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

TIMOTHY SCHAFFERT. The Mermaid in the Tree

DESIREE, THE CHILD BRIDE, AND HER SISTER MIRANDA HAD GONE grave robbing for a wedding gown. In the north end of the cemetery, among the palatial mausoleums with their broken windows of stained glass where the ivy crept in, was the resting place of a young woman who’d been murdered at the altar while reciting her marital vows. The decaying tombstone, among the cemetery’s most envied, was a limestone bride in despair, shoulders as slumped as a mule’s, a bouquet of lilies strewn at her feet. Though her murder, by her groom’s jealous mother, had been long in the past, everyone knew that her father had had her buried in her gown of lace and silk.

“Can you believe we’re the only ones to have ever thought of this?” Miranda said, her knuckles bloodied from shoveling dirt, as she undid the delicate whalebone buttons lining the back of the skeleton’s dress.

Desiree, however, was less inclined to be enthused, and she climbed from the hole, distracted, to light a cigarette on the flame of the lantern. She uncorked a jug, gulped down a few fingers of whiskey, and squinted at the horizon of plains burned black by old prairie fires, the setting sun leaving behind a thin ribbon of violet. His heart isn’t mine, she thought.

The two sisters snuck back to Rothgutt’s Asylum for Misspent Youth, where the girls had lived since infancy, having been arrested then for taking candy from a baby. Desiree was fifteen now, Miranda fourteen, and Desiree’s impending wedding, to take place at midnight in the all-night chapel of a seaside amusement park, excited Miranda far more than it did Desiree. The engagement burdened Desiree terrifically. As Miranda cinched Desiree into the corpse’s stiff flounces of taffeta, then teased her straw-like hair into a glam fright-wig of poof and aerosol lift, Desiree plotted out how she might best jilt her betrothed.

“It needs a heavier blast of spritz,” Miranda said, leaning back with one eye closed, surveying Desiree’s hairdo. “Cover your face with this pillow.”

As she did so, and as Miranda gave her hair a heavy fogging with the DDT pump she’d filled with her own mixture of liquor and sap, Desiree could hear, in the muffling from the pillow, the thick rise and fall of the ocean, and she knew this was the mermaid ghost beckoning her to the tree. The mermaid ghost had something important to tell her.

Desiree stood and tossed the pillow aside, and lifted the bottom of her dress just above her bare feet so she could run from the room. “Flowers,” she told Miranda, and she hurried through the halls and into the walled-in courtyard and to the unruly thicket of rosebushes that concealed loose bricks. She got her hair snagged up in thorns but managed to escape Rothgutt’s unnoticed by the young nun who manned, up in the turret, night security with an archer’s bow and a narcotizing-tipped arrow.

About a mile away, in an open pasture overrun with musk thistle and cocklebur, stood a tree perfect for lynchings — one thick branch extended, leafless and sturdy, at a height that allowed for the knots of a noose, and yet prevented anyone who dangled there from gaining purchase with their toes tippied. At the base of the tree were the bones of many accused and convicted men and women, but also the bones of the mermaid who’d hung herself there only months ago. Her body had decayed quickly, plucked apart by the carrion that found her exotic flesh a delicacy. Whenever Desiree pricked the tip of her finger on the sharp end of a rib bone of the mermaid’s skeleton, and a drop of blood bubbled up, the mermaid’s ghost would appear among the many nooses that still lined the branch.

“Speak to me,” Desiree said as the mermaid appeared again, swinging and mute — a misty apparition. Desiree wrapped her arms around the tree, its black bark tearing at the rotted lace of her dress. She pressed her cheek against it. She looked closely at the ghost and noticed, for the first time, that the mermaid’s lips moved and trembled with words.

Desiree climbed the tree and eased out onto the branch, dangling down from it, walking herself over with her hands until she was next to the mermaid. In life, the mermaid’s tongue had been cut out, but in death she could speak in a hush that sounded like the froth of a breaking wave. It was while hanging there, in her stolen wedding gown, next to the ghost, that Desiree learned the story, the truth of what had happened between the mermaid and Axel, the boy Desiree was to marry at midnight.

Much of the story Desiree already knew, having been there the night Axel found the mermaid, a girl he called Z, shortened from Zel, which he’d shortened from Rapunzel, which he’d called her first because of the wavy hair that rippled long down her back, down past the bottom of her fin.

It had been the first night of the Mermaid Parade at Mudpuddle Beach, the resort town that jingled and rang with the rickety calliopes of slug-machine parlors and where kids could buy every flavor of the razor-blade candy that was illegal in forty-six states, and where peep-show tattooed ladies unlaced their bikinis behind glass and subjected themselves to electrical shocks, and where wobble-legged rickshaws with ratty parasols clackety-clacked across the slats of the boardwalk — all the festive alliteration immortalized in that number-one hit song that Gideon Godley sang about working as a gigolo in a sailor suit in the dime-a-dance hall of the dilapidated but historic Hotel Mudpuddle (in a room of which Gideon Godley would, ironically or not, eventually croak, overdosed on angel’s tit, the deadliest of trendy drug concoctions).

Many mermaids washed up each year on the shore of Mudpuddle Beach, the ocean air too thick for most of them to breathe, slowly choking them as if they were swallowing, inch by inch, a magician’s endless rope of handkerchiefs. It would feel, at first, like just a gentle catch at the back of their throats, one they’d barely notice, as they were often transfixed by the overstimulation — strings of Christmas lights strung along the eaves of the oxygen dens, and the racket of the bands that trumpeted old favorites off-key in the gardens where people got drunk on prohibited liquors and danced dirty all night. But often before they were even spotted by a fisherman or a yacht party, before they’d even reached the sand castles abandoned on the beach, they’d breathe their last, strangled by the very air that brought the elderly and infirm to the beach for its clean, restorative properties.

And the most beautiful of the dead mermaids were collected and prepared for the Mermaid Parade. The city museum’s art restorer, in her laboratory, would delicately bleed the mermaids, hanging them from their fins above a porcelain basin. After, in a claw-foot tub, she’d pump into their collapsing veins a solution of wax and plastic. Art students would then bend the stiffening mermaids into provocative poses, manipulating the girls’ faces into expressions of rapture, and they’d pinken the trout-colored skin with a dye concocted from boiled sugar beets, syringed just beneath the flesh. The mermaids were ultimately floated in formaldehyde, in fishbowls the size of paddy wagons, which were then positioned atop carts bedecked with roses and wreaths.

