Saskia's Skeleton

by Lily Markova

  “Yes, as big as a dinosaur, and for no special reason at that. They also played children’s games and laughed a lot.”

  The Skeleton quivered a little, teeth clattering against one another, and Saskia giggled too.

  “The girl lived in her own tower,” she continued importantly to make up for this lapse in earnestness, “at the foot of which there was a majestic rosebush. Oh—but don’t think it was all laughter and buttercream at the castle—of course, the Princess and Jack argued at times, as adults do. Jack complained that the Princess was always having now a Fever, now the Common Cold and there was no use planning anything with her. The Princess accused Jack of liking to control everything too much, and anyway, she hadn’t signed up for this, being a stay-at-the-castle Princess, she wanted things to happen, she wanted to learn how to play the violin for goodness’ sake (at which point Jack turned to hair-tearing and groaning about how last week it had been the guitar). For your information, Jack’s hair was as black as—”

  The Skeleton’s sharp shoulders had sloped, but Saskia didn’t notice that. She’d just remembered she had to be more descriptive so her scant audience could feel truly involved in the story.

  “—as something really black,” she said, for nothing sufficiently vivid had offered itself.

  With her enviable eloquence and narrative skills, Saskia told much of the rest of the story to the Skeleton in under a minute. It was as follows:

  When the Princess was down with the Common Cold, she would stay for long days in her chamber. At such times, the green of her eyes faded to blue, and somehow they couldn’t fix on the girl, or Jack, or even Franz anymore but seemed to look right through their faces and the chamber walls, seeing something really blue far away.

  When the Princess had a Fever, however, every day at the castle clamored and blazed like a carnival, which was almost worth the bizarre things the Fever often made her do: set off for some wet place called Venice without a single suitcase or warning, or teach herself how to breathe fire. The Princess could master whatever she set her heart on in the snap of a finger, but new activities lost their appeal to her just as quickly, and she dropped what she was doing the moment a more exciting plaything caught her eye.

  Her sudden trips to Venice and fire breathing couldn’t go unnoticed by proper people. Every so often, they turned up at the castle, urging the Princess to eat magic metal beans that would cure her of these undesirable peculiarities and help her get well and proper. That scared the Princess; she said both the Fever and Common Cold were who she was, and without them, she might turn into a completely different princess.

  Underneath all his hair-tearing and grumbling, Jack loved the Princess as she was, so he didn’t insist that she eat metal beans. If the proper well-wishers dared breathe a word of Extra Painful, Ultra Dangerous, and Occasionally Effective Lightning Treatment, he went red and angry in the face and prodded them out of the castle with a poker. The Princess then apologized to the girl, and Jack apologized to the Princess, and the girl didn’t get what there was to apologize for but apologized to Franz just in case. After that, everyone could finally go to the circus again (except for Franz, who was a cat and therefore neither allowed in, nor interested).

  At the mention of such a happy resolution, the Skeleton’s hunched shoulders and bowed head sprang back up, and he rattled his jaws against each other in a bony equivalent of laughter.

  Encouraged by that, Saskia let the Skeleton know, with a fresh quavering fascination in her voice, that the girl from the fairy tale loved the circus! There were mad-looking magicians, mischievous monkeys, and merry musicians who sang funny verses about a fantastic land named Côte d'Au Revoir. But the little girl’s awestruck fondness was reserved for the acrobat who sauntered along a tightrope high above the arena floor, whistling and pretending to tap-dance or drunk-reel as he did. As soon as the ringmistress in a mini top hat and a spangled red suit rode out onto the stage on her unicycle, heralding the acrobat’s up-coming appearance, everything else ceased to exist for the girl. A tiger could have started eating her leg, she would have overlooked that. With sparkling, enamored eyes, she marveled at the way the acrobat made his feats seem at once so effortless and so impossible; to her, this art embodied the most alluring things of all: freedom, lightness, disobedience, adrenaline, and—not least—a great chance to show off. Granted, the girl was going to become an acrobat and nothing else when she grew up.

  Jack gave a high-pitched, nervous chuckle each time the girl declared that. Each time he did, the Princess told Jack to stop laughing and go and stretch a tightrope from the girl’s tower to an old apple tree in the front garden, and place a trampoline below. Jack, whose disapproval of the tightrope-walking’s perils had grown to be so strong he made quite a show of storming out of the circus before every single one of the acrobat’s performances, thought that a terrible idea. He puffed and grunted, but eventually and as always, he gave in to the Princess’s wish—except that afterward he vanished: went to work in the morning and never returned by dusk.

