Saskia's Skeleton

by Lily Markova

  “We have a guest!” Saskia told him. Franz glanced the Skeleton’s way, screwed up his face, and let out a snort that still bore a faint aftersound of the hissing he had once been known to welcome guests with.

  “Please, Franz, be nice!” asked Saskia.

  Reluctantly, Franz lifted a corner of his mouth in a painful imitation of a fanged smile.

  Satisfied with that much, and heeding the Princess’s second reminder coming from the adjoining room, Saskia scuttled off to wash her hands. The half-smile slid down and off Franz’s face immediately after the girl was out of the hall, while his pupils hurried in the opposite direction as he rolled his eyes. Pretending rather pointedly that the Skeleton wasn’t there, he leaned against the mantelpiece and preoccupied himself with prodding faience figurines and dishes with his finger, stopping just when they were on the verge of collapsing and maddening the Princess. In his turn, the Skeleton crossed his violin bow-like arms over his chest, suspicious flowers shifting in his eye sockets, following Franz’s every sluggish movement.

  A clatter of plates coupled with abstracted humming were issuing from the dining room, where the Princess bustled over the long table—a wave of an arm, and a rich-green spread descended onto the tabletop, flattening itself there neatly. Another wave, and on the spread appeared three blackened candelabra of dark blue tapers, which crackled and sparked to life, sprouting slender white flames, on a third wave of the Princess’s arm. (Because you can’t forgo candles once you’ve invited a skeleton to dinner.)

  After four silver domed platters and as many crystal goblets took their places on the green spread, too, everyone gathered around the table at the Princess’s call and seated themselves: the Skeleton next to Saskia, and the Princess and Franz across them. The Princess filled her goblet from a dusty red-glass bottle—she was quite fond of the witch’s Carry-on potion these days. (It had been troubling Saskia at first, but she had long since come to accept that, just like everybody else, the Princess was a person with her own weaknesses and whims, and it wouldn’t be fair to ask her to be perfect when no one ever was. Saskia had figured that, if the Princess were anyone but herself, she wouldn’t be as saddened by her love of the witch’s potion, so the girl had learned to treat the Princess as leniently as if she were a stranger.)

  Next, the Princess poured Franz some milk, and the girl and the Skeleton cherry juice from a large crystal jug. All lifted the domelike lids off their platters. Each dish contained half a pomegranate, a handful of olives, a few chili peppers, a small pool of honey, a bulb of garlic, blue-molded cheese, and three different-colored scoops of ice cream seasoned with basil.

  The Skeleton stared at the unlikely assortment, while Saskia got to casually dipping her slice of cheese in the honey.

  The Princess leaned over the table. “I’m sorry, I didn’t know what you friend liked,” she explained to Saskia in a whisper, “so I decided to serve the usual.”

  Franz shook his sulky head, creating a little snowfall as he did so by shedding clumps of white hair on everyone’s platter, and began to slurp his milk. Every ten seconds, he paused to mop his chin and, while he was at it, forehead, with a napkin.

  The Princess threw a concerned glance at the Skeleton’s untouched plate, put aside her fork, and nibbled on her thumbnail before saying, “Well, why won’t our guest eat anything? Does he not like the food?”

  Saskia regarded the Skeleton for a moment, taking in the gaping slits beneath his collarbones.

  “I think he’s afraid of ruining the carpet,” she said, in a low voice and with a meaningful look at the Princess, hoping that she was sounding more tactful that way.

  The Princess said, “Oh,” and then, “Hmm,” and she picked up her fork again.

  At this, Franz thrust out an arm to the middle of the table to grab the salt cellar, but instead he upset it. (It is quite possible, however, that that had been his intention to begin with.) Franz’s lunge made the Skeleton, who was sitting squarely opposite him, rock back on his chair and clap both hands over his chest.

  “Oh no, don’t worry!” the girl told him quietly so that no one else could hear. “Franz doesn’t hunt birds anymore. Not even mice, look!”