The girls of Rothgutt’s were allowed to attend the Mermaid Parade on condition they peddle the bicycles that pulled the fishbowls along Seaweed Boulevard, their legs strapped together in fins of muslin and green sequins, their cheeks glittered, their false eyelashes as leggy as spiders. They wore coconut-shell bras and a magnetic bracelet that, when activated by the invisible security fence electrified around the beach, would shoot a medicated spike into the vein, temporarily paralyzing the attempted-escapee for forty-five days.

Desiree’s mermaid had red hair and green eyes and, as with all the other mermaids, she’d been denied any article of clothing. The art students had bent her fingers around a plum, one tiny bite bitten through the plum’s black skin. They’d made her look peaceful, at least, having rolled her eyes just slightly heavenward and having parted her lips as if she’d just pulled away from a kiss. Not all the dead mermaids had been so lucky — Miranda’s, for example, had been fashioned into death throes, mid-thrash and wide-eyed, as if paused in the act of drowning.

Desiree breathed against the glass of the bowl then wiped away the fog with the lace shawl she wore across her naked shoulders, polishing away smears on the glass. She named her mermaid after herself.

A whistle blasted with a frenetic tweeting, the parade captains marching about, smacking the girls with their batons, calling for order. Desiree stabbed at Miranda’s fin with a shiv of broken windowpane, tearing at the costume, allowing Miranda’s legs release for better peddling. She did the same for the other girls and, their fins trailing them like the trains of gowns, they all took their places on the bicycles and set off for the beach, jostling the mermaids in their formaldehyde swim. Seaweed Boulevard was lined with spectators, including the Sisterhood of Poseidon’s Daughters, a faction of nuns in aquamarine habits that protested the Mermaid Parade each year. The nuns pelted the girls of Rothgutt’s with a bumper crop of tomatoes they allowed to rot on the vine every late summer for this very purpose.

Not every mermaid that ever entered the atmosphere perished. One became a famous bawdy-house chanteuse, carried out onstage in a cardboard half-shell by four muscular bald men in handlebar mustaches and tight, striped swimsuits. Another became an intellectual, palled around with expatriates, and wrote, well into her eighties, feminist utopian novels. But most mermaid survivors were relegated to the carnival circuit or, worse yet, prostitution, though it was illegal to have sex with a mermaid, even without the exchange of cash; legislators considered it bestiality.

And still other mermaids were taken in by the Sisterhood of Poseidon’s Daughters, a convent so radical it was considered by some a cult. It never failed that at every Mermaid Parade at least one nun would come under arrest for disrupting the procession in some manner — taking a hatchet to a fishbowl, for example, or sticking a broomstick into the spokes of one of the Rothgutt’s girls’ bicycle tires. Some of the mermaids the nuns rescued took the vows themselves, and could often become the most combative among them. One mermaid nun once famously set fire to herself.

As Desiree peddled down the parade path, she eyeballed the crowd for her true love, Axel, for the peppermint-striped jacket and knee breeches of his school uniform, but her fake lashes were nearly too heavy for her lids to lift. Axel attended the Starkwhip Academy of Breathtakingly Exceptional Young Men, the verdant campus of which, with its miles of sports fields and agrarian experiments, its ivy-overrun cathedrals, and its lecture halls of imported stone, was just on the other side of the wall from Rothgutt’s, but might as well have been across the ocean. Desiree had met Axel on the beach following the Mermaid Parade of the summer before, collecting shells as the boys of Starkwhip Academy skinny-dipped and frolicked under the overprotective eyes of the professors shading themselves with umbrellas and pretending to read relevant texts.

The boys’ parents paid such exorbitant tuition to keep their sons away from girls that the boys often fell in love with each other. When Desiree first saw Axel that one summer, he had been napping naked in the scrawny arms of a schoolmate, the boys’ skin burning red as if marked by God as devilish. Desiree, on the other side of the barbed-wire fence that separated the public beach from the private had whistled into her cupped fists to trill out a melodic birdcall. Immodestly he’d stepped to the fence still naked, running his fingers through his sweaty blond locks, and had accepted Desiree’s offer of a puff on her cigarette of dried corn silk. They had compared scars then, Desiree dropping the strap of her bikini to show the burn of a janitor’s cigar. She’d lowered her bikini bottom a fraction of an inch to show him the clawing from a feral tom, and she’d lifted her chin and stretched her neck to show the nick from the kitchen knife when Cookie, the Rothgutt dietitian, punished her for spilling the milk. She’d kept the rest of her scars hidden from him, wanting to save some for her wedding night. Axel had had only two scars: one on his penis from his circumcision by his nervous doctor (his father), and one on his ankle from the exhaust pipe of a motor scooter he’d got as a gift one Christmas.

They had talked until after dark that first night they’d met, feeling woozy from love and from the smell of the pig sizzling on the spit, a tusked warthog the boys had speared in the thicket of wilderness behind the public beach. And in the months after, Desiree and Axel had slipped each other love letters through a crack in the wall, and when they’d been able, they’d snuck away for clandestine meetings at a fork in the creek in the pastureland behind the school, where they had lain in each other’s arms in the ribs of a rowboat run ashore into the weeds. Some nights they’d whispered only “I love you” over and over, and each time they’d felt it as if they hadn’t already said it seconds before, as if they were saying it for the first time, and each time, whether hearing it or uttering it, quickened their hearts and trembled their breaths.

Meet me on the broken Ferris wheel, Axel had written to Desiree only the week before the next Mermaid Parade, referencing the old part of the amusement park where the pier had collapsed one catastrophic summer day and dropped all the carnival rides into the water.

Throughout the entire parade, as she tugged the redheaded mermaid’s tank down Seaweed Boulevard, Desiree nervously gnawed at a hangnail, tearing at it until her thin blood dripped down her hand. She thought Axel might ask her to marry him that night — in the candy-colored chapels of Mudpuddle Beach, anyone over the age of thirteen could be pronounced man and wife. She’d never wanted anything more, so the potential for disappointment had made her grind her teeth and chew on her fingernails and suck hard on the ends of her hair.

After the parade ended, Desiree waited until nightfall to head off to meet Axel at the pier. She changed from her costume into a cocktail dress Miranda had sewn for her from the slick, midnight-blue kimono she’d stolen from the wardrobe of the warden of Rothgutt’s. A gold tassel hung from the end of each short sleeve, and the sateen fabric was patterned with open parasols and butterflies. Miranda had Desiree kiss the end of a lipstick so that her lips were only just barely touched with red, all of it lost on the paper of her cigarette as she smoked on her walk across the beach. The shadowed, haphazard edges of the wreckage of the pier ahead of her were black against the sky, the Ferris wheel like a slipped cog, it having rolled from its axis and partly into the sea.

