I haven’t seen a mirror in weeks, so I conjure my face in my mind: pale skin, green eyes, black hair. Reluctantly, I imagine the marks of my stay: dirty smudges on the skin, the eyes red-rimmed, the hair a storm cloud of filth. I try to smooth the ghostly suffering away, try to see my young face as it was, but it’s no use. I’m forever marked. I close my eyes, tightly.
In my hand, a weight. A matchbox, silver and hard. Inside are four matches with the power to show me the moments when my life turned, when doors opened and closed, and my path changed forever. I open the matchbox and strike the first match.
The First Match
My mother died at my birth, after cursing aloud the blood-spattered bundle that cost her life and her man. I never knew my father: he left when he found his lover beginning to grow round. My grandmother, strangely untroubled by her failure as an abortionist, told me how she drew me from my mother’s death and wrapped me in cloth, crooning that she would teach me all I needed to know.
She taught me herb-lore and human nature. She showed me how to heal a rash, how to draw the blackness from a wound and how to identify the people who would help or hurt us. We lived in a series of tiny huts, in small villages in need of a wise woman, moving on when a potion didn’t work, when a child died, when cattle stopped breeding, when a wife caught her husband looking sideways at my tall, handsome grandmother—and later at me. At least six villages in my life, but they meld together, like wax melting in the flames of a fire.
My grandmother also taught me that we all had a fate. Some of us, she said, are water, but others are fire. Then she laughed. Only problem is, you don’t know which you are until they come for you.
But I knew. I’ve always known. Children of water are dunked, children of fire become ash. When they came for her, my grandmother screamed as they tried her, and tied her, and fed her to the drowning pool. She had already sent me away by then, telling me to hide in one of the bigger towns, a city perhaps, somewhere I wouldn’t be noticed.
It was she who told me about the rule of matches.
The Second Match
I stand naked at the window watching the snow fall, white as mother’s milk, white as my skin, white as bones. Clean and pale until it hits the street, then corrupted, greyed, darkened.
“Of course I love you,” I say.
I turn to face him, to see his bulk distending the sheets. He is a big man, his belly like that of a pregnant woman, his cock at half-mast under the expensive linen. Tonight is a good night, a lucky night. I’m not on the street, in the snow, with my breasts icy globes and my hair hard with ice. I’m warm. The holes in my shoes don’t matter. The tears in my dress mean nothing.
I give him a smile—my best and brightest—and move to the four-poster bed. My fingers as thin as matchsticks, I reach for the sheet and draw it away from him. He blushes a little.
I start at his feet, his toes in my mouth, then trail up his legs, my tongue leaving silvery saliva as it passes. Then the cock, the core of him, meets my lips and another match ignites in my mouth.
This is how I keep warm. This is how I stay alive.
No wishes to save me—no good fairies or bright angels to watch over me. Just the Little Match Girl with a cunning mouth and a tinderbox between her legs.
The Third Match
“I need to see you again.”
His words were my salvation ... my escape from cold, dirty streets.
A man in need; a man who would protect what he coveted. A man I could hold with the firm grip of my lips and my fingers. A man who sought me out and settled me in a house: small, but pretty, with a handkerchief of a garden, and primrose walls. A man who paid my bills and kept the bed warm when he could escape his wife. A man who wasn’t cautious enough when caught in the grip of the lust I roused in him.
His wife reported me as a witch—I had to be a witch to pry her husband away, didn’t I?
They put me on trial. I admitted to nothing but giving my favours unwisely. My lover, my keeper, my protector, crumbled like a poorly-built wall. He wept in the dock, swearing I had bewitched him with my eyes and caressed him with my lips. He confessed what we’d done, said that I’d done what no self-respecting wife would. The eyes of the men in the court turned to me, bright with fear and desire, warning and want.
The judge was an older man, a serious man, a widower of several years. He was like the others and hoarded his desires like shame and his wants like sin. He packed them away in darkened rooms where they grew fat and lush as mushrooms, covered with shit. He said he would need to consider his judgment carefully. I was to wait in prison, yearning for my primrose walls and handkerchief garden.
The Fourth Match
The judge comes to me and each visit ends the same way—with hard flesh and cries, with slick bodies and heated breath. The last time is the worst as he pushes me against the wall, my face scraping against the stones, blood seeping through my skin. This is my judge, my jury. This is my executioner.
As he slows and shrinks, he says once more. Say you confess, say you repent, say you will be a good girl, and all will be well. I am silent. When I raise my eyes to his, he sees the dark blood on my face, and perhaps the shimmer of red behind my eyes. He raises his hand, scoring a mark on my skin, blood staining his palm. He backs out, whispering my name with a fear that makes me smile.
If I were a witch, I would strike him down. If I were a witch, I would fly from this place. If I were a witch, none would stand before me. Alas, I am only what I am.
I drop my gaze and see what he has carelessly left behind. A matchbox, silver and hard.
Now there’s only one match.
The judge offers salvation if I confess. If I lie. If I beg.
I kick the straw into a mound. I pull the filthy covers from my bed and add them to the kindling. I stand on the small mountain of my unmaking. I take the last match and strike it. It lights with a spit and a crack, and burns merrily at me as I crouch, touching it gently to the tinder.
