The Merry Spinster

by Mallory Ortberg

  “But what a terrible waste that must be,” cried the girl. “I can think of a dozen better things I could do with a soul.”

  “More’s the pity that you haven’t got one, for I have no doubt you could put a soul to a great deal of good use.”

  “I should like to get a soul,” said the girl. “The prince has one already. I might have his. I have put my mouth on his mouth, and surely that counts for something, even among savages.”

  “Getting a soul takes suffering and solitude,” said her grandmother. “We are much better off than they are, no matter how much they squander their birthright.”

  “I’ve suffered already,” said the girl. “Not much, perhaps, but I should still like to get something for my suffering.”

  “You could,” said her grandmother, “if the prince were to love you such that his own people were nothing to him, and if he forgot the two parents who made him, and if all his thoughts were yours, and if he were wed to you with his full heart, then his soul could become yours, and you would gain a share in his eternity.”

  The girl thought of the prince, quiet and still on the sand with his dark eyes closed, and she thought about gaining something from him. She considered his soul quite her own already, minus a few necessary formalities.

  The very next day the girl swam out from her father’s house to visit the sea-witch. She didn’t call her a sea-witch, obviously, because people who live there don’t go around affixing the word “sea” to everything any more than you would speak of visiting your land-doctor or your dirt-grocer. She didn’t call her a witch either, as a matter of fact, but no translation is perfect, and for our present purposes, there’s not much more you need to understand about the sort of person the sea-witch was. After all, it was true that she lived in the sea, and it was true that she could make things happen that other people couldn’t. She was a very effective and useful person, which meant, as far as the girl was concerned (although, you will remember, that you would never call her a girl, if you got a good look at her), a sea-witch was just another sort of king’s daughter.

  Now here is what the sea-witch looked like: she was hinged neatly in the middle; she could jump very high by bending and straightening her great-foot; she could whistle water through her teeth and hit a swimming fish one hundred yards away; and she had no head at all. She was lovely to look at.

  And here is what the sea-witch’s house looked like: it was composed of a hundred white chimneys that shot out merry little clouds of particulate all night and day. The chimneys were crusted in mottled bits of iron and long drips of sulfide and flanked with lovely pale calcium blooms. Out of this smoking corridor grew tube worms, which the sea-witch tended herself, and which had no faces at all, only pale, slender midguts and foreguts that concluded in a red mouth that danced in the current. The mouths turned and followed carefully everything that swam by. The sea-witch’s home was bounded by a dead brine pool and old dripping waterfalls, and a soft shower of marine snow was always pattering lightly against the roof of her chimney-palace. It was too hot and too cold and too wriggling for anyone else to live there, so the sea-witch owned it. She turned it out quite neatly, too.

  The girl felt the worms twitching underneath as she swam, mouthing at her limbs softly as she passed over. She went faster until she came to a chimney that would have looked to you like a squat stone beehive—it didn’t look like a beehive to her, but what she thought it looked like wouldn’t mean anything to you. Anyhow, it was in this chimney that the witch lived, and so it was this chimney that the girl came to.

  “Good day and well-met, girl,” said the witch, spitting a long stream of nacre on the floor in welcome. “Come in, then, and bring your business with you.”

  “Good day and thanks, Mother,” the girl said (who was polite as well as efficient). “I’m off to get a soul, and a prince besides, if I can manage it.”

  “Can’t see what need you have for one,” the witch said. “What will you do with it?”

  “Oh, I haven’t got any plans, exactly,” the girl said. “Only I’m good at figuring out what to do with things, and the ones that have the things to begin with don’t seem interested in putting them to use, just in keeping them where they already are.”

  The witch nodded, or made an approximate gesture that involved folding and unfolding herself quickly. “I can’t abide selfishness either, an it comes to that. Well, good luck to you, and if you manage to bring either one back, I’ll look forward to a good meal in your company. But better a plate of herbs where love is than a stalled ox and hatred therewith.” (The witch didn’t say “ox,” or “love” either, if it comes to that, but there are other books that better explain that sort of thing. Hadn’t you better be reading some of them?)

  The witch looked the girl up and down with a critical eye. (You know, by now, I think, that the witch had no eyes, and I need not explain every little difference to you, but bear in mind that even if someone is merely in possession of a clot of photosensitive cells and a rudimentary sort of lens that is only dimly aware when a shadow passes overhead, they might be just as proud of that clot of cells and that rudimentary lens as you are of your own two eyes.)

  “You’ll need a great deal more skin than you’ve got now,” she added, “and you’ll be dried out all over, and you’ll get two limbs on the top half of you and two on the bottom and no more than that, and if you lose one, that’s the end of it. There’s no growing those back; no one up there abides by the blessed mandate of Radial Symmetry. Cut one of them in half—in either direction!—and they just fall apart stupidly, never to move again.”

  “That will be novel,” the girl managed to say, although she looked more than a little pale at the prospect of losing Radial Symmetry, which she had been catechized in from her earliest memory.