Desiree feared stepping past the invisible magnetic fence that would set off the poisoned spines in her bracelet, so she proceeded carefully among the crashed bumper cars, with her wrist to her ear, listening for the first hint of a click of the bracelet’s workings. She crawled along twisted and knotted roller-coaster track, and as she climbed onto a spoke of the Ferris wheel, she felt a tug at her ankle, lost her balance, and fell with a shriek into Axel’s arms. He caught her, but the force of her fall nearly knocked them both from the wooden seat that rocked fiercely just above the waves below. Her left slipper dropped into the water with a plip-plop. They clung to each other then, tightly, clawing at each other’s backs and laughing at their crying. When the seat stopped swinging on its creaky hinges, they kissed for a while.

“My sister made this dress for me,” Desiree said as Axel undid the buttons up the back, as he kissed her neck. “She took apart a kimono.” Though she’d seen Axel naked on the first day they’d met a year before, and though she’d shown him her scars, she didn’t want him undressing her. She loved him too much to risk being the girl who gave it all up too soon. Boys set girls up for failure all the time, Desiree had heard from one of the teenagers at Rothgutt’s — a girl named Pearl with a broken-heart tattoo on her cheek. “Boys are too stupid to know that’s what they’re doing,” Pearl had said, “but that’s what they’re doing. The boys think they’re just dumb, and they are, but they’re putting things together in their brains by accident.”

Ask me to marry you, Desiree thought, as she brought her hands to the front of her dress, to hold it against herself. She then put her hands to his cheeks to push his face away, to look into his eyes. She scrunched up her eyebrows into sinister caterpillars, indicating she meant serious business. But she said nothing.

Finally Axel said, “Let’s get a good start on ruining our lives together, huh?”

“A girl likes to get a ring before she says yes,” Desiree said, though she had every intention of saying yes yes yes yes yes yes, endless yeses, ring or no ring. “So she can have something to show the other girls back at the asylum.”

With that, Axel brought from his pocket the ring he’d bought on the boardwalk from a man’s open raincoat, watches dangling from safety pins up and down the coat’s lining, rings and necklaces tucked into the many pockets. Give it a bite, the man had said, inviting Axel to test the diamond’s authenticity, to prove that Axel was being charged far, far too little for such stubbornly authentic jewelry, and Axel had stuck the ring on his pinkie and given the diamond a good hard bite, chipping a back tooth, causing a sharp thunderbolt of ache he felt through his body — in his temples, behind his ears, tingling his bones and back behind his testicles, and curling his toes.

“Give it a bite,” he told Desiree, but before he could put it on her finger, it bounced from his hands and, in classic slapstick, tumbled about them like a clumsy dragonfly, seeming just within fingertip’s reach, even knocking against a finger or a knuckle, then springing away opposite. Finally it joined Desiree’s slipper in the sea with a soft and undramatic plink. Axel jumped in after it, but the water was as murky as squid’s ink. Desiree twisted her hair around and around her finger in an effort to console herself as Axel came up for air, then dived back down, then back up, then back down. She made no suggestion that he abandon his search.

But Axel did abandon it after a few more dunks and he swam from the Ferris wheel, with urgency, as if he’d spotted the ring spirited away on the frothy top of a wave. But no, he’d heard something, someone weeping and gasping. The carousel horses, that had been perpetually suspended midstampede in the carnival’s merry-go-round, fell apart with a sudden sweep of stormy weather, and Desiree watched as a white stallion broke away from its team. Its ceramic teeth bared and clenched around a green apple, the pink locks of its mane curled like plumes of smoke, it raced off. A girl’s arms were wrapped around its long neck. Not a girl’s, a mermaid’s, Desiree saw, correcting herself with some delight, a mermaid topless, with long hair, riding away like a bucked-off Lady Godiva.

“She’s alive!” Desiree yelled into the storm that had yet to produce any rain, only wind and howl. And the mermaid was not just alive, but clinging for life, willing herself to live. “Save her, Axel,” Desiree whispered. Her almost-husband would be the night’s hero, the ring no longer just a ring regrettably lost, but the ring lost on the night Axel rescued a mermaid from drowning.

When Axel reached the carousel horse, the mermaid allowed herself to be taken into his arms, and she held tightly to him, collapsing against him as if her fin were crippled, as he swam toward shore in the hectic waters, the waves teasing the two of them forward, then tugging them back. Desiree climbed from the Ferris wheel and along the creaking boards of the fallen pier. She ran across the sand. By the time she reached where Axel and the mermaid had washed up, Axel had coughed and vomited the ocean from his lungs. He picked up the mermaid and carried her across the desolate beach, her long wet hair coiled around his leg like a vine.

Desiree ran to keep up, gnawing at the heel of her palm to get at a sliver that pained her, as Axel rushed the mermaid to the empty lot near the casinos. There, a nurse was stationed to attend to drunkards and other overindulgent parade revelers in a collapsible medical shed slapped together for the weekend and painted orange. But just before reaching the lot, her hand to her mouth, Desiree heard the first suggestion of her bracelet’s tyranny — the tiny but piercing squeak of the tightening of a spring — and her heart pounded and her feet stopped. She stumbled backward and fell into the sand, pinching and scratching at her legs to assure she still had feeling. She did. She lay on her side to wait for Axel to come back for her, watching the lightning outline the black clouds.

“I’d eaten some peaches I found,” the mermaid ghost told Desiree as they dangled there from the hanging branch. Though Desiree could hear her clearly, the mermaid spoke with a click and an awkward knocking in her mouth, as if she were only just learning her way around the stump of her tongue. “I’d been swimming for hours to reach Mudpuddle Beach, and I was so hungry I was half-sick.” The mermaid told Desiree that she’d rested on some rocks beneath the boardwalk in the hours before Axel rescued her. Up above had been people dancing, paper lanterns strung about and casting tall and jittery shadows up and down the walls of the casinos of red sandstone. In among the trash littering the rocks were tins with the lids cut open and jagged but with peaches still inside. The mermaid hadn’t known the story of the tins, of course, of the summer tradition of cocktails mixed from their nectar, so she’d eaten all she could find.

