“What an amazing kind of thing to do,” the girl said, “running a place like that.” Ella could have told her that they had never had a vacation themselves for a quarter of a century and that the hotel had worn her out and finally killed Bill and eaten up their lives for nothing, mortgaged and remortgaged and the payments from the bed and breakfast people not even enough to live on here, but because there was a break or a catch in the girl’s voice that sounded as if she saw the forest ridges and the Inn on its lawns above the river as Ella saw it, as the old, noble, beautiful, remote thing, she said only, “It was hard work,” but smiled a little as she said it.
Stephen came out of the house and straight across the grass, glancing up once at the girl and then down again at the picture he held. It was the framed photograph of Mama and Papa on the porch of the house, the year they bought it, and Ella in her pinafore dress sitting on the top front step, and Baby Stephen sitting in the pram. The girl took it and looked at it for quite a time.
“That’s Mama. That’s Papa. That’s Ella. That’s me, the baby,” he said, and laughed quietly, “huh-huh!”
The girl laughed too and sniffled and wiped her nose and her eyes quite openly. “Look how little all the trees are!” she said. “You’ve been doing a lot of gardening since they took that picture, I guess.” She handed it carefully back across the fence to Stephen. “Thank you for showing it to me,” she said, and her little whiskey voice was so sad that Ella turned her head away and scraped her nails in the dirt trying to seize the broken root, in vain, till the girl had gone, because there was nothing to say to her but what she knew already.
THE STORY
Ann sat erect in the white-painted iron chair on the little flagged terrace behind the house. She wore white, and was barefoot. The old abelia bushes behind her, above the terrace, were in full flower. Her child sat among scattered plastic toys on the edge of the terrace where it met the lawn, near her. Ella looked at them from the kitchen window, through the yellow metal blinds that were slanted to send the hot afternoon light upward to the ceiling, making the low room glow like the wax of a lighted beeswax candle. Todd moved the toys about, but she could not see a pattern in the way he moved or placed them; they did not seem to relate to each other. He did not talk when he picked up one or another. There was no story being told. He dropped an animal figure and picked up a broken-off dandelion flower, dropped it. Only from time to time he made a humming or droning noise, loud enough that Ella could hear it pretty clearly, a rhythmic, nasal sound, “Anh-hanh, anh-hanh, hanh…” When he was making this music of his he swayed or rocked a little and his face, half hidden by thick glasses, brightened and relaxed. He was a pretty child.
His mother, Ann, was very beautiful there in the sunlight, her pale skin shining with sweat, her dark hair loose and bright against the shadow and the small, pale, creamy flowers of the abelia. Had she given promise of such beauty? Ella had thought her rather plain as a child, but then she had held herself back from the child, not looking for her beauty, knowing that if she found it all it meant was losing it, since Stephen and Marie came West so seldom, and after the divorce Marie never wanted to send the child alone. Three or four years would pass when she never saw Ann. And a grandchild’s life goes by so fast, faster than a child’s.
Stephen had been a pretty child, now! People had stopped her to admire him in his little blue and white suit in the pram, or when he was walking and held her hand and walked with her down to the old Cash and Carry Market. His blue eyes were so bright and clear, and his fair hair curled all over his head. And that innocent look some little boys have, that trusting look, he had kept that so long, right into his teens, really. And how Stephen had told stories when he was this child’s age! From morning till night there had been some tale going, till it drove her crazy sometimes, Stephen babbling softly away at table, anywhere, telling his unending saga about the Wood Dog and what was it?—the Puncha. The Puncha, and other characters he had made up out of his head. They didn’t have the TV then, or the bright plastic toys, soldiers and tanks and monsters. While they lived up on the ranch, Stephen had had no playmates at all, unless Shirley brought her girls over for the day. So he told his endless adventures, which Ella could never understand, playing with a toy car or two and bits of mill ends for blocks, or an old spool, wooden the way spools were, and wooden clothespins, and the little husky monotone voice: “So they went up there rrrrrm, rrrrrm, rrrrrm, and they were waiting there, so they went along there, rrrrrm, rrrrrm, so then the road stopped and they fell off, they fell down, down, down, help help where’s Puncha?” And so on and on like that, even in his bed at night.
