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

KATHRYN DAVIS. Body-without-Soul

IT WAS A SUBURBAN STREET, ONE BLOCK LONG, THE HOUSES MADE OF brick and built to last like the third little pig’s. Sycamore trees had been planted at regular intervals along the curb and the curbs themselves sparkled; I think the concrete was mixed with mica in it. I think the street was so new it couldn’t help but draw attention to itself.

The families living on the street came from all over, but the children had no trouble forming friendships, the boys’ based on rough-housing and ball games, the girls’ on a series of strategic moves, tireless linkings and unlinkings, the bonds double, triple, covalent like molecules. “Heads up!” the boys would yell when a car appeared, interrupting their play; the girls sat on the porch stoops, cigar boxes of trading cards and stickers in their laps, making deals. School was about to start. The darkness welled up so gradually the only way anyone could tell night had fallen was the fireflies, prickling like light on water. The parents were inside, presumably keeping an eye on their children but also drinking highballs. Fireflies like falling stars, the tree trunks narrow as the girls’ waists.

Occasionally something different occurred. One girl pasted a diadem of gold star stickers to her forehead and wandered from her stoop to get closer to where one of the boys stood bent slightly forward, his hands on his knees, waiting for another boy to hit the ball. This waiting boy was Eddie, who lived at the opposite end of the street from Mary, the girl with the diadem; their bond was exquisite, meaning it would never let go, though they were too young, really, to understand the implications. Once she fell roller-skating and skinned her knee and he stood spellbound, staring at the place on the sidewalk where he could see her blood. “I shouldn’t have let it happen,” he told her, even though he’d been at the dentist having a cavity filled at the time. When he described how much the drill hurt she gave him one of her two best trading cards, Pinkie, who she thought of as herself despite the fact that she, Mary, would never dream of wearing a hat that had to be secured with pink ribbons, not to mention the fact that she needed glasses and had mouse-brown hair and wasn’t especially pretty despite her nice brown eyes. Giving him Pinkie meant she had to break up the pair with Blue Boy, who she thought looked like him with his dark hair and soft lips and studiously downcast expression. But, then, she wasn’t sentimental like he was, either.

Bedtime, the end of summer. In the brick houses the clocks kept ticking away the time, chipping off pieces of it, some big ones piling thick and heavy under the brass weights of the grandfather clock in Eddie’s parents’ hallway, others so small and fast even the round watchful eyeballs of the cat clock in Mary’s parents’ kitchen couldn’t track their flight. The crickets were rubbing their hind legs together, unrolling that endless band of sound that when combined with the sound of the sycamore trees tossing their heads in the heat-thickened breeze could break even the least sentimental human heart.

Headlights appeared; the boys scattered. The car was expensive and silver-gray and belonged to the sorcerer Body-without-Soul, a tall thin bald man with a small gray mustache who lived somewhere on the next block over with a woman everyone knew as Miss Vicks, the elementary school teacher, who also may or may not have been his wife. One minute Mary was standing there in her plaid shorts and white T-shirt, balanced like a stork on one leg, the headlights turning the lenses of her spectacles to blazing spinning disks of molten gold so she could no longer see the street, the sycamore trees, the brick houses — anything at all, really, let alone Eddie — and the next minute she was gone.

“Has anyone seen Mary?” Eddie asked.

“She disappeared,” Roy Duffy told him, but he was joking.

Everyone knew how Mary was — here one minute, gone the next. Besides, they were all disappearing into their houses — it was only the beginning. The game was over; the next day school started. When the crest of one wave of light met the trough of another the result was blackness.

Miss Vicks handed out sheets of colored construction paper. They were to fold the paper in half and in half again and then in half again — in this way after unfolding the paper they would end up with eight boxes in each of which they were to work a problem in long division. A feeling attached to the act of being given instructions involving paper and folding it, a feeling of intense apprehension verging on almost insane excitement. Eddie filled his boxes with drawings of Mary, some of them not so bad; it was his plan to be an artist when he grew up. From time to time he looked to his left where his subject sat folding her piece of orange paper, folding and folding and folding it, many more times than they’d been instructed, many more times than it’s physically possible to fold a piece of paper, in this universe at least. He tried getting her attention but it was as if she weren’t there, the light bouncing off the glazed schoolyard pavement and onto her glasses. It was like looking at a robot, Eddie thought, but also like looking at an old-fashioned girl toiling up a steep hillside in a faraway land, carrying a bucket of cream.