  Laughing, Saskia pointed toward the floor. A fat gray mouse had just toddled up from under the table, and showing no sign of shyness, scurried up the Skeleton’s leg. Once it was sniffing around the dishes with the air of someone owning the place, the Skeleton looked up at Franz, bones aquiver, but the other just watched the mouse grimly while it was towing the largest piece of cheese off his own platter.

  “Well, of course!” Franz grunted in response to the Skeleton’s stunned chirrup. “Though we cats do use the terms interchangeably, I became human, not an idiot. I am well able to adapt to change, and albeit I find my new condition deeply unfortunate, I still have enough common sense to realize that chasing after every filthy mouse under the current circumstances would be inappropriate and reeking of cheap, classless comedy.”

  “What is it?” said the Princess, looking from Franz to Saskia.

  “There is a bird in the Skeleton’s chest,” said Saskia with an encouraging glance at him.

  “Oh, that’s nice, sweetie,” was the Princess’s only reply, as she returned to stabbing her olives with a toothpick and sending them into her mouth.

  “No one bites here,” Saskia prompted, and the Skeleton succumbed and began to unbutton his tailcoat—even though Franz had gone out of his way to contradict the girl’s statement by sinking his teeth into a chili pepper and making his eyes menacingly round. A second later, however, his eyes proceeded to morph into long vertical ovals, his eyelids grew pinker than usual, and he spit out the pepper and seemed to be trying to sputter out his tongue in its wake.

  Luckily for Franz, neither the Princess nor Saskia had noticed his failed attempt to intimidate their guest. Saskia couldn’t tear her gleaming eye off the Skeleton, who pinched seeds off his pomegranate, juggled them, and caught them with his mouth—inside his ribcage, the bird did just the same with its beak. While the girl enjoyed the show and cheered, and Franz was still trying to hack and wheeze the throat-tickling, tongue-burning taste of pepper out of his system, the Princess rose from the table and went to the back of the dining room.

  There, against the wall, stood what looked like a decades-old sideboard with peeling golden tracery and a scuffed hutch dresser on top of it—that is, so it had looked until the Princess pulled open the two stained-glass doors. Rather than dishware and quaint souvenirs, the hutch displayed a jumble of wooden gears, metal strings, glass pendulums, piano keys, sewing and knitting needles, bronze horns riddled with lots of tiny holes, and long levers. The Princess sat on the short three-legged stool before it, slipped off her shoes, and planted her feet on the pedals sticking out from under the sideboard. She rolled her head around her shoulders and tugged at one of the strings, which set one of the wooden gears in motion, which tugged on some more strings, which set some more gears in motion. The Princess’s fingers began to flounce across the black keys, soon leaving them for white ones on the shelf above, soon skipping to the right to pull some faceted glass spheres and tubes hanging by elastic threads.

  “Ah, listen!”

  Saskia shushed Franz, even though he was silent already, and tapped the Skeleton on the hand to attract his attention to the Princess, even though he had wheeled around at the first sounds of music. Saskia wanted to ask him how he could hear anything without any ears, but remembered she was too well brought up to do so, and then she forgot that, together with what she had meant to ask the Skeleton, for this was what the Princess’s music did: It made people forget every thought they’d been having, except for the one about how unearthly and pure the music was. An enchanting sight it was, too—the Princess’s bare feet dancing across the countless pedals, her hands gliding lovingly over the whimsical elements of the instrument, striking and plucking them swiftly and accurately, and her whole body swaying as she reached for yet another lever or pendulum. />
  Saskia rocked from side to side as well and went on to jump in her seat once the music whirled faster and more brightly, until her little fidgety legs carried her to the center of the room and, presently joined by the Skeleton, she spun there around and around, singing a song in a nonexistent language. The Skeleton’s bird twittered a tune that was different from Saskia’s but complemented it amiably.

