she spent making shirts out of nettles. Little shirts that would no doubt fit the children she also made. She had suspected her dealer, whose jealousy — of her own artists! — was well-known. But she could not voice her suspicions, since she was not speaking at the time.

Across the room, she sees her dealer speaking to the art critic. He is bent forward to hear her in the noisy room, his head almost touching her breasts, which are offered up in a fashion not so much sexual as maternal.

Someone is talking about a glass mountain that has sprung up in midtown, or maybe it’s just a new building by that architect, the one who did that thing in Barcelona. For some reason she is suddenly sure that that is where her children, that is, her brothers, no, her children, have gone.

The art critic has some difficulty with one of the miniature pork chops that are circulating on platters, and the dealer wipes his mouth for him in a fashion not so much maternal as sexual, though he is certainly at least half her age.

The art critic has a big head and longish, floppy, wavy hair like a cellist. He catches her eye from across the room and raises his plastic cup to her, sloshing a little sparkling water over his wrist. The light shines in his brown hair as if something golden were nestled there.

The performance artist nods, distracted. The children: where can they be hiding this time? Under the paper skirts of the table with its ranks of plastic cups? She can feel her dealer watching her. There is a smell of burning meat in the air — the mini sausages, maybe.

“Oh, no, here he comes,” said the woman with silver hands. “Don’t do it. You’ll just live happily ever after. Again.”

THE YOUNGEST BROTHER’S LOVER

He turns his back to me in bed and I tuck my hand under his wing. I can feel him thinking, thinking, thinking; then he softens to sleep.

I know what he thinks about, I was someone else once, too. I hopped it when she kissed me, scared of such a pink and hearty love. I whose blood had not yet warmed, between whose fingers translucent webs still stretched. Ugly with gravity, I lugged myself back to the pond — weak jump, volcanic splash. Quelle surprise! The water barely covered my head.

Now I’m thick and pink myself and sometimes pull a sweater on. I have hair on my balls. Hell, I have balls. But I still blush green, and I knew him when I met him. Saw, in my mind, red legs coming down from a feathered sky. Neck coming down, pearls of air in the feathers. Robber’s mask over bulging, vulnerable eyes. We had shared that cold world. I did not hold it against him that he once might have nibbled me up with the duckweed. If anything it thrilled me. But.

Sliding down the long curve of his throat, or lying next to him on a double futon: both are, I guess, love, but I choose this.

MOTHERHOOD, BROTHERHOOD

Time goes by. The children don’t turn up. Did she ever have children? The performance artist considers adoption. She reads from the information packet: “Fees may be significantly lower for foolish and lazy youngest sons, children thumb-sized and smaller, those with the heads of hedgehogs or the ears of donkeys. Many so-called special needs, given proper care, will not significantly impact the future health and happiness of your child.” She schedules a home study. “So they can determine whether I am likely to eat my children, I guess. When it should be obvious that I am responsible to a fault. But I do have doubts. My brothers, for example: I lost them. Who was it who said, ‘to lose one brother may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose six looks like carelessness’?”

“You were how old?” said the woman with silver hands. “What kind of father leaves seven children alone in the woods? For that matter, what kind of father marries a woman he can’t trust with his children?”

What kind of father cuts off his daughter’s hands, thinks the performance artist.

“Anyway, you got them back,” said the woman with silver hands. “How’s your brother?”

“He and his boyfriend have bought a house in the Berkshires. Well, a cabin, really. You’d like it, it stands on a giant chicken foot. Hops around the yard. In winter they’re going to ‘tool down to Florida’ in it. They’ve asked me if I want to come along, but I don’t know.”

THE PERFORMANCE ARTIST DAYDREAMS

A group of swans — six cobs and one pen — shift their weight uneasily as a woman walks toward them, carrying six little shirts.