  Then the witch laughed so loud that she fell to the ground and wriggled about. “I will prepare a drink for you, with which you must swim to land tomorrow before sunrise, and sit on the shore and drink. All manner of things will happen to you: you’ll grow a hard plate of bone that will split the vaults inside your head; two soft cysts to force the air out of your chest; sprout studs of bone all in a line down your back; you will be mammalized, and it will hurt, and it will hurt until you are back here with all of us, in your own form again. But all who see you will consider you lovely, and you will be able to open your eyes wide against the sun. If you can bear this, then I can help you.”

  “I can bear this,” the girl said. “Most likely,” she added, for she had never actually had to bear anything as yet and was only guessing.

  “Well, I’ll give it you, then,” said the witch, “but you should be careful, because I don’t know much about the undoing of it, and once you’ve become human all over—instead of just partway, as you are now, and might I say, I like your present form much better—you might become particularized and believe you belong to yourself only, instead of in the normal way—you belonging to all of us and we all to you—and never return to the water, or your sisters, or your father’s house, or mine. And if you were to fail in winning the prince or his soul, if he were to join with another or hoard his own soul to himself, then you might die, and turn into nothing useful at all, and I should have wasted an afternoon, and gone hungry to boot.”

  “Just the same,” the girl said, “I don’t think I’ll fail.”

  “Another thing,” said the witch. “I can’t do voices. I mean that I can’t make you a new mouth that makes sounds. Not the kind they could understand, anyhow. I can make you a mouth that can suck in air and blow it back out again, and a mouth that can eat the right kind of food and swallow it, but I can’t make a mouth that can do all that and put a voice in it, too. So you won’t have one.”

  It was a disappointment, but like any good administrator, the girl never held anyone responsible for their natural limitations. “No voice, then,” she agreed. “I’ll make up the difference somehow.” It was getting to be a great deal of trouble for a single prince, but there was
a great deal to be said for doing something unprecedented.

  At any rate, everything happened exactly as the witch said it would; the girl beached herself in the dark, drank from her little cup, experienced a fair bit of discomfort as her skeleton made itself known in new and distressing configurations, tested out her voice, found none, and assessed the situation, along with her assets (alive, conscious, in possession of a singleness of purpose, also in possession of eyelids) and disadvantages (unable to change color, one-way joints, a sudden and profound sense of isolation). Then the sun came up. The prince was there, which was remarkably convenient.

  His eyes were so fixed upon her that she decided she must have uncommonly attractive legs, or else somehow the principle (if not the reality) of Radial Symmetry was visible in her new form. She found, somewhat to her surprise, that she was rather put off by his obvious approval, given how much trouble she had gone to just to split so much of herself apart. He had not, it had to be said, asked her to suffer this for him, and so could not strictly be blamed, but she found herself doing it just the same.

  The prince asked her who she was and where she came from, and she looked at him with not a little disgust, that he did not know her. No point in suffering for someone who hasn’t asked you to do it, the witch had said, but please yourself; he won’t recognize what pain looks like on your face, that’s for certain. He evidently couldn’t recognize disgust, either, taking it for a softer emotion and guiding her inside a nearby building. She couldn’t help feeling, even in the midst of everything, a little thrill at the prospect of stepping through her first front door. She walked through it as easily as anything, although every step she took was as painful as promised.

  As far as all that goes: the girl was not from the sort of people who took much interest in cataloguing various types of pain. Nor would she be interested in the sort of person who was, chiefly because knowing more about something one cannot change is not especially useful. So as far as the girl was concerned, things either hurt, or they didn’t, and you could either make them stop hurting, or you couldn’t. Walking hurt, and the sun boiled hot and furious over the horizon every morning, and the food she ate was bloodless and dry and made her stomach twist up, but she couldn’t help any of that, and that’s all there was to say about it.

  At any rate, she couldn’t say anything about the pain, and so no one noticed, least of all the prince, who brought her home with him in a careless sort of way, and covered her in clothes and smiled at her and gestured broadly at a small stuffed sort of bed that was evidently meant for her use and not to be shared. He seemed to have a frenzy for clothes shared by all members of the administration; the girl could scarcely walk from one room to the next without being frantically presented with clothes by someone or other.

  It was strange, the girl thought, that the prince had not yet bothered to thank her for coming to see him, for rearranging her skin, for all the suffering she was enduring for him, simply because he had not asked her to and did not know why she did it. It seemed to her that he was much nicer when he had been drowned and his eyes were closed, but that did not make her love him any less. He simply had a great deal to be taught.

  The prince kept her near him at all times, and was forever tipping her chin up with his two longest fingers, as if he remembered having his face pointed to the sky as she swam him to shore. Her little stuffed bed sat just inside the door to his own room, and she slept when he slept, like a favorite dog. Where he went, she went, but never to assist or facilitate, merely to attend.

  There had been plenty of activity at the beginning over whether the girl could speak, or was planning on it anytime soon, or whether she should be made to speak, or if she belonged to anyone (which she considered a ridiculous question, as she belonged to everyone). She expressed no preference one way or the other, and eventually she was left alone about it. They did not seem anxious to find a purpose for her. She was not going to be useful, she was not going to be shared, she was not even going to be eaten. It was with mounting horror that she realized their selfishness extended even to her.