“Stephen?”
“Yes Mama!”
“Hush now and go to sleep!”
“I am asleep, Mama!” Virtuous indignation. She hid her laugh. She tiptoed to the door, and in a minute the little voice would begin to whisper again: “So then they said Let’s go to the, to the lake. So there was this boat on the lake and so then Wood Dog started sinking, crash, splash, help help where’s Puncha? Here I am Wood Dog…” Then at last a small yawn. Then silence.
Where did all that go? What happened to it? The funny little boy making everything in the world into his story, he never would have understood any story about a telephone company executive recently married for the third time whose only child by his first marriage was sitting now in the white chair watching her only child by no marriage rock back and forth restlessly and endlessly, droning his music of one nasal syllable.
“Ann,” Ella said, lifting the slatted blind, “diet cola or lemonade?”
“Lemonade, Grandmother.”
What became of it? she asked again, getting the ice out of the refrigerator, getting the glasses down from the cupboard. Why didn’t the story make sense? Such hope she had had for Stephen, so sure he would do something noble. Not a word people used, and of course it was silly to expect a happy ending. Would it have been better to be like poor young Ann, who had no hope or pride beyond the most austere realism—“He won’t be fully self-sufficient, but his dependence level can be reduced a good deal…” Was it better, more honest, to tell only very short stories, like that? Were all the others mere lies, romances?
She put the two tall tumblers and the plastic cup on a tray, filled them with ice and lemonade, then clicked her tongue at herself in disgust, took the ice out of Todd’s cup, and refilled it with plain lemonade. She put four animal crackers in a row on the tray and carried it out, batting the screen door shut behind her with her foot. Ann stood up and took the tray from her and set it down on the wobbly iron table, its curlicues clogged solid with years of repainting with white enamel, but still rusting through in spots.
“Can someone have the cookies?” Ella inquired softly.
“Oh, yes,” Ann said. “Oh, very much yes. Todd. Look what’s here. Look what Grandmother brought you!”
The thick little glasses peered round. The child got up and came to the table.
“Grandmother will give you a cookie, Todd,” the young mother said, clear and serious.
The child stood still.
Ella picked up an animal cracker. “Here you are, sweetie,” she said. “It’s a tiger, I do believe. Here comes the tiger, walking to you.” She walked the cracker across the tray, hopped it over the edge of the tray, and walked it onto the table’s edge. She was not sure the four-year-old was watching.
“Take it, Todd,” the mother said.
Slowly the child raised his open hand towards the table.
“Hop!” Ella said, hopping the tiger into the hand.
Todd looked at the tiger and then at his mother.
“Eat it, Todd. It’s very good.”
The child stood still, the cracker lying on his palm. He looked at it again. “Hop,” he said.
“That’s right! It went Hop! right to Toddie!” Ella said. Tears came into her eyes. She walked the next cracker across the tray. “This one is a pig. It can go Hop! too, Toddie. Do you want it to go Hop?”
It was better than no story at all.
“Hop!” said the great-grandmother.
Record of First Publication
Volume One: Where on Earth
“Introduction,” copyright © 2012 by Ursula K. Le Guin.
“Brothers and Sisters,” copyright © 1976 by Ursula K. Le Guin; first appeared in The Little Magazine.
“A Week in the Country,” copyright © 1976, 2004 by Ursula K. Le Guin; first appeared in The Little Magazine.
“Unlocking the Air,” copyright 1990 by Ursula K. Le Guin; first appeared in Playboy.
“Imaginary Countries,” copyright © 1973, 2001 by Ursula K. Le Guin; first appeared in The Harvard Advocate.
“The Diary of the Rose,” copyright © 1976, 2004 by Ursula K. Le Guin; first appeared in Future Power.
“Direction of the Road” copyright © 1974, 2002 by Ursula K. Le Guin; first appeared in Orbit 14.
“The White Donkey,” copyright © 1980 by Ursula K. Le Guin; first appeared in TriQuarterly.
“Gwilan’s Harp,” copyright © 1977, 2005 by Ursula K. Le Guin; first appeared in Redbook.