“Mary is sick,” Miss Vicks told them the next day. “She won’t be coming back to school. Wouldn’t it be nice if we made her a present?” The teacher was pretty and seemed no older than most of the students’ parents, but in fact she was very old, old as a breastplate of hammered bronze, a virus.

“We could make a card,” suggested Betsy Abbott, a suggestion Miss Vicks met with disdain verging on rage.

“Oh, a card,” said Miss Vicks. “What good would that do?”

Someone was going to have to go to the old Poole estate. There they would find a black egg hidden somewhere in the middle of the knot garden, the only thing that could make Mary better. As Miss Vicks talked she paused from time to time and cocked her head like she was listening to someone or taking dictation. She described the egg in detail — the dark shell dappled with pale white spots that shifted when you weren’t looking at them, as if sunlight were falling onto it from above through the shifting crowns of the trees, but you’d be wrong, oh so wrong, for this egg could only be found where there was no light at all, the aroma it released when you cracked it open unpleasant but also sweet, like a mouse decomposing in the wall of an old house, all of which made perfect sense given the fact that the egg could only be found in the body of a dying animal.

“Let’s see,” Miss Vicks said, looking around the room, pretending to think. She put one manicured fingernail to the delicately upturned tip of her chin. No one was surprised when her gaze fell on Eddie — everyone knew it had been headed there all along, which was also why no one except Eddie found her description of the egg disturbing, since he was the only one who had been listening. Eddie and Mary were a pair; they had been formed that way — everyone knew that.

“Edward, wait!” Miss Vicks said, reaching into her desk drawer and removing a small curved knife with a gold handle. “You’ll need this. The shell is hard as rock.”

To get to the Poole estate you went to the far end of the street, up the three little green hills beyond the school, and over the trestle bridge above the railroad tracks. Old Mr. Poole had abandoned the estate years earlier for some reason no one was able to remember — the parents had all warned their children to stay away from the place. The mansion was dangerous, its floors and staircases rotten, the windowpanes smashed to glittering daggers of glass. In the spring you could still find lilacs and forsythia growing in what had once been the formal gardens, but by summer’s end the stringweed and creeper covered everything, leaving behind only the general shapes of things, disquieting like the sheeted furniture in Victorian novels, and if you weren’t careful you would pitch into a cistern and drown.

Of course Eddie had been there — all of the children who lived on the block had been there on their bicycles. It was the best place to play hide-and-seek or sardines. Eddie knew without being told that some egg wasn’t going to cure Mary, assuming she was sick. From the sound of it, in all likelihood it would probably make her sicker, if not kill her. Even so he rode his bike to the Poole estate that same afternoon. The minute he had passed beyond the formal entryway’s twin pillars, one surmounted by an armless Athena, the other by a noseless Aphrodite, the air suddenly grew ice-cold, as if a thin veil of pretense had been let fall, the illusion of light and heat withdrawn, the planets swimming closer and closer, drawing into their orbits the dark chill nothing of outer space. “Is this because the season’s changing,” Eddie wondered, “or is this the way the world really is, or is this my mood because of Mary?”

He left his bike leaning against a pillar and began to explore, eventually locating the knot garden, more or less unrecognizable as anything at all under its blanket of vines. There at the garden’s heart, lying on its side, was the dead body of one of the big gray hares that had appeared in the neighborhood the previous spring — the cause of many a minor automobile accident — but it didn’t have an egg like the one Miss Vicks had described to him hidden in it. Nothing was hidden in the hare’s body.

While he sat hunkered there, looking at the hare, night fell, taking Eddie by surprise. He’d brought no flashlight, forgetting how quickly the days grew shorter once the equinox was past. As unsentimental as Mary was, Eddie was suggestible. The hare’s dead body frightened him, the glazed surface of its upward-facing eye reminding him of Mary’s the other day in the classroom when she couldn’t stop folding the piece of paper. He returned to where he’d left his bike leaning against the pillar and removed the curved knife from the basket. Then he retraced his steps to the maze and cut the hare’s body into pieces.