  She took to sneaking out of her bed after everyone else had gone to sleep and taking the steps that led down to the sea, where she could bathe her feet in salt water and think about her old garden. Once during the night, her sisters came up linked arm-in-arm, chorusing reproachfully at her from the water, and she tried to tell them how severely she had overestimated her ability to make something constructive out of suffering—but she had the wrong sort of mouth, and no voice to tell them with. They waved at her anyhow, and told her of all the work they had been undertaking, and promised to come again.

  After that, they came to the same place every night, and she threw crusts of bread for them to eat, and their bright hair flashed in the lamplight as they lunged to snatch it from the waves with their teeth. After she ran out of bread they would bob around sullenly until she spread her arms wide in apology. Then they would vanish.

  As the days passed she caught herself clinging to the prince more often, and his arms went easily around her, but it never entered his head to forget the two parents who made him, or to make all his thoughts her thoughts, or to wed her with his full heart, or give any part of his soul to her, which was exceedingly frustrating.

  Sometimes the girl would look at him very hard, and try to ask “Do you not love me yet?” with her eyes, and she thought if she had any luck at all, he would begin to find her necessary. She had no luck at all, and began to despair of her plan entirely.

  So she began instead to consider how to minimize her losses, capitalize on her assets, and make a strategic retreat. She did not blame the prince—he was not to blame for her limitations—but she began to think about how she could love him more efficiently. It so happened that very soon the prince had to marry, which was a great relief to the girl, who was beginning to wonder whether the leadership of his country cared about the perpetuation of daughters in the slightest. Then it was said that the particular daughter of a particular neighbor was to be the bride. This struck the girl as unnecessary—why favor specificity over proximity?—but as she was merely a guest and had not been invited to comment upon their cultural practices, she kept her own counsel. The prince still tipped her chin up with his two longest fingers, but now did so distantly, as if something had changed.

  A ship was prepared, and all the favorite members of the court were put on it, and they wobbled cautiously out over the sea, hugging the coastline for three days. The morning they sailed into the bride’s harbor they were greeted by bells and gunfire and cheering, as if the wedding was something that was going to happen to everybody instead of merely two people.

  The bride was brought forth, and the girl had not had time to form an opinion of her before the prince was married. She decided she could love the bride just as easily as she had loved the prince. A fanciful sort of person waved censers about, and the prince and the bride clasped their hands together, and the girl held up the bride’s train. Once again she saw lamps being flung up in every corner; once again rockets disemboweled themselves in a rush to produce light, although this time she could watch without fear of being blinded.

  Then there was a great deal of laughter, and dancing, and motion. The prince never left off putting his fingers all over his bride’s face. Nor could his bride decide for what purpose she had a mouth; one moment it was crammed with food, the next moment it was smeared against some part of the prince. Eventually the two disappeared into the bridal cabin, and everyone left without milled around aimlessly. The crowd bled members belowdecks until eventually no one was left above but the ship’s automated operator at one end and the girl at the other.

  The girl leaned against the edge of the railing and looked out over the sea for signs of morning. She saw a group of her sisters rising out of the water, their heads quite naked, for they had cut off all their hair.

  “Hello again,” they said, “finding you has been awfully tiresome, and we’re very eager to go home. Are you ready to
go home? We’ve brought you a knife, in case you are ready to come home, unless you’d rather die up here and be burnt into ashes. Take it, and visit the prince with it, and let his blood coat your feet, and let them grow back together, and have a sensible body again. The grandmother misses you, and your garden is just wild with polyps, and the witch says never mind about the meal, that she isn’t hungry for anything but to see you home again. All our hair is gone. We gave it to the witch so she could make a knife with it. Well, what have you to say to that?” Then they all sighed deeply and mournfully, for they were not used to making such long speeches.

  The girl tilted her head and waved cheerfully down at them. Then she bound her hair at the back of her neck, pulled her legs back up from the edge of the ship, and disappeared inside the cabin.

  The girl drew back the curtain covering the marriage-bed, and saw the prince sleeping against his bride’s chest. She bent down and kissed his brow, then hers, and then his, then hers once again for good measure. It would be too bad to have suffered so without getting the prince for it, but now it was his and his bride’s turn to suffer. Since the girl had already done her suffering cheerfully, she saw no reason why they should complain either. The knife jumped a little in her hand, and then it jumped first in the prince’s throat, then his bride’s, and a red line trailed after it. Then the girl flung the knife into the sea.

  “Oh, that’s lovely,” she said, and she found that she had a voice again, and that she was not suffering in the least. “That’s so much better. That’s wonderful.” She wriggled her toes around in the blood and left scrunched-up little footprints behind her as she returned to the railing.

  “Hello, sisters,” the girl called out as she waggled her bloody legs over the side. “Oh, but it’s a relief to see all of you. I can’t begin to tell you the extent of my troubles. I’m covered in little fissions—or fissures, I misremember which is which, but I’m split all over like a reef—and I can only move in four directions, none of them interesting, and I don’t care if I never see another soul as long as I live. I want to come home, and be around sensible people, and dig up my garden, and never have to look at the sun again.”