The tins, every parade, were hauled out from a warehouse where thousands had been stored ever since a national recall. But the botulism-tainted juice, if consumed only in tiny spoonfuls, would produce a slightly out-of-body euphoria without causing illness, so bartenders added the toxic syrup to the Bruised Peach, a summer drink that also called for gin, ginger beer, and a cough drop to give it a tint of purple-black. The mermaid, however, had devoured the peaches by the fistful and, woozy, she’d fallen from the rocks and back into the sea. It was as if the carousel horse had stretched out its neck just for her as she’d floated past, allowing her to grasp the brass ring in his nose.

The nurse in the medical shed could not legally treat a mermaid in an emergency situation without filling out a kit of forms, getting it all notarized, submitting it to a government panel, and receiving in the mail (within sixty to ninety days) a permit to be posted within public sight. Fortunately for the mermaid, the nurse on duty that night had been a sympathizer, having worked for years alongside Dr. Penelope Clapp, a great pioneer in mermaid medical research (the Penny Valve, a cellophane innovation that partially humanized the mermaid’s esophagus, was invented by her and named in her honor). The nurse undid the pins that kept her paper cap to her hair, unbuttoned the top buttons of her blouse, rolled up her sleeves, and locked the shed’s door. She put on a pair of magnifying spectacles and ran her fingers along the rims of them, clicking through the various lenses for the correct degree before peering down the mermaid’s labyrinthine throat.

“Bring me the satchel that’s in the bottom drawer of the corner cabinet,” the nurse ordered Axel, but he stood still, too startled by all that was going on before him. The nurse reached out and grabbed his elbow, her fingers digging into his skin. “I need your help,” she said, scolding.

The bag was heavy and awkward — bottles of elixirs jostling around inside — and he nearly dropped it before reaching the bed. The nurse took from it a mask and a pump, syringes and scopes, all equipment that had been jimmied to best fit a mermaid’s insides. As she gently snaked a ribbed tube up the mermaid’s nostril, she handed Axel a square green-glass bottle. “Heat this up on the burner,” she said. “To exactly one hundred degrees. There’s a thermometer in the drawer.” Together they worked in lamplight that the nurse had dimmed away to practically nothing, becoming so quickly intimate that they hardly had to speak at all, relying on gestures and glances, grunts and sighs.

Finally the mermaid breathed easy, snoring with little puffs of breath at her lips, like blown kisses. Axel had never seen anything more beautiful. She must dream of handsome sailors, he thought. Exhausted, the nurse lit a cigarette and began to strip from her sweaty uniform, down to her bra and slip, her back to Axel. A few scars ran across the skin of her thin, pale back and you could see the segments of her vertebrae. “Get her out of here,” she said. “I could lose my license.” She handed Axel her blouse. “Cover her breasts with this. Do you have money for a rickshaw?”

Axel reached into his pockets, pulling the damp lining inside out, demonstrating that any money he’d had he’d lost in the ocean. The nurse gave him some dollar bills she’d had tucked in her bra strap. “There’s a cab stand in front of the fried jellyfish parlor down the street,” she said. “Tell him to take you to the nuns. He’ll probably say it’s not on his route, so you’ll tell him you’ll pay double.”

“Don’t I need something to disguise her fin?” Axel asked, as he buttoned the mermaid into the nurse’s blouse.

The nurse took a drag off her cigarette and exhaled heavy. “It’s the Mermaid Parade,” she said. “The place is crawling with people dressed up like her.” She gave Axel a corked vial of a green liquid. “The nuns will know how to administer it.”

“Tell me,” he said. “In case they don’t know how.”

“They’ll know how,” she said.

“In case they don’t,” he said.

The nurse sighed, shook her head, stuck her cigarette in the corner of her mouth, and squinted from the smoke that rose into her eye. She wiggled her finger toward the satchel. “Get the little red tea tin out of there,” she said, through clenched teeth. He did, and she showed him the double-pronged syringe inside. The tip of the needle was slightly curved. She demonstrated, on a vein of the mermaid’s arm, how to give the shot. “A shot in the morning, at noon, and at night.” She gave him more money from her bra and advised him to check into the flophouse at the corner of Atlantic and Pacific, “where the landlady don’t ask questions.”

But the landlady did ask Axel a question: “Need a drink?” She stood at the door to the room she’d assigned him and his mermaid, leaning against the jamb with a slouch intended to seduce. She wore a fuzzy, pink housecoat, roses embroidered on the lapels. Her dentures somewhere in a cup, her mouth sucked in on itself with a rhythmic smacking, and the downturned corners of her frown seemed to sag off her face entirely.

“No thank you,” he said.

“Well, you might as well start scratching now, you prissy little thing, because those bedbugs will itch like hell.” She slammed the door behind her.

But Axel and the mermaid did not sleep in the room; there were no other boarders on the second floor those first few nights, so Axel drew the mermaid a bath down the hall, and he lay on the floor beside her, the cold tiles cushioned only by a threadbare beach towel promoting a brand of cigarettes called Sailor’s Lung — Like having your head in a stormy cloud, the slogan promised.

Her hair spilled over the side of the tub and began to slowly spring with curl as it dried. He combed his fingers through her golden locks. “Rapunzel, Rapunzel,” he whispered, “let down your sweet hair.” He practically chanted it, in a soft monkish drone, easing his anxious stomach with its rhythms and repetition. He then turned the chant into a song, his sleepiness rendering it nonsensical and poetic, a song about spotted pears and senile dogs. He wrote many songs those few days at Rapunzel’s side, songs he then sang on the boardwalk when she got better, a hat overturned at his feet for coins, as the tourist season crept to an end. He bought Rapunzel a wicker wheelchair and a crocheted quilt to hide her fin, and she jiggled a tambourine he’d made from grapevine and sand dollars. As people stumbled from the casinos feeling they’d struck it rich, they took pity on the pretty girl in the chair, and would empty their pockets of coins into the hat. His banjo he’d bought with money he’d made working for a few weeks as a nanny to the sideshow’s monkey boy, who’d really been nothing more than just a hirsute infant with wild yellow eyes.

Though the boardwalk crawled with private gumshoes investigating infidelities and runaways, Axel was not recognized by any of the men his parents had hired. The ocean air and summer sun had quickly turned his face craggy and dry and his blond hair had gone as white as rice noodles. He’d never before even been able to grow peach fuzz on his chin or upper lip, but his concern for Rapunzel had led to a full snow-white beard in only a week or so, concealing a weak momma’s-boy chin.