By now it had grown so dark he could barely see a thing; if there was a moon most of it seemed to have slid through a slot in the sky. It took Eddie a long time to once again track down his bike. When he did, he found a big yellow cat sitting there by the front wheel waiting for him. “Pssst,” the cat said, licking the hare’s blood from its paws and flicking its long yellow tail from side to side like the cat on the clock in Mary’s parents’ kitchen. Atop Athena’s head perched a flea-bitten crow, a string of entrails dangling from its beak; a rake-thin dog sprawled under a lilac bush, worrying a foot bone. “Thank you, Eddie,” he heard a tiny voice say, and when he tried to figure out where it had come from, it seemed to be from the ant he saw crawling up his ankle. “We were starving.”

It wasn’t until he got home that he found the gifts the animals had left for him in his bike basket: a cat’s claw and a dog’s whisker, the feather of a crow and the leg of an ant. These things might come in handy, he thought, and he stowed them away along with the curved knife in the shoe box where he kept Mary’s trading card.

Mary returned to school the following day as if nothing had happened, and Miss Vicks acted as if Mary had never been gone, withholding the usual favors she granted students snatched from the jaws of death, such as clapping the erasers or feeding the fish. At some point Mary got contact lenses and stopped wearing glasses; for a while in high school she and Eddie were sweethearts, but even when they started having sex things never went back to being the way they’d been when they were young.

In spite of that, though, the look of Eddie, his obvious preoccupation with an inner life he kept hidden from everyone, excited Mary; she would grow so moist she’d have to leave class. There was a cot in the furnace room where she would lie waiting for him, her skirt hiked up around her waist and her underpants down around her ankles. The one time he asked her where she’d gone that summer night so many years ago, she looked at him in amazement. “I was kidnapped,” she told him. “I thought everyone knew.”

Eventually Mary moved on to other boyfriends, some of them the same boys who’d played baseball in the street with Eddie. She developed a reputation for being fast. Then she got engaged to a much older man who was said to have a lot of money. Sometimes Eddie saw her standing by the magazine rack in the corner drugstore, teetering a little in her stiletto heels, her mouse-brown hair now bleached blond and worn in a French twist. She would be paging through a fashion magazine, but because she had on sunglasses Eddie couldn’t tell if she’d noticed him too and was choosing to ignore him, or if she hadn’t seen him at all.

After graduation he went off to the city to study painting at the Academy. He moved into a large apartment building where he lived by himself until one day the big yellow cat showed up at his apartment door, wrapping itself around his ankles while he was struggling with his key, and then slipping through the open door so quickly and curling itself so comfortably in his one good chair that it was as if it had always been there. Often he would talk to the cat about the past and the cat would offer monosyllables in exchange; Eddie told himself this was the way things were meant to work out. Whatever he had felt for Mary — and, really, he wasn’t certain what that had been, only that it had been everything for him — he chalked up to the fires of youth, which he told himself were behind him. I think he was encouraged to feel this way, to belittle everything that had happened between him and Mary; time healed all wounds, everyone knew that!

What Eddie didn’t take into account was the fact that while time did, indeed, heal all wounds, it was also the source of them — a fact the sorcerer Body-without-Soul was only too well aware of. It was the sorcerer’s ambition to get rid of time altogether, and in so doing to make everything in the world duplicate his own grotesque condition. For what granted the body its relation to time but the soul, the ageless, deathless soul — without the soul the lump of flesh that was the body would just sit there forever like the lump it was, unable to understand or feel a thing.

Eddie turned out to be a portrait artist of uncommon skill, his ability to capture the essence of a subject so uncanny he earned commissions from some from the city’s most prominent citizens. He painted the newly appointed bishop with his gold mitre and ivory teeth; he painted the mayor’s bony wife with her chubby daughter. In each case he was able to convey an almost painfully accurate representation of the subject’s external appearance while at the same time laying bare what would otherwise remain occult, the bishop’s unrequited love for his own handsome face, the daughter’s delight at being the cause of her mother’s embarrassment.