I refuse to be saved. I am the Little Match Girl and I will burn.
* * *
The Juniper Tree
It begins with the tree.
Branches reach toward the sky; the tree is quite straight. Its roots, conversely, go deep into the soil and spread out, consolidating their hold on the earth, making their foundation unassailable.
It is the tree that watches over all. It was here before the people and the house, frosted brown and white like a cake; it will remain after they are dust and ashes. It watches and winds its way through their lives in much the same way as its roots wind their way into the soil; it is indelible.
The tree holds many stories, they lie in its trunk like age rings. Its memory is a long thing. Some years it sleeps, some years it wakes and watches and listens. Some years it remembers the lives it has given and tasted and taken ...
There was a woman, once, young and pale and very lovely. Her husband had thought a young bride ideal for the getting of heirs. A more robust girl would have been better, he knew, but her green eyes and dark hair caught him. There was nothing else for it but to make her his wife and pray there would be children.
He loved her dearly; she was frail but this did not stop his efforts to plant his seed. The man spent as much time riding his wife as he did his horse and to far less effect—at least on the horse he travelled, conducting business and growing his fortune. His wife, however, seemed to be a barren field, a bad investment.
The juniper tree stood in the back garden. The wife loved its spreading branches and the whispers it made when breezes sang through its limbs and leaves. Of the many gifts her husband made her, her favourite was the simplest. A swing was hung from the strongest branch and on summer evenings the wife would sit and swing, dangling her delicate feet as she hung suspended above the ground, dress catching the air and fluttering behind her. The tree spoke to her and it was words of love she heard, before her husband collected her and took her once again to bed.
One spring, when her husb
and was away travelling, she told the juniper tree of her fears and doubts, of the rigours of her marital bed and of a husband who loved her sometimes too much and sometimes not enough. She leaned against the trunk of the tree, its rough bark smooth under her soft skin, its lower branches seeming to stretch and enfold her. She sank to the base of the tree, curled between the roots and slept for some time. In her sleep she dreamt of love without pain, of gentle caresses, of a lover who took time enough to ensure she was wanting and ready.
When she woke, there were small tears in her skirt and she was wet as she had never been with her husband. Confused, she retreated into the house, throwing uncertain glances at the tree.
She did not mention anything to her husband. When he was next inside her she thought of spreading branches and the touch of bark, and clung to him, rising up to meet him as she never had before. He was surprised but pleased.
The wife began to glow and grow, and it became obvious that her husband had at last sewn fertile seed. They were happy—he would have his longed-for heir and she a respite from his attentions.
The wife grew still.
Her husband was travelling, increasing his fortune so that he would leave a comfortable legacy for his coming child. One night when they lay beside each other the wife said:
“If I should die, bury me beneath the juniper tree.”
Her husband, startled by her turn of thought, but certain he would not have to fulfill his vow in the near future, agreed.
The child killed her. The daughter, pale skinned, streaked with her mother’s blood, was handed to her father, who held the child tightly and named her Simah. The juniper tree flourished, new blossoms bursting forth, fed by the wife’s fertilising form.
The man was rich, and loved his little daughter, but he was lonely. A warm bed and an obliging, soft body were the only things on his mind. When Simah was five, he took a new wife.
Second Wife had a child of her own, a daughter not much older than the widower’s little girl. Second Wife loved her daughter with all her heart and vowed she would love her stepdaughter just as well. She did try (in her heart she knew she had tried) but every time her husband slighted her daughter in favour of his, it grew a little harder. Each snub was a prick and her heart soon became a pincushion of jealousy. She began to take her hurt out on his child, in tiny ways at first, then in larger, more bruising ones.
Simah understood only that her presence angered her stepmother. She grew quieter, tried to shrink so as not to attract the woman’s ire. Without conscious thought she began to dim, to fade, until she was a tiny voice that seldom spoke. She would light up only when her father came home or when she played with her stepsister. On the worst days, she fled to the back garden and hid in the branches of the juniper tree, eating its berries, her face turned to the sun and the wind, taking in for a short while the breath of a place where she was welcome.
Second Wife’s girl, Marlechina, was fond of her stepsister, and tried her best to protect Simah from the worst of Second Wife’s temper. She watched as her mother grew into someone she did not fully recognise. When Simah entered the room it was as if Second Wife darkened. Marlechina did what she could but, ultimately, she was a little girl, no match for the dark worm that curled inside her mother.
When her father was away, Simah was fed less than Marlechina; her clothes became old and worn in spite of her father’s wealth; no new toys became Simah’s while Marlechina’s collection spilled from her room like a flood.
Simah’s father loved her in the casual way men love their daughters, affection without attention. And her father, as fathers are apt to be, was blind when it came to his wife. The domestic sphere troubled him not at all—as long as his belly was sated with tasty foods and his bed was filled with an agreeable softness, he did not worry about what happened in his own house.
On one of his trips, the husband sent gifts home ahead of his arrival. A large box arrived. Inside it, Second Wife found a beautiful necklace for herself, a pretty ring for Marlechina, and for Simah, ribbons and the biggest doll any of them had ever seen. It was almost as big as the little girl and looked enough like her to be a sister, with dark curls and huge blue eyes.