LIVE POULTRY

The performance artist goes to a live poultry store in south Brooklyn. There are hand-painted Arabic letters on the yellow sign, and a proud white cock with one red foot raised. Inside are a lot of Hasidic men and Mexicans, or maybe Guatemalans or Colombians, who knows, and cages stacked to the ceiling, with dirty feathers sticking out of them. She bends and peels up a feather from the sticky floor.

She buys six swans, no, geese, the live poultry store does not sell swans, and barricades them into the backseat with cardboard boxes. They honk out the windows as she drives over the bridge, possibly smelling water, and draw startled looks from passing drivers. In the gallery, they walk around importantly, looking like art critics and nibbling at electrical cords. The next morning, the gallery reports the theft of artworks valued at thirty thousand dollars.

NEWS

Six small robbers are spotted on a department store security video, pulling on identical shirts and turning this way and that in front of the mirror, then dropping the shirts on the floor.

Six small robbers are caught on video attempting to enter the glass building by that architect, the one who did that thing in Sidney. They are frightened away by a night watchman.

Six small robbers are found sleeping in children’s beds in the Red Hook IKEA. Locked in a room to await the arrival of a law-enforcement officer, they apparently escape through a third-floor window. Goose dung is discovered on the windowsill.

ABOUT TIME

“Isn’t it about time you came out with something new?” said the art critic. “Not that it’s any of—”

“No, it isn’t.”

When they met, she wasn’t speaking. They went for walks in the dark; sometimes she climbed a tree, and when he, growing impatient of the game, begged her to come down to bed, she would throw down her shoes, her stockings, her dress, aiming at the red light of his cigarette (several of her favorite dresses still had tiny round holes in them); she would unhook her bra and pull it out through her sleeve and throw that down, until she stood barefoot on a branch in nothing but her slip, looking down at the darkness where he stood.

“Marry me,” he would say, to the pale shape roosting in the tree.

“Of course he knew I couldn’t answer,” she told the woman with silver hands.

Now that she is speaking, their relationship has deteriorated.

“It’s about time you came out with something new, don’t you think?” said the art dealer. “If you’re ready.”

“I think the art critic is sleeping with my dealer,” said the performance artist to her friend.

“Ew,” said the woman with silver hands.

FEATHERS NEEDED

The performance artist puts an ad on Craigslist. Feathers needed, swans preferred.

FACTS

The best quill pens were cut from swan feathers.

A female swan is called a “pen.”

Right-handed writers favored feathers from the tip of the left wing, which curved outward, away from the line of sight.

THE PERFORMANCE ARTIST WORKS (AGAIN)

In a storefront gallery in a big city, a performance artist sits at a spinning wheel, spinning feathers into thread, sits at a loom, weaving thread into cloth for little shirts. Down drifts around her, collecting in loose, dusty rolls on the floor. Her nose is running; she has developed an allergy.

THE PERFORMANCE ARTIST DREAMS

The feathers, too, sting her fingers.

THE PERFORMANCE ARTIST’S REVIEWS

“Lacks the critical edge of her best work”. “Has the performance artist lost her sting?”. “The aspirational tone is a welcome shift from the claustrophobia and bitterness of her ‘Nettled’ show, but the feather shirts, while frankly gorgeous, resolve the vexed issue of female domestic servitude perhaps too easily in resorting to the hackneyed metaphor of flight”. “In repeating with variations her own earlier work, is the performance artist cannily engaging the current trend of reenactment, or has she just run out of ideas?”. “Though the memory of pain lingers in the form of the scars that silver the artist’s hands, the element of physical suffering has been removed from this new, softer work, and there is a corresponding loss of intensity”. “The trick has grown old. One wonders whether, after yet another six years of silence, anyone will be left who cares.”