“May’s Lion,” copyright © 1983 by Ursula K. Le Guin; first appeared in Fellowship of the Stars.
“Buffalo Gals, Won’t You Come Out Tonight,” copyright © 1987 by Ursula K. Le Guin; first appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.
“Horse Camp,” copyright © 1986 by Ursula K. Le Guin; first appeared in The New Yorker.
“The Water is Wide,” copyright © 1976, 2004, by Ursula K. Le Guin; first appeared as a chapbook from Pendragon Press.
“The Lost Children,” copyright © 1996 by Ursula K. Le Guin; first appeared in Thirteenth Moon.
“Texts,” copyright © 1990 by Ursula K. Le Guin; first appeared in American Short Fiction as part of the PEN Syndication Fiction Project.
“Sleepwalkers,” copyright © 1991 by Ursula K. Le Guin; first appeared in Mississippi Mud.
“Hand, Cup, Shell,” copyright © 1989 by Ursula K. Le Guin; first appeared in The New Yorker.
“Ether OR,” copyright © 1995 by Ursula K. Le Guin; first appeared in Asimov’s.
“Half Past Four,” copyright © 1987 by Ursula K. Le Guin; first appeared in The New Yorker.
Volume Two: Outer Space, Inner Lands
“Introduction,” copyright © 2012 by Ursula K. Le Guin.
“The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” copyright © 1973, 2001 by Ursula K. Le Guin; first appeared in New Dimensions 3.
“Semley’s Necklace,” copyright © 1964, 1975 by Ursula K. Le Guin; first appeared as “Dowry of the Angyar” in Amazing Stories.
“Nine Lives,” copyright © 1969, 1997 by Ursula K. Le Guin; first appeared in Playboy.
“Mazes,” copyright © 1975, 2003 by Ursula K. Le Guin; first appeared in Epoch.
“The First Contact with the Gorgonids,” copyright © 1991 by Ursula K. Le Guin; first appeared in Omni.
“The Shobies’ Story,” copyright © 1990 by Ursula K. Le Guin; first appeared in Universe.
“Betrayals,” copyright © 1994 by Ursula K. Le Guin; first appeared in The Blue Motel.
“The Matter of Seggri,” copyright © 1994 by Ursula K. Le Guin; first appeared in Crank!
“Solitude,” copyright © 1994 by Ursula K. Le Guin; first appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.
“The Wild Girls,” copyright © 2002 by Ursula K. Le Guin; first appeared in Asimov’s.
“The Fliers of Gy,” copyright © 2000 by Ursula K. Le Guin; first appeared on www.scifi.com.
“The Silence of the Asonu” copyright © 1998 by Ursula K. Le Guin; first appeared as “The Wisdom of the Asonu” in Orion.
“The Ascent of the North Face,” copyright © 1983 by Ursula K. Le Guin; first appeared in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine.
“The Author of the Acacia Seeds” copyright © 1974 by Ursula K. Le Guin; first appeared in Fellowship of the Stars.
“The Wife’s Story,” copyright © 1982 by Ursula K. Le Guin; first appeared in The Compass Rose.
“The Rule of Names” copyright © 1964 by Ursula K. Le Guin; first appeared in Fantastic.
“Small Change,” copyright © 1981 by Ursula K. Le Guin; first appeared in Tor zu den Sternen.
“The Poacher,” copyright © 1992 by Ursula K. Le Guin; first appeared in Xanadu.
“Sur,” copyright © 1982 by Ursula K. Le Guin; first appeared in The New Yorker.
“She Unnames Them,” copyright © 1985 by Ursula K. Le Guin; first appeared in The New Yorker.
About the Author
Ursula K. Le Guin has published twenty-one novels, eleven volumes of short stories, four collections of essays, twelve books for children, six volumes of poetry and four of translation, and has received the Hugo, Nebula, National Book Award, and PEN-Malamud awards, among others. Her recent publications include the novel Lavinia, The Wild Girls, an essay collection, Cheek by Jowl, and Finding My Elegy, New and Selected Poems. She lives in Portland, Oregon. (ursulakleguin.com)
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