It wasn’t long before Eddie could afford a studio of his own in a fashionable neighborhood. Initially society’s darling, as the years passed he also became the object of serious critical attention. There were shows at the major galleries, articles in the best journals, adulatory monographs, even a coffee-table-sized book. For a while he was married to one of his patronesses; he had his share of love affairs as well. Then one evening he got the call that changed everything. “I have a job for you,” said the sorcerer Body-without-Soul, disguising his voice to sound human. “I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised.”

The next day when Eddie entered his studio he found that a woman had let herself in and was standing on the dais with her back to him. She was wearing an organdy gown of a pinkness so pale as to be practically white, tied at the waist with a deep pink sash. On her head she wore a bonnet, its long pink streamers hanging loose to her shoulders, which were bare. She was the image of Pinkie, the girl on Mary’s trading card, though unlike the woman in his studio, Pinkie would never have been caught dead with a cigarette. The woman glanced to one side. “Eddie,” she said, exhaling smoke. “Darling.” He got the fleetest glimpse of a single eye, refracting light and silver like mirror backing.

But if this was Mary, why was the yellow cat hissing at her, its back arched in a parody of feline anger? The woman looked no older than Mary had the last time Eddie had seen her, whereas he, Eddie, was losing his hair and needed glasses to read the paper, and the yellow cat had long surpassed one hundred in human years. The studio was overheated, the water banging in the radiators, the smell of turpentine and cigarette smoke overpowering. There had been some scandal, Eddie remembered, following which Mary had moved to the city. As he watched, she began removing her clothes. Her skin was that shade of milky white that’s almost blue, like skim rather than whole milk, her hair a tumble of curls. Before she had a chance to turn to face him, he had bolted from the room, together with the shoe box and the cat.

Now he could no longer stand the sight of living flesh. For a while he drew the cadavers the hospital supplied for the use of the medical students; he had been told there was money to be made illustrating anatomy textbooks and this proved to be true. Later he preferred to find his subjects at the city morgue, where he was befriended by the coroner, a heavyset man with the drooping jowls of a hound and a long gray ponytail. When Eddie asked him the difference between a cadaver and a corpse, the man pointed to a recent arrival by way of reply. The bodies that came into the morgue were not always in such good shape, corpses — as opposed to cadavers — often having met a violent end. But Eddie could draw anything. “You’re so good you can draw blood,” the coroner liked to say, and then he would howl with laughter.

I suppose it’s not surprising that eventually someone Eddie knew would show up there. He was sitting alone eating a sandwich, his drawing pad open on his knees, and had just started sketching.

“Remember me?” asked the corpse.

It was Miss Vicks lying on the marble slab, flat and pale as a flounder. “Listen to me, Edward,” said Miss Vicks. “You’ve always been good at following directions. Do you still have that knife I gave you?” She asked him to cut her up in pieces the way he’d cut up the hare. When Miss Vicks spoke her mouth opened and closed like a small live entity all its own.

“Why should I do that?” Eddie asked, and he began to grow dizzy thinking of where the time went and how there wasn’t that much of it left. “Besides,” he said, “the last time I followed your directions I don’t remember things going particularly well.” Over the years he had grown so used to talking to the yellow cat he didn’t find it that strange to be talking to a corpse.

“What on earth do you mean, Edward?” Miss Vicks asked. “It was Mary who didn’t fold the paper the way I said, not you. Hurry up, please!” she added, flecks of spit appearing on her lips. “What’s taking you so long?”

At some point rain had started falling, long strings of it from a sky the color of tin, pieces of which kept breaking loose and landing on the morgue roof, piling up there like the pieces of time in the case of the grandfather clock in Eddie’s parents’ hallway.

Eddie felt so dizzy, he hardly knew what he was doing. He took the knife from where he kept it in the shoe box. He cut off Miss Vicks’s hands and feet and cut out her entrails and was just cutting off her head when he heard a tiny voice coming from his sandwich.

“Eddie,” the voice said. “Don’t listen to her. It’s a trap.”