Rapunzel’s first drawing was of Axel looking years younger, though it depicted him from only a few weeks before: Axel swimming against the raging sea, as beautiful as a young prince, to rescue her from the drifting carousel horse. Axel had known from the beginning that she’d been unable to speak due to the tongue cut from her mouth, the primitive stitches of which he could feel with his own tongue when he kissed her, but he had not initially noticed she’d been unable to see clearly — when he brought her glasses bought from the drugstore, it was as if it improved her mind’s eye as well, her backward glance blossoming in color and clarity. Her drawings looked as if torn from the pages of a book of fairy tales, the characters with eyes so round they consumed their faces.

Her illustrations also depicted Rapunzel in the life she’d left undersea, where she’d lived, like royalty, in the wreckage of a luxury liner. She’d eaten her octopus salad off broken plates of fine china and had drunk her kelp tea from cups of rusted silver. At parties, she’d made her entrances by swimming down the grand staircase lined with candelabra lit by phosphorescent jellyfish and she’d waltzed across a ballroom floor of Moroccan tile that chipped away with the sweep of her fin.

The drawings that made Axel cry were of the pirates who’d captured her and her sisters in a net as they’d swum, rebellious, near the surface to glimpse the ship’s figurehead, a carving believed to be based on the mermaids’ mother. Their mother, a stunning beauty who’d loved, as a girl, to swim up above the surface to sing torch songs, had become quite a legend, blamed for little yachts and sailboats capsizing in the rocky waters as sailors were lured forward by her melodious throat.

As one pirate had held Rapunzel down on the floor of the ship and another had held open her mouth, the captain had wrapped his fingers around the handle of a small knife and had pushed the blade against the tongue he held with his thumb, like slicing off a strip of apple peel. Onshore, professional singers and pop stars paid obscene amounts for mermaid tongue, which was believed to have enhancing properties. If licked within a few days of being cut fresh from the mouth, a mermaid tongue could strengthen the voice and perfect the pitch.

As Axel played his banjo on the boardwalk one drizzly evening, Rapunzel sat beneath the battered silk parasol he’d roped to her wheelchair and she drew a portrait of an opera singer collapsed on a fainting sofa in her dressing room, her spectacular breasts spilling over the top of her corset with busted laces, her wig in her lap, the tip of her long tongue curling at the tip of the mermaid tongue in her open palm. Madame Ernestine Swarth, the mezzo-soprano whose farewell performance at the Mudpuddle Hall had been selling out nightly for three years, happened by that evening and lifted the black veil of her feathery sinamay hat to look over Rapunzel’s shoulder as she sketched. Charmed, she offered Rapunzel a tidy sum for the drawing.

From that point on, Axel pinned Rapunzel’s drawings to the back of her wicker wheelchair, and up along the bent stem of her parasol, and her most gruesome portraits sold the quickest, the ones of mermaids in peril. She piled her hair atop her head and kept it in place with a handful of drawing pencils stuck through. She wore an artist’s smock with deep pockets where she kept her wads of gum erasers and her Q-tips for blending and shading the charcoal.

At night in their flophouse bed, Axel sat cross-legged, naked, strumming the banjo and composing new songs about his love for Rapunzel as she lay next to him, singing along in her head.

Desiree, meanwhile, left notes for Axel in the usual place — stuffed into a jaggy crack along the wall between Rothgutt’s and Starkwhip Academy, the crack hidden by the Japanese honeysuckle vine that climbed the bricks. But the notes went unretrieved for more than a month. Was he angry at her, she wondered, for not following him to the nurse’s station? Or maybe he was embarrassed that he’d dropped her ring in the sea? Blame me for everything, she wrote in one of her unread notes to him, if that will make you love me again. I won’t claim innocence.

One autumn day, the leaves of the vine having fallen, Desiree went to the crack in the wall and found all the notes gone. But her relief lasted only seconds. She was grabbed by the elbow by Sister Bathsheba and hurried to the chapel, where two detectives in dry raincoats stood gnawing their toothpicks to splinters. Her notes were spread out on a pew in front of them. Her own handwriting, so bare in the gaze of the rumpled men, startled her; her penmanship looked so poor, the loops of her o’s and l’s so girlie, the fat dots of her i’s so obnoxious.

“You were the last one to see him,” said the detective on the left, and that was all the prompting she needed. Her heart lifted so that she nearly cried with joy. She could forgive Axel now, after weeks of hating him for hurting her. He hadn’t abandoned her after all, he hadn’t intended to leave all her notes in the wall and all her words unsaid. She told the detectives about the Ferris wheel, the ring dropping into the sea, the mermaid on the horse, each confession met with a scolding yet comical-sounding thwack on the back of the head by Sister Bathsheba’s spank-paddle, saved from her days as a vaudeville clown. It wasn’t until after Desiree had said everything that the worry — which had been such a relief, such a reprieve from feelings of rejection — began to twist her stomach. What had become of Axel?

And what had become of him? At that particular moment, Axel pushed Rapunzel’s wheelchair up the cobbled walk of a mansion overlooking Mudpuddle Beach, where lived the owner of the Waterloo Casino and his invalid wife. The marrow-colored mansion resembled the skeleton of a whale, with portals of stained glass embedded in the porous rib bones. The windows depicted classic scenes of havoc at sea — Jonah devoured, the Titanic half-sunk, Captain Nemo wrestling the tentacle of a monster squid. The casino owner watched them navigate the walk that wound among the overgrown toad-spotted fox-gloves, a snifter of brandy the size of a basketball cupped in his bird-boned hand. He stood on the deck, located in what would have been the hinge of the jaw of the open mouth. He swirled the brandy around, unsmiling, undrinking.

Rapunzel, against her every ounce of common sense, had become addicted to the nurse’s murky green elixir, despite all the veins in her arms having fallen from Axel’s inexpert stabbings with the syringe. Axel lately shot the drug into her neck, at least ten times every day, to keep her from sobbing and clawing at the itchy scales of her fin, but the street junk was watered down and costly. To access the clinical strength required the bribing of the delinquent pharmacist of Anemone Lane, and to afford the bribing, Rapunzel agreed to sell some of the organs she had doubles and triples of.

The casino owner’s wife was a mermaid who’d been on land for twenty years, and suddenly she was failing rapidly. The pharmacist had put Axel in touch with a surgeon known around the county as the Malignant Dr. Benign, the Organ Grinder. The doctor would remove Rapunzel’s middle swim bladder (“You can get by just swimmingly with just the two,” he’d joked) and her upper marginella (“As useless as a tonsil!” he’d said unconvincingly; if it were so useless, then why was it worth triple the price of the swim bladder?) right there in the upstairs kitchen of the mansion. Axel had pushed the wheelchair along that winding walk to the mansion so many times over the next several weeks that Rapunzel began to resemble an over-loved ragdoll with all her crooked stitches.

