You who’ve never before had much to offer any of the girls who passed by, leaving traces of perfume in their wake, a quickening of the air they so recently occupied. Maybe simply because you, and you alone, have something to offer her. It’s instinct, then, that tells you, Help this girl and good may come of it. That would be too many steps down the line for most people, and you, though you have a potent heart and ferocity of intention, are not a particularly serious thinker. When you hear the story about the girl who can supposedly spin straw into gold (it’s the talk of the kingdom), you don’t immediately think, This might be a way for me to get a child. Who wants to refund a farmer’s money as he stands destitute in his still parched fields? Who wants to say, “I’m sorry, it works most of the time,” to the elderly couple who still hear cackles of laughter coming from under their mattress, whose cutlery still jumps up from the dinner table and flies around the room? And-as is the way with spells and conjurings-it’s not a hundred per cent reliable. No one in the family, not in the past few centuries, at any rate, has thought of making a living at it.
Your people have, for generations, been able to summon rain, exorcise poltergeists, find lost wedding rings. You’re descended from a long line of minor wizards. The King gives the miller a glacial look, has a guard escort him away, and withdraws, locking the door behind him. I mean, Your Majesty, you can’t be thinking of killing her. . . . The miller starts to confess, to beg forgiveness.
Like most fathers, he finds it inconceivable that his daughter may not be singular that she may be lovely and funny and smart but not so exceptionally so as to obliterate all the other contending girls. The miller is apparently unable to imagine all the pale-necked, shyly smiling girls the King has met already. You suppose (as an aspiring parent yourself, you prefer to think of other parents as un-deranged) he is hoping that if he can get his daughter into the palace, if he can figure out a way for her to meet the King, for the King to see the pale grace of the girl’s neck and her shy smile, and hear the sweet clarinet tone of her soft but surprisingly sonorous voice, the King will be so smitten (doesn’t every father believe his daughter to be irresistible?) that he’ll forget about the absurd straw-into-gold story. He must have thought he needed a claim that outrageous to attract the attention of the King.
Find the little man free#
Some impoverished miller-a man whose business is going under (the small-mill owners, the ones who grind by hand, are vanishing their flour and meal cost twice as much as the big-brand products, which are free of the gritty bits that can find their way into a sack of flour no matter how careful you are), a man who has no health insurance or investments or pension plan (he’s needed every cent just to keep the mill open)-that man has told the King that his daughter can spin straw into gold. You listen carefully, then, when you hear the rumor. It’s another thing entirely to yearn for what’s so readily available to any drunk and barmaid who link up for three minutes in a dark corner of any dank and scrofulous pub. It’s one thing to envy wealth and beauty and other gifts that seem to have been granted to others, but not to you, by obscure but undeniable givers.
0 kommentar(er)