Eddie looked down and saw an ant emerging from between the two slices of bread, the very same ant he’d saved so many years ago from starving. What Eddie had to do, the ant told him, was to hold onto the leg it had given him back then — did he remember? Eddie had put it in his shoe box. By holding onto its leg, the ant told Eddie, he would become an ant so small no one could see him, even with a magnifying glass. And indeed the second Eddie picked the leg up he found himself standing on the sandwich, the other ant at his side, as enormous as an elephant, its magnificent abdomen gleaming like patent leather.

“What do we do now?” Eddie asked.

“We wait and watch and listen,” the ant replied.

When the coroner arrived at the morgue to find parts of Miss Vicks strewn across the slab, he couldn’t believe what he was seeing. “Oh, Eddie,” the coroner sighed. “How could you do this to me?” Clearly it was a case for the police. In no time at all Body-without-Soul had sped to the scene in his silver-gray car. “Tell me you haven’t touched anything,” he said to the coroner. “We’ll dust for prints,” he added, snatching Eddie’s drawing without first bothering to put on his latex gloves. “You might as well go home,” he told the coroner. But the minute the man was gone Body-without-Soul tore the drawing to bits. “They’ll never get me,” he said. “Most human beings are too stupid and sentimental and the only one who isn’t I took care of years ago.” Of course Miss Vicks knew he meant Mary. Precious Mary, as Miss Vicks thought of her, sourly.

Human beings would never be able to kill him, the sorcerer went on to say, because to do that would require tracking down his soul, which was hidden somewhere on the Poole estate in a black egg. A black egg in a black craw in a black heart in a black stomach. Someone was going to need the right tools — a bunch of body parts, he added, a trifle sadistically thought Miss Vicks — without which they’d never be able to make all the transformations needed to slit open the belly of the cat that ate the dog that ate the crow and find the egg that his soul would fly out of when you cracked its shell open. “Blah blah blah,” said Body-without-Soul. “The usual song and dance. It’s not going to happen.”

Miss Vicks moved her mouth as if to answer. Nothing came out at first but a trickle of sound like tap water and then her hands balled into fists and the sound grew louder, churning and grinding and clicking like stones borne on the flood.

I think it’s harder to return to the place where you lived your life when you were a child than it is to change from a man to an ant and back again. Eddie couldn’t stop looking at his human arms and legs, wondering what had become of those six graceful appendages he’d come to prefer to his own, each one as translucent as amber and delicately feathered.

The street where he used to play baseball was jammed on both sides with parked cars, making the idea of playing anything there, even if he’d still been able to, impossible, and the sycamore trees, having first grown so immense that huge holes had been cut in their crowns to make room for telephone lines and electric wire, in the end had gotten chopped down completely. Mary’s parents’ house and the houses to either side of it had been changed into condominiums so you couldn’t tell where one stopped and the next began. Eddie’s parents’ house looked more or less the same, except that the sloping front lawn his father had worked so hard to maintain was turned to chaff, the grass dead or dying and overrun with dandelions, and instead of the lush ivy plant his mother had kept in the front bow window there was a hideous gold lamp shaped like a naked woman.

Eddie was an old man now. The hair he still had left was white and his teeth false, the youthful promise of his career all but forgotten, the portraits he had painted so many years ago possible to track down with some effort in private collections, but considered stylistically quaint. The big yellow cat was dead, also the coroner, the cat’s ashes in a plastic bag in Eddie’s shoe box, the coroner’s in a cemetery Eddie sometimes visited before he moved away from the city. The Poole estate had been sold to a developer who built a retirement community there, Poole Village, which included the nursing home where Eddie’s father lived the last years of his life. But Eddie’s father was dead, too.

As he walked along the neat brick pathways of Poole Village, Eddie could barely remember what it was he was supposed to have come back to do. The day was mild, the air sweet but with a smell of autumn in it, of burning leaves, and in the blue sky he could see a small wavering V of geese making their way south, hear the plaintive far-off sound of their honking. Mary had always made fun of him, of the way the end of summer made him sad — her eyes would mock him, lovingly. He remembered how she would sit on the porch stoop with one of the other girls, the two of them apparently in deep negotiation for some card, a dog or a horse or what the girls all referred to as a “scene,” meaning a painting from the Romantic period showing a world where beautiful places like the Poole estate had once existed. Mary’s head would be bent over the cigar box, her shoulders hunched, but he could tell she was more focused on him than she was on nothing else. No one or nothing else in his life had given him that same degree of attention.