One night as she soaked, groggy, in the flophouse tub after an injection of the elixir, Rapunzel put her fingers to Axel’s lips, which had always meant she wanted him to tell her about the night he’d saved her life. Axel tried to tell the story, but couldn’t without sobbing hysterically. Rapunzel, in her drifting to and from reality, tried to convince herself he was laughing from happiness.

In the middle of that night, Axel stood at the mirror and sawed at his tough beard with rusted scissors. He shaved away the old man’s gray hair that covered his head, to get at the raw baby-pink skin there. But still he looked nothing like the boy he’d been only weeks before. Nonetheless, in the morning, he put on his turtleneck and peacoat and rolled up one of Rapunzel’s illustrations of him walking, sopping wet, across the night beach, Rapunzel a precious ruin in his arms. He tied the drawing closed with a polka-dot hair ribbon and took the bus to the town of his childhood home.

Axel’s parents desperately wanted this wrecked child to heal their broken hearts, but try as they may, they couldn’t recognize a thing about him. It wasn’t that they didn’t believe he was who he said he was, but he was so absent of the beautiful, craven, childish need he’d once possessed that they couldn’t reconcile themselves to his corruption. Axel’s mother and father held tight to each other’s fists, leaning against each other on the sofa in the parlor, unspeakingly agreeing to accept this lost soul. Axel sat across the room from them, atop a footstool with a needlepoint cushion, its cross-stitches having been mostly plucked out by his mother in her mourning. She’d spent all the days of Axel’s disappearance undoing every sampler and embroidered homily she’d ever sewn.

“We love you, son,” his father said, but calling this hardened, broken-backed man “son” choked him, and he cried so hard his nose bled.

“And I have a wife,” Axel finally said, though he and Rapunzel had been pronounced married only by the flophouse landlady, her slum-lord husband Axel’s best man. Axel gave his parents the gift he’d brought. “She drew that,” he said. “She’s a talented artist.”

“A wife?” his mother said. She picked at the pink monogram embroidered at the corner of her silk hankie.

“That’s why I’ve come home,” he said. “She’s very sick. We need to find a doctor to help her.” Axel leaned forward to point toward the illustration and said, softly, “That’s her. That’s Zel. My wife. In my arms, there. I saved her life. I’ve saved her life again and again and again.”

This was all Axel’s father needed to stifle any flicker of impulse to accept this boy back into his home. His back stiffened and he cleared his throat. He deepened and steadied his voice as if he could fool Axel into thinking he’d not shed a tear at all. “I don’t think so, Axel,” he said. “This is not. We didn’t raise you to…” He shook his head. “The nerve. Your nerve. Coming into this house. An insult to your mother. Obscenity.” He stood up. “I won’t stand for it.”

Axel’s mother stepped forward to protect her husband from his own crushing sympathies. She held out her hand to Axel and was satisfied by the strange weight of his swollen knuckles and by the clammy chill of his skin. She led him to the front door, where she wrapped around his neck a striped woolen muffler she’d only half unraveled in his absence. “This had been yours,” she told him, as if he hadn’t known. She put her arm in his and walked him out onto the porch. “You let us believe you were dead,” she said. “So don’t go thinking that we’re the terrible ones.”

His mother had always smelled so comfortingly of nutmeg and orange peel, though she rarely stepped foot into the kitchen, not even to advise the cook. “I was so scared,” Axel said, his chin trembling. He’d hoped to never have to see his Rapunzel through their eyes.

“Please know that we wish you nothing but the best,” she told him with a friendly pat of dismissal. She went back into the house, and as he walked toward the front gate, she returned to the porch. “Wait,” she called, and she met him at the gate. From behind her long skirt she produced Rapunzel’s illustration, rolled back up and tied back closed. She smiled with pity as he took it from her, as if she felt sorry for him for having a mother and a father who no longer loved him, and she turned to walk back to the house.

At the flophouse, Rapunzel puffed on a long pipe fashioned from a hollow reed, a whittled acorn lashed to the end of it, in which a flower petal burned. She put the pipe aside and ran her cool hands over Axel’s cheeks, red and puffy from all his weeping on the train. She wiped his nose with the cuff of her sleeve. She undressed, then she undressed Axel, who was so despondent he could barely lift his arms for her to pull his sweater off. She brought his head to her breast and followed her fingers softly along the grooves of his ear. She tried to remember the words to the songs she used to sing undersea, and their melodies, but it was as if they’d all escaped her with the severing of her tongue. A mechanism of the mind, she supposed, that kept her from lamenting their exact loss.

Axel smoked from the pipe, too, and his dark mood lifted into melancholy. Around midnight he wheeled Rapunzel over to The Ink and Stab, where an elegant old Japanese woman in a man’s red smoking jacket, her white hair pinned up in a nautilus swirl, tattooed Axel’s back. “Give the mermaid that pretty girl’s face,” he said, gesturing toward Rapunzel in her chair, her long secondhand prom dress reaching down past her fin. The tattooist, who herself was covered throat to toe with sea dragons committing gory violence, pumped the machine’s pedal with the tip of her peg leg, setting the needle to buzzing. The pain she inflicted as she painted the many glittering green scales was excruciating, and he squeezed Rapunzel’s hand so hard for comfort that she bit through the flesh of her lip. The tattooist wrote cruel destiny in a fluttering banner beneath the mermaid, in lettering that reminded Axel of the Popeye comic strip he used to read every Sunday after church.

“How much for that on your back?” the casino boss asked as Axel waited in the living room of the mansion, popping wheelies in Rapunzel’s chair. The doctor had Rapunzel up in the kitchen, bleeding her for a transfusion.

“What do you mean?” Axel asked.

The casino boss licked his bony middle finger and ran it across his own forehead, straightening the line of his comb-over. His shoe-polished hair was as black as the shiny suit he wore. He stepped behind Axel in the chair and tenderly touched his fingers to the back of Axel’s neck. Axel leaned forward, and the casino boss’s fingers followed the curls in Rapunzel’s hair shaped like sea waves. “I meeeeeeean,” the casino boss purred, “how. much?”

Ever since the tattoo had healed, Axel had gone shirtless everywhere, despite the unlifting fog that kept Mudpuddle Beach cold and wet in the late autumn. People would gather behind him, enraptured by the tattooist’s art, as he strummed his banjo on the boardwalk and sang the love songs he wrote for Rapunzel.