THE OPENING, CONTINUED

The room is hot, the air is thick. It stings her throat like nettles. It tickles her throat like feathers. Either way she can’t breathe. No, it’s not the air, it’s a length of yarn twining round her neck; the children have appeared, the children have been found, wandering in the forest, shut up in yet another castle, it’s joyous news, and they’re running around their mother, the performance artist, with a ball of yarn they’ve found somewhere, and they don’t realize, nobody realizes, how tight the loops have become. Unless it’s her brothers, who have come after all, who are grateful after all, all six of them, pulled away from their barbecues, their robbers’ dens, their high-stakes online poker games, their castles, their princesses, led of course by the youngest, the one with the disability, and as her knees give way they are severing the yarn with their beaks, fanning her with huge wings, lifting her up with their red, red feet — they’re weaving a net, they too know how to weave, a net of nettles, they’ve taken the sides in their beaks and they’re lifting her on it, beating their great wings, already she is high above the city, she sees the glass mountain rising before her—

Or it is the man with chicken feet helping her up, he’s kicked off his boots to free his feet, he’s more agile like that, and the woman with silver hands is fanning her, with one of her own shirts. What has happened? She must have slipped on the glass mountain and fallen. But luckily she still has the chicken bones folded into her napkin, and now she plants one in a crack in the glass, tests to see if it will support her weight, and plants another a little higher. Up she goes! Higher and higher into the rushing sky, her gaze steady, her knees only trembling a little. She is nearing the top. One more step and she will be able to reach — but the napkin is empty. She cuts off — with what? Bites off — her little finger. Stepping on her finger, she reaches the top.

There is the great arched door. It is locked, of course, but she has been given a chicken bone to use as a key. She carefully unfolds the stained napkin. There is nothing inside!

Now six robbers enter the art gallery. You can tell they are robbers because they wear black masks and black capes. They are small robbers — children, or dwarves. Each is exactly the same as all the others, except the sixth. There’s something bulky and white sticking out from under his cape where his left arm should be, almost sweeping the ground. Something soft and white.

They do not bother with the wallets, rings, watches, and cell phones that the guests have already thrown down in anticipation of their demands, but move straight to the wall and take down the little shirts, as calmly as people getting dressed in the morning. There is one shirt each. Naturally, the robber with the white thing under his cape — okay, it’s a wing — chooses the shirt with no left sleeve. He goes to it straightaway, as if he knew it would be there. Probably he did, probably he had cased the joint. He frees the defective shirt from its fiddly hook and falls in behind the others, who are already filing out through the door. The performance artist jerks after them, is stayed by a hand on her arm, her dealer’s. Something confusing is happening outside, a sweeping and whirling — capes and shirts and feathers. A honking call sounds. The performance artist rises to her toes. Her feather boa stirs in the breeze from the closing door.

VARIATIONS

The performance artist picks up a shirt and puts it on. She spreads her wings and falls into the sky.

The performance artist picks up a knife and cuts off her baby finger. She inserts it into the glass lock, which clicks smoothly open. Inside are her three children and her six brothers, waiting with open arms, with spread wings, with eleven arms and one wing.

The performance artist picks up a pen. (It bites her.)

The performance artist picks up a ball of yarn.

The performance artist picks up a phone and buys a ticket to Florida.

SLEEPING AND FLYING

A man sleeps, one arm flung over his lover’s chest. In the dark air over the bed, his wing beats; he is dreaming, of course, of flying. But his other arm holds on tight.

Elsewhere, a woman’s hands silvered with scar tissue flutter, too. She is also dreaming of flying. No, she is dreaming and flying, reclining in a window seat, her crooked, scarred, shining hands folded in her lap.

YET ANOTHER SHIRT

“I was never very craft-y,” says the woman with silver hands. “For two obvious reasons. But does it have to be feathers or nettles, nettles or feathers? Couldn’t you do something with the yarn?”

READING AND FLYING

A girl is sitting in a room. The sun is slanting in the window, warming her knee, lighting up the book she holds open.

You are reading while walking, she reads. You can’t see your feet. The spread pages glide over the sidewalk, mottled by leaf-shadow, by moonlight and streetlight. Over continents of shadow, continents of light. The book is a bird with white wings. You are a bird. Reading, you can fly. You are flying now.