  When the Princess stopped playing, Franz woke up from his sweet slumber to discover that the mouse was snoozing among the cheese crumbs on his platter, with its bulging belly up. Its fur looked stiff and sticky, as though it had rolled in honey, and now and then, it let out a contented hiccup.

  “I couldn’t possibly fall lower,” said Franz morosely.

  The Princess closed the doors of the hutch dresser, turned to face the quiet room, and smiled. The Skeleton pointed at her, pressed his palms to his chest, against an imaginary heart, and shook his head so that his chin traced a figure eight in the air. As everyone went back to the table, Saskia told the Skeleton that the musical instrument was called the Polyfun and that the Princess had designed it herself, after she’d had enough of getting bored with individual instruments and decided the only logical solution was to have them all in one. The girl also added that the Princess had started learning how to play the Polyfun just a few months ago, to which the Skeleton reacted appropriately by dropping his lower jaw. Embarrassed, he slid under the table, picked up the jaw, dusted it off, and fitted it back where it belonged.

  Helping herself to more potion, the Princess said, “Oh, it’s nothing!”—either to soothe the Skeleton’s awe or to stop Saskia exaggerating her talents. “There’s a secret to my music, you know. When I play, I imagine that I’m the best musician alive and it’s the most natural thing for me to do. I mean, if you want to amount to anything extraordinary, you’d better have something to keep you going, like sheer madness.”

  “Stay delusional,” muttered Franz. Music had a positive but sadly short-lived effect on him.

  “That is my motto, indeed—thank you, Franz,” said the Princess, without a hint in her tone or expression to suggest that she might be joking. “I think, once you’re down at your instrument, your best chance to extract true music from it is to delude yourself into believing you already are everything you aspire to be. You’re incapable of making mistakes, you’re infallible! I say—” The Princess lifted her glass in a toast to nobody in particular. “I say, stay delusional as long as you’re playing.”

  “Of course,” she added, taking a sip of her Carry-on potion and inclining her head to one side, “it’s rather important to forget the illusion of omnipotence the minute you’re finished. For if you think you are the greatest all the time, how can you grow and learn what else there is to learn? But for the time being, while you’re playing, let go of your reality—don’t let it hold you back, not even for a second, don’t hesitate, do not look down, or else you will—”

  “—fall,” said Saskia, casting her dimmed eye to the floor and nodding. If only she hadn’t looked down the moonful night of Jack’s disappearance. . . . How light her midair step had been until she’d seen she had no safety net to count on! It all had come to her at once: how painful her collapse would be, how inevitable; how young and inexperienced she was, and how she’d never once before had done a thing as difficult and scary.

  “How can I ever become a real acrobat now that everyone can see my fall forever written on my face?” the girl blurted out, and she hid her scarred face in her hands.

  The Skeleton made to stroke Saskia’s lowered head, but the Princess got up, swept around the table, and squatted before the girl. “Come!” she said, drawing Saskia’s hands off her face and clutching them tightly in hers. “It is true that you fell. It is real that it hurt. And the scars will stay with you. But, my wonderful child, it’s for you to decide whether you’re going to keep wearing these scars like a shield to fend people off so they can’t see your shame—like proof of your failure, a reminder of your slip. You can choose what you’ll let them see—the scars, or the one behind them.”

  “But the proper children—” began Saskia, sniffling.

  The Princess pulled away and threw up her hands. “How many times do I need to ask you not to call them that? You’re setting yourself against them!”

  “But we’re not like them, they will always sense that! This morning. . .” And Saskia told the Princess about the girl in a blue scarf, who she thought had wanted to speak to her but had changed her mind after taking a good look at Saskia’s face.

  “Oh, my poor little thing, you’re unlike other kids, all right,” said the Princess, with that special understanding smile of hers. “But surely you know it’s not your scars that make it so? No, child, what makes you different is here, beneath the scars, beneath your skin—it’s the way you see the world, the way you change it by just being here, being you.”