  That evening the Princess came down with the frostiest Common Cold she’d ever had, came down right where she was standing, to the kitchen floor. There she drank from a bottle of potion brewed and supplied to her by their neighbor—a stump-toothed, bad-mannered witch—and there she cried, and there she fell asleep, at the bottom of the kitchen that was turning into a deep, deep well. The Princess kept crying even as she slept, and the floor came spinning downward, the well fuller and fuller of her tears. The last of the potion spilled out of the bottle in a shining red ribbon, which spiraled around the Princess’s figure until it had dissolved in the water. . . .

  Meanwhile, the little girl was so bored in her tower she’d almost yawned herself to a lockjaw. She had already read aloud a short story she knew word by word, scratched Franz behind the ear, and even done her Numbing Numbers homework. (The last one was something the girl resorted to only in the most extreme cases of nothing-to-do, and she had balanced the dull thing out by doing it while standing on her head. Quite apart from feeling funny, the trick caused the blood to rush to her brain, rendering it quicker, for a change, than her feet.)

  The girl was halfway through another yawn and squashing her face against the dark windowpane to try and distinguish anything interesting in the still garden below, when the moon rolled out from behind its cloudy screen. Bluish-white with dark blue seas, the orb was so big it took up half the sky. The unfinished yawn turned around in her mouth and came out as an admiring “Aaah!” It wasn’t the moon’s magnificence that had the girl’s attention—who cared about the moon itself, when it illuminated the rope Jack had stretched above the garden, making it twinkle like a string of blue fairy lights in the black air?

  The girl flung open the window and climbed onto the sill. Everything smelled like roses and warbled like nocturnal insects—it was a most magical night. . . . All of a sudden, the girl understood it was ridiculously easy to walk a tightrope. She stepped bravely into the boundless night and was pleased to find that every muscle in her legs seemed to know what to do. So inspired she felt, she forgot herself; she forgot Jack, and the Princess, and even Franz, who was meowing his protests on the windowsill now far behind her. The girl rose on tiptoe, her arms over her head like a ballerina, and began humming a tune her favorite acrobat in the circus often whistled. If only Jack could see her dancing through the air now, he’d believe she could do it, he’d never laugh at her dream again!

  But where was he? The girl’s arms dropped to her sides, as she remembered Jack hadn’t come home yet—he had never been so late before. She looked down, hoping to catch sight of him somewhere in the woods ahead. Instead, she noticed something else, something that made her calves turn numb and heavy. If a moment ago she’d felt lighter than a breeze, now she was as good as an unwieldy stone statue. Jack hadn’t set up a trampoline yet!

  The magic was sucked out of the night, as was the air and confidence out of the girl’s chest. On stiff legs, she started to edge
back toward the tower, but she was too scared now and couldn’t stop casting glances at the dark yard so far beneath her tingling feet, couldn’t stop imagining how horrible things would be if she lost her balance. The Princess and Jack would be so angry she’d started practicing without supervision. They would take down the tightrope and ground her for this—oh, but would they even be able to ground whatever was left of her if she crashed?

  She only had time to hold out her arms to the madly yowling cat and scream, “Franz!” The springy rosebush softened her fall, but the prickles scratched and cut her skin and wounded her eye. Everything happened so quickly—“Franz!”, and a cloud of white petals shot up into the air. (Here, the Skeleton patted Saskia clumsily on the arm, and his ribcage gave another quiet cheep.)

  When the little girl stumbled into the kitchen, threads of red beads trickling down her face, the Princess, who had gotten ten years older in one night, started to weep again. Then she got up from the floor, gave the girl a tight, reassuring hug, and brought a few medicine flasks and bandages from the bathroom. The most furious Fever she’d ever had followed, which the girl only welcomed, because the Fever always meant plenty of dancing, singing, laughing, trips to the circus, games, and cakes.

  The Skeleton shivered. Saskia stopped mid-story, unsure of whether he was laughing again or upset.