Now a young woman orderly approached on the path, pushing an old woman toward him in a wheelchair. The young woman reminded him a little of his old elementary school teacher, Miss Vicks — she had the same red lips and fingernails, the same birdlike way of tilting her head when she talked, and her name, amazingly enough, was Vicky. The old woman was just an old woman; she wore the kind of sunglasses with side shields a person needed after cataract surgery, and her silver hair had been put up in a bun. “Are you going to lunch?” the old woman asked Eddie. “Today is Friday,” she added, clapping together the swollen joints of her hands. “Swordfish!”

Eddie was about to say no, that while Poole Village certainly seemed nice enough, he wasn’t yet a resident. But then he was once again filled with a sense of having forgotten something important, something he was supposed to have come back there to accomplish. He seemed to remember something about a sorcerer, but that was in a fairy tale he’d heard in his childhood. Something about someone wearing a diadem of star stickers, about a girl wearing a diadem of star stickers on her forehead.

The three of them — Eddie and Vicky and the old woman — were making their slow way along an avenue of shade trees, the leaves casting moving shadows across their faces. Eddie felt cold; what the stickers signified, it suddenly came to him, was more than the fact that one girl had been set apart from the other girls. Something had happened to her, something bad.

He followed Vicky and the old woman into the building. “Whatever you do,” the old woman told Vicky, laughing, “don’t push me down there.” She was pointing toward the blue hallway that led to the level-three nursing home; when you went down that hallway you never came out again except as a cadaver.

Eventually they arrived at the dining room. The room was full of old people sitting in groups of four or six around tables covered with white tablecloths. It was a pleasant room, almost like a restaurant, with artificial floral centerpieces and aproned waitstaff, except all the waitstaff could perform CPR. Eddie put the shoe box on the table beside him. There was a plate in front of him with a piece of fish on it and a pile of peas and a pile of rice but he had no appetite.

“What have you got there?” asked the attractive young man who came to wait on their table.

“You have to speak up,” Vicky said. “Otherwise he can’t hear you.”

The old woman reached across the table and put her hand on his and held it and he could feel a tremor run through his whole body that either came from him or from her, he couldn’t tell the difference.

He also couldn’t tell where he was but he thought he could see a sky like gray padding with a handful of black specks swirling just beneath it, birds busy looking for things to use to build their nests. There was the smell of knotweed, a little like the smell of cat urine, and sure enough there was his yellow cat, big and sleek the way he used to be when Eddie first saw him, scratching in the dirt. Eddie’s hands were shaking so hard he almost couldn’t open the shoe box.

“See if he can manage this,” the attractive young man said to Vicky. He set a bowl of broth on the table.

“Here, let me help you,” she said, propping up Eddie, who had slid so far down in his chair he couldn’t reach the table. “I’m going to break an egg into it to give it more body,” she explained. Then she reached into the shoe box for the curved knife and gave the egg a whack, separating the two halves of the shell and dropping the contents into Eddie’s broth.

The room grew very quiet. Shadows padded along the walls, poured over Eddie like rain.

The old woman leaned closer. “Uh-oh,” she said. “It looks like he’s wet himself.”

She took off her sunglasses to get a better look.

She was wearing a long robe of a heavy lustrous fabric like the satin they stopped making years ago, and it set off her skin — she allowed just the right amount of animal fat in her diet to keep it thick and creamy, hydrated it just enough to keep it translucent. “I have something to tell you, Mister,” she said to Eddie, looking up over her fork at him, lifting her eyes which weren’t cloudy and dull but alive and dark and lit by the fire of her spirit, which, like the sun, couldn’t be confronted directly but had to be filtered through the vitreous humor of her material self. Eddie remembered those eyes watching him, and as he did he heard the sound of the crickets, a sound he hadn’t heard in a very long time, and with it the voice of his mother calling him in, and his father whistling as he adjusted the sprinkler, its lazy arc above the freshly mowed lawn, and there was Mary in her plaid shorts and white T-shirt, standing on one leg like a stork.

“You look like you just saw a ghost,” the attractive young man said. It was the very last thing Eddie heard before his soul flew out of his body.