“It’s not for sale,” Axel said, leaning forward, allowing the casino boss’s fingers to follow the lines of the mermaid’s hips, and down to where the points of her fins ended just above his ass. The casino boss playfully snapped at the elastic of Axel’s briefs, which stuck up from his baggy dungarees.

“Nothing’s not for sale,” the casino boss said cheerfully. He took the lid from a vase on the credenza, and reached in for a thick roll of bills held together with a rubber band. “Think of all the intoxication you could buy your little sweetie. And a boy so young as yourself would heal in a matter of weeks. Our good doctor has all the latest medical gadgets. And strawberry-scented anesthesia to boot! You won’t feel a thing.”

Not only did Axel then agree to be skinned, but he signed a far more sinister contract with the casino boss. He promised he would give him a child. “You young people,” the casino boss said, “have unwanted infants all the time. It’s no loss.” He then offered Axel a much-consulted pornographic pamphlet disguised as a medical guide: Properly Defiling the Mermaid, by Dr. H. W. Easterman, with illustrations by the author, its pages taped together and falling loose from the staples.

In the flophouse bathroom that night, Axel thumbed through the pamphlet with horror — the text and illustrations were graphic, but the photographs were more so: full-on mermaid snuff, the girls vivisected, their flesh peeled back and their innards laid open atop a clinical bench. He slapped the book shut and examined his back in the mirror, staring at the tattoo, divorcing himself from it, gritting his teeth and furrowing his brow, as if willing himself to slough off the skin painlessly.

He took Rapunzel to the roof then and, within the fence of wrought-iron spikes of the widow’s walk, made love to her sweetly and passionately, in a variation on diagram #142 from the pamphlet. After, as he watched the stars flicker in and out within a netting of smoke-colored clouds, and considered the chilling magnitude of his own smallness, he knew he would be defaulting on all contracts with the casino boss. But the refusal of their first-born would most certainly be the end of them; the casino boss’s spiny network of thugs infected every district of the world. Where could they go but into the air?

Just before dawn broke, Axel took Rapunzel to the convent of the Sisterhood of Poseidon’s Daughters, its massive doors crafted from the hulls of retired ships, barnacles still crusting the wood. The door knocker was an anchor dangling from a chain. At the noise of it, a tall nun with a paralyzed hand swung out her claw and captured Rapunzel by the hair. “We have no place for boys who violate helpless creatures,” the nun said in a voice gravelly with sleep and the whiskey she nursed every midnight, as she snatched away Axel’s lover. Rapunzel, so long voiceless, howled with the keening of a rabbit in a trap, and she didn’t stop, and Axel didn’t leave the front garden, not for two days and two nights, until the nuns, unable to worship peacefully even with cotton in their ears, evicted Rapunzel, a twenty-dollar bill safety-pinned to her smock. Back in her wheelchair, Axel kneeling next to her, she wrote in her sketch pad, in a shivery, old-lady cursive: I am an animal.

Axel lifted his fingers to her lips. He parted her lips with his thumb and slipped his pinkie in to touch at the powerful stump of her near-soundless tongue. “Thank God for your terrible noise,” he told her. He made love to her again, right there, in that garden overrun with a trumpet vine that attracted only flightless birds, and he knew they watched, the nuns, he knew they gathered in the crow’s nest because he could see the stem of it warping with their weight, could see the nest of it leaning forward like the head of a sunflower. The nuns watched, their neutered flesh tucked away in mortifying panties of thorns, growing slick, throbbing with afterlife. Never to be yours, he said in his mind to the nuns, about his love, never to be anybody’s but ours, and he knew this was true, because he and Rapunzel were impossible, everyone said so. And to hold something impossible in your hands, not just in your heart, was a rarity God afforded almost no one.

“Maybe our baby would be happier with them,” Rapunzel wrote on her sketch pad as they escaped Mudpuddle after dark, Axel pushing her wheelchair through the forest. Though the chair bounced and bumped along the pinecone-strewn path, Rapunzel drew a portrait of the child they’d have and give away, a baby with legs and wrapped in fox-fur bunting, resting in a pram so elegant it resembled a hearse with its silk curtains and its curlicues of chrome on a waxed black cab. “We’d have a rich child,” she wrote.

What Axel didn’t tell her was that the silver duct tape he’d wrapped around his knuckles concealed a missing finger. He’d left the nun’s garden only once during Rapunzel’s captivity, to go to the boardwalk for some pralines to sustain him in his vigilance, and was there nabbed by a goon who’d taken him to the lower guts of the Waterloo Casino. Luckily for Axel, the goon had been too giddy with sadism, determined to luxuriate in Axel’s slow torture. As the goon had delighted in Axel’s lost finger, using it to scratch his nose and chewing on its hangnail, Axel had escaped through a vent.

And it was the goon who’d revealed to Axel the casino boss’s true intentions — the organs of the first-born would be harvested. The casino boss’s wife was failing fast and needed fresh parts that were as like new as possible.

“When he finally told me about his finger,” the mermaid ghost told Desiree, “I felt so sad for our first-born. I cried and cried as if our baby existed, as if I’d seen him and lost him. So I don’t know whose idea it was, when we came up to the hanging tree, that we should put our necks through those nooses. Have you ever seen Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare?” Desiree hadn’t, but she’d had a part in Rothgutt’s all-girl production of Titus Andronicus last year. “Axel and I saw it at the Mudpuddle Beach amphitheater. Romeo had been played by a forty-year-old actor in a wig and with circles of rouge on his cheeks, but he was quite good, and you could very much forget that he was too old.”

“Like Romeo and Juliet,” Axel told Rapunzel as he lifted her from her chair and helped her to the noose that had lynched many men. In Axel’s arms, she felt euphoric, her soul given over entirely to this notion of absence, and she slipped her neck through the noose and reached up to tighten the knots. Axel stepped back, but couldn’t bear to have her die before he did, so he leaped up onto the seat of the wheelchair to reach for the next noose on the tree. The wheelchair rolled from beneath him and he fell to the ground, hitting his head on the skull of a long-dead convict, knocking himself unconscious. When he woke, Rapunzel swayed lifeless above him.

“It wasn’t that he changed his mind, Desiree,” the mermaid ghost insisted, “but that he thought he could somehow keep my soul alive if he lived.”