  “But are you tired, Skeleton?” she asked. “It’s a good fairy tale, I promise. I haven’t yet gotten to the part where there are candles, and funny mice, and a cat who woke up human one day. I think that’s the part they were angriest with, at school,” she added pensively, swinging her legs. “That Franz became human and stopped chasing mice. Or was it the candles? Or that the Princess drank potion and learned how to play the violin? Proper people are strange. They said my story needed rewriting because all fairy tales must have a happy ending.”

  “I know!” agreed Saskia hotly, for the Skeleton’s chest had let out an unmistakable Jeepers! “That’s what I told them too: ‘Why, this fairy tale already does have a happy ending!’ But they said it must be a proper happy ending, you see.”

  Saskia felt a warm splash on her hand—another drop of blood had escaped her little nose. The Skeleton hastened to extract a handkerchief from his tailcoat breast pocket and hand it to the girl.

  “Jack from the fairy tale had a tailcoat, too,” Saskia said, distractedly, as she threw back her head and pressed the handkerchief to her nose. “This is so very nice of you, thank you!”

  The bird in the Skeleton’s chest chimed in again, and Saskia, who had come to be rather good at interpreting its remarks, could clearly hear “Do you miss him?” hidden in the gentle interrogative chirp.

  Saskia gave that some consideration, and then shrugged, carefree, and said, “No?”

  And again the Skeleton’s shoulders fell, but this time it didn’t escape Saskia’s notice.

  “I must have worn you out with my babbling! Would you like to see our castle, maybe? I’ll introduce you to the Princess, and to Franz, unless he’s having a bad-hair day. It would be wonderful—it’s been such a long time since we had a guest. And the Princess will like your flowers!” Saskia chattered away. “After Jack was gone, people would try to give her bouquets sometimes, but she says you should only bring her cut flowers if you mean to give her an opportunity to watch something beautiful wither, and potted flowers if you’d like to burden her with having to look after something. But she’ll love your flowers, because they’re both live and taken care of!”

  Saskia jumped off the trunk and helped the Skeleton down, since he moved with stiff difficulty. It looked as if he hadn’t flexed his bones in a while.

  “How long have you been sitting here?”

  The Skeleton began ticking off on his fingers, folding the digits inward, but quickly lost count and waved his hand. They set off, and the woods grew animated behind their backs once more, but Saskia was no longer frightened. After a few minutes, the Skeleton stepped on a crunchy twig, and with a piercing cry, a great black bird soared into the sky from the shuddering crown of the nearest tree, making the Skeleton leap up and land with his bones rattling. Saskia took his hand and smiled.

  “The Princess and I, we walk through these woods almost every day,” she said. “If there is something dangerous here, it had many chances to hurt us, but it didn’t.”

  A wide gumless grin spread downward on the Skeleton’s grayish face, but he was soon distracted by a passing green butterfly, which took interest in his eye flowers, so the Skeleton snapped at it for the rest of their walk to the castle. Once or twice, he managed to swallow it, but the butterfly found its way back outside easily through the gaps in his bones.

  Chapter Four. The Castle

  Once Saskia and the Skeleton had reached the edge of the woods and exited through another set of labeled gates in the spiked fence, a delightsome-looking castle of golden-brown rose into view, the scarlet conical roofs over its towers resembling strawberry frosting caps on biscuit cupcakes. On their arrival, the sun drew the creamy clouds apart and poked out its beaming face, making the tips of the spires blaze like the flames of birthday candles. Here and there, long plants were twining around the castle walls as though someone had piped green buttercream all over them in thin loopy patterns. And of course, the garden! The garden rounded up the deliciousness, flower patches and fruit-spangled tree crowns scattered around like shreds of hurriedly ripped, motley gift paper, with a luxuriant white rosebush for a wrapping bow.

  Saskia watched the Skeleton’s reaction, furtively, with bated breath, struggling not to burst out with enthusiastic comments about what was what and how everything worked. She felt funnily proud to be showing the castle to somebody, as if she herself were the mind solely responsible for all its splendidness. The Skeleton proved to be a pleasant guest, for he was eyeing the castle with his mouth agape, and even the flowers in his eye sockets had blossomed more brightly and exuberantly, he was so charmed.

  When the double front door flew open, the Skeleton’s flowers popped out of their sockets altogether. Flustered, he fumbled to stuff them back inside. The Princess herself had come out to greet them, and the castle rayed still more radiantly around her.