  Saskia gave an unconvinced laugh and looked away, wiping her eye on the sleeve of her pirate shirt.

  “Okay, you know what I think?” said the Princess in a cheerful, confidential tone. “I think that girl you speak of is hiding something underneath that scarf. What if she’s also different, but, just like you, she is afraid the others will condemn her? You know what else I think?” the Princess pressed on, when Saskia turned to her, frowning uncertainly at the idea. “I think they all wanted to say something to you, something nice. I think they all have something to hide under their uniform, under their flawless skin—something different, something wonderful. And I am absolutely sure that if one of them, just one, stepped forward and supported you, the others wouldn’t sneer. They’d be relieved somebody else did it before them, and they would know it’s safe for them to step forward, too.”

  “But no one did,” said Saskia, and although she was still frowning, it was clear from the look on her face that she wanted to believe the Princess very much.

  “Oh, give them time,” said the Princess, standing up and waving a hand. “Or be the first to stop hiding and speak to them.”

  That unexpected suggestion left Saskia wide-eyed and wondering for a while. Franz, meanwhile, was telling the Skeleton all about the hardships of human life—then again, it was Franz, so he could just be recounting his misfortunes aloud to himself.

  “Humans can’t even jump onto a fridge,” he was grumbling, “and I was six times as short as I’m now when I could do that. It’s pathetic!”

  The Skeleton’s eye flowers had a droop and a slightly withered look to them.

  “Stop it, Franz, you’re depressing him!” said Saskia, discarding her own troubles and putting her energy into entertaining the Skeleton.

  Franz watched her from under knitted white eyebrows while she tickled the fat mouse’s stomach with her little finger until it snored itself awake. The girl hid her hands under the table, and the confused mouse fell asleep almost immediately only to be woken again in a moment.

  “You try it, Skeleton, this mouse’s so funny!” a giggling Saskia kept repeating.

  Franz leaned closer to the Princess, who had resumed her seat beside him and was watching the girl too, only with a more indulgent expression. “Are you even planning on telling her at all that there is no skeleton?” he whispered so that Saskia couldn’t hear him.

  “Dear Franz,” said the Princess in an undertone, so that Saskia couldn’t hear her either, “you make a very proper human.”

  “Thank you,” Franz replied stiffly, “but I was doing fine without your compliments. What’s that to do with the child’s having an imaginary friend and your playing along?”

  “Imaginary! Look how happy she is!” The Princess refilled her goblet and sighed. “Maybe your problem is you don’t have any—imagination, I mean. Maybe that’s why you’re so unhappy.”

  “I’d rather be unhappy that delusional.” Franz’s reproving stare followed the goblet as it rose to the Princess’s lips. “Or completely crackpot, like some,” he added still more quietly.

  “Well, ho
nestly, I’m surprised you believe in yourself. How did you manage to become human in the first place, with a mind so narrow?” Though the Princess’s tone was scolding, her eyes twinkled cunningly, reflecting the candlelight.

  A huff of indignation came out of Franz’s flaring nostrils. “Is that my fault now? I’d still be a cat if it weren’t for you and the girl. I am what I am because you believe it is so. You read this personality into me. Oh, Franz is moody, Franz is sulking, Franz enjoys classical music, isn’t that adorable? Franz this, Franz that! I just wanted to eat, sleep, and look out of the window. Lifelong meditation. Observation. Enjoyment. That’s what the whole thing’s about. The human condition, if you ask me, and even if you don’t ask me, is a deviation, an illness! Imagination is a horrible mutation. Creativity? Intoxication! Fever! You should all be taking those metal pills!”

  Leaping out of his chair (and almost out of his skin, too) with resentment, Franz pointed to the chained and padlocked medicine cabinet on the nearest wall, where, behind the glass, there were two shelves crammed full of labeled orange bottles.