The Price of Longing Read online



  The Price of Longing: A Short Story

  By Amber Marshall

   

  Copyright © 2012 Amber Marshall

   

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the authors’ imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

   

  All rights reserved

   

   

  Prologue: Rapunzel’s Father Speaks

  ---

   

  When my wife became pregnant, my father warned me that a pregnant woman is a strange thing. My mother and wife were in the kitchen cooing over the news, and well out of earshot. “A rational, sensible wife becomes a madwoman when she’s breeding,” he told me. “She becomes a slave to her emotions, more than women usually are,” he said with a wry smile. “Best to stay out of her way and try to fulfill her requests when you can.”

  My wife wants a salad. Rampion. It grows wild, in fair season, common as dirt. It is nothing special. But she says it is the most delicious thing she has ever eaten. She has gone nearly mad about it, pining and wasting, saying she is sick and cannot eat until she eats of these greens.

  If it was summer, I could go out by the roadside and pick enough to stuff a bushel basket, but it is dead winter, and the only one who can grow the stuff is the witch. Her garden is lush and green even in this frozen season. No snow falls there. I can see it, over the garden wall, from our bedroom window. No doubt it is due to her magic, to her pacts with the Devil.

  “She has some. Maybe we can bargain with her,” my wife suggests, eyes mad and feverish.

  “Her price is too high,” I say. “Would you have me selling my soul to demons?” I fail to keep frustration out of my voice.

  “Don’t yell at me!” she cries, and begins to weep loudly. I leave the room, slamming the door behind me. Who can resist his wife’s will, when she is carrying his child and threatening to kill it by starvation? I must do as she asks.

  At night, then. Surely even witches sleep?

  The stones of the garden wall are slick with ice. I cling to the moss covering them. Scaling the wall is tricky, but soon I make it, and land in the garden. The witch grows plenty of ordinary plants here, herbs and vegetables that the rest of the village never tastes out of season. To my right is a tangle of brambles, thick with dark, juicy blackberries, swelling as if it was the height of summer. My mouth tingles and waters, but I restrain myself from tasting them.  

  There are also fearsome things with thorns and huge, fleshy things that may be flowers or fruit. I cannot tell. I expect that they will come alive at any moment, like sentinels, to devour me, the trespasser.

  I search until I find the plant my wife so longs to eat. It has oblong, green leaves, about two inches long, growing from a long stalk. When we harvest it, we uproot the entire thing before the blue-purple flowers bloom. But the witch will surely notice uprooted plants; perhaps she will not notice the theft of a few leaves. Perhaps (I hope, although I know no animal dares disturb this unholy place) she will think a starving animal stole into the garden, desperate for food, and made off with them.

  I reach to pluck some leaves, expecting the plant to shriek like uprooted mandrake. It silently allows my plundering. I fill a small pouch; “even a mouthful” my wife said, and I dare not get too greedy here.

  I do not see her there until I stand. The crone. She stands right in front of me, though I did not notice her approach. I recoil, try to run, but my feet tangle and I end up on my arse, quaking in terror. She is not bent now, though I have often seen her so in town, bent over a stick and shuffling so slowly that it takes her near an hour to move across the square. I know now that it is an act, that her body, though older than I can imagine, is still supple of joint and quick, thanks no doubt to her pacts with Satan. Her fingers are knobby, her face as wrinkled as an old apple. But her eyes are bright and vicious, her back straight, and her white brows knitted together. She is wearing dark wool, and a shawl on her head. Wispy white hairs poke from under it.

  “Trespasser!” she hisses, her voice like the groaning of an old house settling, the rattle of gravel under a cart wheel. “Thief!” She points a claw-like fingernail and I begin to babble, trying to explain myself. I tell her of my wife, our child-to-be, the illness, the longing. I beg her mercy.

  “I should kill you,” she says. In response, the fleshy flower-fruit I dreaded earlier spin their heads to me, like sunflowers turning their faces to the sun. Thorny vines rise up and bob in the air, waiting on her command. “But…” she continues, “perhaps we can make a deal.” The crone smiles, horribly, showing small, white, sharply-pointed teeth. “I have always wanted a child.”

  “I’ll not give you a tender meal, Devil’s whore!” I spit, terrified at my insolence as I do so.

  Her eyebrows twitch. “Not to eat, fool!” she snaps. “To raise as my own. To teach my ways.”

  “And if I refuse?”

  Her grin widens. “Then you will die. And without the rampion, your wife will die, and your child.”

  I feel sick, my heart dropping into a bottomless well within my chest. There is no choice. Children do not always survive, but to lose my wife would destroy me. “You can always have another,” the witch says, echoing my thoughts.

  “Very well,” I agree, dragging each word out with my teeth.

  The crone nods, satisfied. “Take the rampion, then, with my compliments,” she says, sarcastic. “They go well with vinegar and oil.” Her wicked smile reappears. “Now go and tell your wife what her longing has cost her.”

   

  I don’t remember scrambling over the wall, or anything else until I handed my wife the dish piled with my small plunder. She ate it like a starving woman, for she was, smacking her lips and groaning in unseemly pleasure with every bite.

  “Thank you, my love,” she said, so sweetly that I could not imagine her the same as the snarling harpy I had been living with these last few months. “I feel so much better already.” She jumped a little. “Ooh, the baby likes it too. Feel.” She snatched my hand and pressed it against her stomach. I felt a bump against my palm. My eyes stung. “What is the matter?” my wife asked, concerned.

  “I’m just happy you are well,” I lied. I couldn’t bring myself to tell her the truth, that we would lose our child to a devil-loving crone. Perhaps I feared that the truth would destroy her, put her into another black mood of starvation and mourning from which neither she nor the child would recover. Or perhaps I wanted to savor our last few months of happiness. Perhaps I hoped the crone would forget.

  But she didn’t. She was there, only minutes after the birth of our daughter, before my wife could even choose a name. She snatched the babe from my wife and held our daughter to her chest.

  “Give me back my baby, you witch!” my wife screamed. “Do something!” she cried to me. I stood paralyzed. The child wailed, terrified.

  The crone grinned. Our daughter shrieked. “He never told you!” the witch marveled. She sniggered at me. “Didn’t you wonder where he got that rampion?”

  My wife’s rage turned to me. “You traded her our daughter for salad greens?”

  “Ah, but wasn’t it you who said you’d die without them?” the witch reminded her. “I caught him in my garden, and offered him this trade, or death. Be grateful he took the trade, for you both survived to bring forth more children. But this one is mine.” Then she was gone. There was no puff of smoke, no odor of brimstone, no sound. She simply disappeared, the sound of our daughter’s cries blinking off in an instant.

  My wife wailed and screamed. I dared not go near her, for fear she wou
ld take her anguish out on me. Instead I went to the window, to see if I could spy the witch.

  The cottage, and the garden, were gone. There was no remnant, no ruin, no foundation, nothing to show that anything had ever been there. Only a field of rampion, withering in the frost.