  The Princess was a tall woman with large eyes, which were currently green and amused, a rippling cascade of chestnut hair, and the most porcelain skin possible—except, far from being cold and matte like the proper children’s, her face was glowing with an evasive understanding smile, which filled Saskia’s heart with a warm sense of safety at once. Meanwhile, the Skeleton’s chest had broken into a spoony song.

  The Princess’s sweeping, fancily embroidered ball gown rustled against the grass as she lowered herself to meet Saskia, who ran up to her and flung her arms around the Princess’s neck.

  “My sweet girl,” said the Princess, her tone half relieved, half still worried. “Why are you so early? Why didn’t you wait for me?” She drew back and examined Saskia shrewdly from head to toe. “Did something happen? Oh, dear, you were bleeding again. The kids pester you?”

  A grin broke across the girl’s face, and she shook her head; the Princess kissed the messy top of it and got up to withdraw into the castle, but Saskia dashed back to the middle of the garden path, seized the Skeleton’s hand (he had hidden himself behind one of the bushes), and hauled him over to the Princess, who was frowning in confusion, halfway through the doorway.

  “I brought a friend. I hope it’s all right.”

  The Princess’s mystified eyes dwelled on Saskia’s hand that was firmly clutching the Skeleton’s, and traveled up from there to the visitor’s face.

  “Oh, my!” she exclaimed, staring at the Skeleton with a horrified expression. “Pardon me, but your friend is terribly thin! Please, come on in, join us for dinner!”

  The Princess stepped aside and waved a gracious arm, and Saskia hopped into the entrance hall, the Skeleton trailing behind her, his sharp shoulders pulled sheepishly up to where his ears should have been.

  The castle was
not a jot less wonderful on the inside. There were paintings everywhere on the walls, but they weren’t arranged in a strict and precious way of a respectable, no-nonsense art gallery; here, opposing genres rubbed along, frames of all shapes and materials hung askew and overlapping, and nobody seemed to care that some of the pictures were probably the wrong way up. Numerous armchairs and sofas were heaped with all sorts of musical instruments, most of which lacked some of their keys and strings or were entirely dismantled. There were so many instruments that it looked as though an entire dysfunctional orchestra had vanished from under them just the moment before Saskia and the Skeleton had entered.

  The Skeleton’s head revolved around and around, and he almost knocked over a valuable-looking china vase as he gazed about the hall, now and then tripping over old-fashioned footrests and nearly bumping his skull on unlit floor lamps’ shades. He managed to put on an apologetic expression, no small accomplishment for someone missing facial muscles, and tilted the vase back to its due position on the mantelpiece. Just in time to witness that, an extremely pale man of unidentifiable age between fifteen and fifty-one, wrapped in a woolly white bathrobe, trudged down the fine helical stairs.

  “Franz!” Saskia cried out, lunging across the hall to hang from his neck and ruffle his ashen-blonde head. Franz gave a long, noisy nasal sigh. He hated public displays of affection, he hated private displays of affection, he hated to be nestled, squeezed, snuggled, and touched in general. Even more, he hated being human.

  The morning after Jack’s disappearance and Saskia’s accident, cat Franz had had his portion of bad luck too—the largest of them all, or so Franz was secretly convinced. He had woken to find that a highly unpleasant fate had befallen him—in his sleep, he had been misshaped into a human being, an event that the Princess would later shrug off as being beyond anyone’s control and therefore unworthy of fretting about, designating it “Franz’s metamorphosis.” Naturally, on that first morning, the Princess had been perhaps as annoyed as the cat himself to discover that a strange person was sprawled on her bedroom windowsill—her cat’s favorite windowsill, at that. She soon puzzled out, however, whom she was dealing with, from the stranger’s sour mien and tragic complaints. It’s not that the Princess was so gullible as to take his crazy word for it, but the man had for a passport a mop of wonderful white hair on his head (of which he left rich tufts wherever he went, and even somehow where he didn’t). Together with the atrociously hairy legs, pink ears, and redness around his pale green, apathetic eyes, that left no doubt of the poor thing’s identity. It hardly need be pointed out that as a human, Franz was considerably less charming than as a feline. His personality seemed to have drastically deteriorated, although the truth was, Franz’s attitude had always had room for improvement, but what looks good on a cat might get a man kicked out of the house.