The children held their gifts happily and Second Wife looked, the one to the other. All she saw was the size of Simah’s gift compared to that of Marlechina’s―she did not weigh up the value or even consider that her husband had thought carefully in order to give his stepdaughter a gift she would treasure. She saw it as yet another snub. As she seethed, her own daughter spoke: “Mother, may I have an apple?”
“Yes, in the trunk over there,” she answered. Simah, glancing shyly over the top of her enormous doll, risked a tentative request.
“Mother, may I also have an apple?”
Second Wife turned on the little girl, a refusal at her lips, then paused and nodded. Simah followed her stepsister to the trunk. The woman shadowed her.
Marlechina drew an apple from the trunk and skipped outside to watch the sun shimmer across the red stones of her ring. Simah leaned into the great trunk to reach one of the rosy red apples lying at its bottom. Second Wife grasped the lid of the trunk with both hands and slammed it closed.
The child’s body dropped slowly to the floor outside the trunk, now as still as the giant doll. The woman opened the lid and stared at the child’s severed head. Blue eyes reproached her.
Shaking, Second Wife picked up the body and sat it at the table, then plucked the head from the trunk by its dark curls. Using a long purple scarf, she wrapped the neck tightly so the head appeared to be connected. Only a little blood escaped from beneath the silk. Second Wife hid in the parlour to watch what might happen.
Marlechina skipped inside. She looked at Simah so still and pale at the table, her doll lying on the floor beside her.
“Sister, may I play with your doll?” Receiving no reply, Marlechina gently shook her sister, which provoked nothing but a head wobble.
“Sister, I would play with your doll.” Once again, she received no reply and she frowned at her sister’s unusual perversity.
“Simah, answer me! I wish to play with your doll!” She reached out and violently shook the little girl’s shoulder. This produced a more startling reaction—Simah’s head rolled from her shoulders like a pumpkin dislodged from a windowsill.
Marlechina screamed, and her mother, watching from the parlour, charged into the room, demanding to know what had happened. Marlechina wept as she blurted out the story. The mother looked at the sad little body and its severed head and began to weep. Second Wife steeled herself—she was, after all, a woman who had decapitated a child.
“No one must know what you did, Marlechina,” she said. Marlechina shrank, fear and guilt frosting her veins. “Get me the biggest pot in the pantry. I will put this to rights.”
Second Wife cooked her stepdaughter; she made a lovely stew, with plenty of vegetables and a thick brown sauce. Some of the meat she kept aside, to hang later in the smokehouse to dry. Marlechina stood beside her mother, weeping. Her tears fell into the pot; the salt of her grief seasoning the dish.
When the meat had boiled from Simah’s tiny frame, Marlechina took the bones and wrapped them in a cloth. She carried the sad little bundle and the doll to the back garden. She hid them under a thick pile of leaves at the base of the juniper tree, and ran back inside. She did not see the earth move and shift, the doll and the bones sliding into the dirt as if swallowed, taken to a place of safety.
The husband returned, his belly growling as the odour of cooked meat filled his nostrils. Second Wife piled the plate high with tender flesh and he ate ravenously, not noticing that his wife and stepdaughter did not touch the dish, nor that his own child was nowhere in sight. He ate and ate; the more he had the more he wanted and soon the large pot was empty.
When he finally pushed back his plate he looked for Simah.
“Where’s my daughter?” he asked, picking slivers of meat from his teeth. Second Wife looked meaningfully at h
er own child, and he shook his head. “My own daughter.”
“She has gone,” said Second Wife, her voice rough. “Gone to visit her mother’s sister; she wanted to see her aunt.”
The father grunted, disappointed and disapproving that his daughter had left without his permission, though a stronger imperative had begun to take hold. His belly filled with forbidden meat, he now eyed his wife’s sweetly curved flesh.
He sent Marlechina to her bed and, almost before she disappeared from the dining room, he was on his wife as if he would eat her, too. Plates and pot were thrown aside as he lodged himself firmly within her. Second Wife thought her happiness complete.
The woman grew round.
When her husband was home from his travels, she would draw his hand to her swelling belly and run it over the taut skin. She was kinder to her own daughter, gentle as she watched guilt swim in the child’s eyes and dark shadows grow beneath them.
But she did not say, It was me.
She found herself thinking of the dead child as she rubbed her belly, blinking away tears and wishing things had been different.
Marlechina thought of her stepsister often. One morning as she played beneath the juniper tree, she heard the most marvellous song. Looking up, she spied a magnificent bird, plumed red and blue and gold. The bird sang and its notes began to sound like words:
My mother she killed me,
My father he ate me,
My sister she hid me,
Now my bones lie beneath the juniper tree.
A shower of colour fell toward Marlechina. She reached out, grasped the rainbow, and found coloured ribbons in her hand. The silk shone, glowing like gems in the sunlight. She looked up again but the bird was gone, only the ribbons in her fingers and the memory of its words remained.
The Girl With No Hands and Other Tales Page 7