Upon hearing this, Desiree, her wrists too weak to hold on any longer, let go of the branch and fell to the ground. The mermaid’s ghost went instantly vaporous. When Desiree landed hard on both feet, she felt her Achilles tendon tear in her ankle, and, like a stretched rubber band snipped with scissors, the tendon snapped up inside her leg and balled behind her knee. She passed out from the pain but woke only minutes later, Miranda lifting her into Rapunzel’s wheelchair, which had sat wrecked beneath the tree ever since the half-orchestrated suicide pact. Miranda, with the screwdriver she kept tucked in her sock for protection against the pervy mashers who crept among the forest paths, repaired the chair’s wobbly wheels and pushed Desiree toward the wintry gray haze of the sky above the ocean, far in the distance.

“It’s past midnight already,” Miranda said, “but if he truly loves you, he’ll still be waiting.”

“I need a doctor,” Desiree said. Her leg felt like her elbow felt whenever she banged her funny bone, but one hundred times worse.

“Shhhh, there’s no time to talk,” Miranda said, though it was at least a half hour’s walk to the beach. Desiree closed her eyes and longed for sleep so she could dream dreams of Axel, so handsome in those days before he saved the mermaid from drowning.

It must have been only a week or two after Rapunzel’s death that Desiree had found a note from Axel in their crack in the wall, which she had still visited every morning before going to the hives to collect the honey. She would run her fingertips through the break in the brick, hoping to scratch her skin on the edge of paper.

Dear Desiree, Are you still on the other side of this wall? Love, Axel.

Dear Axel, Yes. Love, Desiree.

Axel had returned to Starkwhip Academy, but not as a student. He now worked for the boys he had so adored, and for the professors and the deans. No one recognized him, and certainly no one believed him when he told them he was Axel. He became known only as Nine Fingers due to his missing pinkie, and whenever anything was stolen, he was blamed. You’ve been nine-fingered, the boys would say to one another when even so much as a single tooth of an old plastic comb turned up gone.

Every day he crawled through their crawlspaces and pipes with a hard-wire bristle-brush, dusting their chimneys and ducts — polishing every ventricle of the black lungs of the ancient halls in which the boys studied listlessly. In the basement, he stirred their laundry around with an oar in a kettle of boiling water and lye, and sometimes, when he folded their clothes, he’d put on a boy’s uniform, skivvies and all, and fantasize about the life he’d once led. He’d lie back in a pile of quilts, rubbing his genitals through this other boy’s britches, smoking a damp cigarette that frequently fizzled out from the humidity of the laundry room. He’d press his fingers hard against his tender throat, and he’d swallow, approximating the strangled breaths Rapunzel must have struggled for in her final minutes of life. I’m worse than that pirate, he thought, thinking of her knifed-out tongue. How can I live with myself? He pressed harder on his throat and imagined it being hard enough to choke all life from him, and he pictured Axel dead, and Nine Fingers alive, Nine Fingers the criminal, the villain, and he proposed to Desiree among the clouds of angered bees, her face hidden by a heavy net draping down to her shoes from the broad brim of her hat of black velveteen. The ring was a ruby one he’d stolen the night before from the headmaster’s wife as she’d bathed; she’d safely tucked it away in an antique jewelry box with a pop-up ballerina that didn’t pop up anymore. He’d tried to fix the ballerina by monkeying with a cog, but then he’d heard the sexy rush of water as the headmaster’s wife had stood from her tub squeaky clean. “Don’t let the ring fall from your finger this time,” he told Desiree, either remembering the circumstances wrong, or hoping Desiree had forgotten how he’d fumbled his proposal on the Ferris wheel. She forgave him the little lie, the first of thousands of forgivenesses she could feel waiting to be granted, stuck in her teeth like an ache.

Though Desiree and Miranda arrived at the chapel long past midnight, Axel waited. He sat on the bumper of a rusted Volvo parked in front, beneath the pink of neon lovebirds, his legs crossed, the flood-level trousers of his tux revealing mismatched socks. He’d rented the tux, a dandelion yellow, from the chapel, fake shirt-ruffle and all.

“He mustn’t see me in this chair,” Desiree said, and Miranda rushed ahead, waving her arms, shooing.

“Bad luck!” Miranda yelled. “You can’t see the bride in her wedding dress! Go inside!”

And he did as he was told. He went to the pastor’s office to keep from seeing, and the pastor’s wife helped Desiree into the chapel as Miranda hid the chair in the peony bushes of the parking lot. The pastor’s wife seated Desiree in the front pew. “We usually charge a nickel to rent a bouquet,” the pastor’s wife said, pausing to allow for Desiree to offer a nickel, then she continued with, “but that’ll be my present to you.” She brought Desiree lilacs made of felt, their stems wrapped in an embroidered hankie.

Desiree took a deep breath and closed her eyes when she heard the pastor’s wife begin to play an almost-melodic song on the pump organ. She thought of all the weddings she’d ever devised growing up — she thought of her play-marriage to Ophelia Littlenought in the third grade, her nightgown knotted atop her head and training behind her like an antique veil, her bouquet nothing but morning glories. She and Ophelia had mock-kissed — their hands over their mouths — in a corner of the yard where the gardener had just drowned a toad in a bucket. She remembered how, when a little older, she had talked herself to sleep reciting the vows she would write for the pretty-faced prince who’d been in the news when his mother fell to her death from a balcony — If I ever stopped loving you for even a second, may the devil himself knock me over with a feather. She remembered all the flowers she’d ever considered holding at the altar — all the tall violet glads, the plain-faced daisies, the tiger lilies with their vulgar spots. She’d decided on yellow roses until reading in an old book of manners that yellow roses were symbolic of jealousy.

My groom will not ruin my wedding, she vowed as she sat in the pew of that dollar-a-service chapel, and indeed he didn’t. He was so beautiful in his suit that didn’t fit. His Adam’s apple up-and-downed with his sweet, nervous gulping, wiggling his bow tie that was knotted all wrong to begin with. She thanked God that he let Rapunzel die alone, and then she felt sick with guilt for thinking of Rapunzel at all.

“I do,” he said, and Desiree said it, too, when asked. And tucked into her palm, in her closed fist, was a bone as tiny as one you’d choke on in a restaurant. Within the skeleton of the mermaid, which had broken to pieces beneath the hanging branch of the tree, had been another skeleton, Rapunzel’s little part-boy part-fish, the first-born that never was. Desiree would hold onto this bone, keep it secret, until one terrible day in the future. Whenever she felt her husband might be drifting away for good — when the time came that he was completely lost to her — she would simply hold out this bone so small and white you could barely see it, and she would ruin him and she would bring him back.