004. myth
Who knows what the vengeful spirits would make of the eldest daughter, not-quite-living, not-quite-dead?
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When the most powerful man in the village was young, he made an arrangement with the gods. Each year, he provides them with the most impossibly beautiful handwoven pants that mankind has to offer in exchange for guaranteed safety and prosperity. In this forested region so often beset by fires and droughts and wolves, it is a deal that each of the neighboring villages greatly envy.
The most powerful man in the village has—in addition to the mill and workshop and estate and divine arrangement—two daughters. One daughter is a child even more precious than the beautiful linens and silks of the workshop. The other daughter is beautiful and stubborn, as are all mythological daughters in her position and at her age, there on the precipice of bridehood. He swears he will never forgive her greatest betrayal to date: her recent refusal to marry the equally beautiful son of the coat maker from the neighboring hamlet. The most powerful man in the village feels his heart sink every time he thinks of the great potential of what could have been: the village could have offered full suits to the gods. They could have accumulated even more goodwill. Even more blessings raining down over their humble human heads.
As it stood, though, the grace of the gods never seemed to spread through the town evenly. Though the most powerful man in the village lived a life of blissful ease and merriment, the lives of the everyday villagers were, more or less, ordinary. But though they had their heartbreaks and setbacks and obstacles, the villagers ultimately found that true tragedies were rare. Many years ago, they agreed to shelter a representative from the gods, an accountant of sorts. In the center square resides a tiny skeleton who keeps a record of every worldly grievance from the village in a skin-bound tome.
As summer slips away and the annual festival looms, the villagers watch the forest’s edge with awe and gratitude, that mysterious forest where the membrane between the human world and the country of the gods was light as silk. The villagers all knew that on the day of the festival, they would each wear their own pair of beautiful, ceremonial trousers and all of their woes would melt away into the illusion of true prosperity, beauty, and peace, if only for a day. And then the next morning, they’d return to their rough-hewn threads, ordinary as the earth beneath their feet but invisibly protected from true disaster for the coming cycle of seasons. And every week, as they always have, they will pay the most powerful man in the village for their continued protection.
Days away from the annual festival, the most powerful man in the village receives a message from the five spinster sisters, who, they say, live in a collapsing manor in the heart of the forest. They also say one sister speaks of your future, one interprets your full past, and one sees you as you are. One tells you lies that feel like the truth and one tells you the truth you can’t believe. The man in his beautiful walled garden listens carefully to the simple words of the messenger, in which, he must assume, the sisters speak as one: Danger ahead. Let the children visit us. Help us fix our well. He gives the messenger a chunk of fresh bread and sends him on his way. He forgets this message almost entirely.
The morning sun crests over the treetops on festival day and the village is already abuzz with life and color, slow-roasted meat and ancient songs, lanterns hung and the tiny skeleton wreathed in garlands. And of course, everyone arrives dressed in their finest, wrinkly from the year’s storage. At the center square, the heart of all ceremony, rests an altar built around a mighty hand-carved chest. The silken pants for the gods lie within, and on this day where the mortal world intersects with the country of the gods, the spirits retrieve the offering.
The eldest daughter of the most powerful man in the village awakens on festival day with her left eyeball having fallen from its socket and rolled across the bedchamber floor. A handful of long, dark hair slides down her shoulder like dead leaves. In the looking glass, the eldest daughter finds her once dewy skin has started to pucker, shrivel, and grey, the skin of her smooth arms having begun to peel from the bone in fleshy strips. She weeps and spits three rotted teeth into the washbasin as she wraps her face and limbs in muslin discarded from the mill, the realization dawning that her body has suddenly begun to decay.
The eldest daughter meets her lover where he works at the village cemetery, a groundskeeper and grave-maker. With her cloak pulled tight around her face, she explains and passes him a satchel of missing pieces and shed skin, her index finger detaching in his hand. After an initial shock, the lover, particularly familiar with the lives of corpses, bravely proceeds with a plan. For on festival day, with the country of the gods just beyond their reach, all manner of spirits are also liable to wander the land. Who knows what the vengeful spirits would make of the eldest daughter, not-quite-living, not-quite-dead?
The lover gathers the flesh and hair and bones and ruined bandages into a burlap bag and hides it all in the trunk at the foot of his bed. With a plan to bury the bag’s contents in the cemetery later that night, the lover brings the tiny skeleton a carafe of wine, a bribe to look the other way and omit this crime from the ledger. The eldest daughter hides in the humble cottage on the edge of the cemetery, crumbling, holding her breath.
The eldest daughter’s absence in the festivities went unnoticed, for at sunrise a mysterious doppelgänger had stepped from the forest. She has the eldest daughter’s bright skin and flowing hair dark as midnight. As she steps through the crowd, she casts no shadow. When the lover, who is far too smart to be fooled, reports on the doppelgänger, the eldest daughter feels a moment of unease. But then she tells him that she is happy to hide and not have to keep up appearances in her current state amid the day’s festivities. He retrieves her left leg and one deflating lung and a handful of fingernails, wrapping them in burlap and stowing it all in the trunk.
That evening, with the air rich with anticipation and grilled fruit and woodsmoke and fog, the villagers light the lanterns, careful to keep ash and oil away from their finest clothes. A crowd gathers around the center altar bedecked in late-season blooms, the tiny skeleton still in its tiny throne. As the most powerful man in the village opens the mighty hand-carved chest, the song the village begins to sing is an ancient one, sweeping and swelling into the hazy evening.
The man’s scream cuts through the ode like an ax, and those closest to the chest shriek, too, for where there had once been dozens of crisply-folded silken trousers now lay a lumpy sack stuffed with a heap of loose, pulpy flesh and saturated by a thick puddle of blood.
The townspeople cry, Murder?! The tiny skeleton leaps into action, dispatching signals by flare and firework to those gods lurking nearby. And the most powerful man in the village locks his daughters up in their fortified estate, remarking upon how agreeable his eldest has become in light of the emergency at hand. The youngest daughter regards the doppelgänger with a suspicion that goes unnoticed.
In the days that follow the festival, mysterious occurrences befall the village. Unknown, utterly anonymous children with no memory appear in the cavern at the forest’s edge. A goose with no skin and no feathers strolls through the town square, its cries echoing the melody of that ancient, festive song. Little spheres of lightning, seemingly benign, float through the town. At first, the spheres of electricity are small as fireflies, but over the course of a few days, the lightning balls multiply and grow to the size of cows, of sheds. A horse that never stops galloping tears through the village several times a day, stamping all village paths with its bloody hoofprints. Three men die in a fire at the mill. When any child laughs, it is the laugh of a deceased relative. The horse continues to run through the village and trails more blood than seems possible. A family of six die in a fire overnight. The goose with no skin and no feathers sleeps curled up at the foot of the tiny skeleton’s throne. A weaver watches two spheres of lighting collide, and when the sky goes lavender, she blacks out. Four of the five spinster sisters die in a fire. Shellshocked, the fifth sister, whose lies resemble the truth, repeats, the only one, the only one, the only one. The child daughter of the most powerful man in the village dies in a fire that licks up the sides of the walled garden and burns blue-violet at its heart.
Soon, the village is in shambles, the air perpetually smoky and brimming with static electricity. The villagers openly weep, haunted and singed and sooty as they help kin and neighbors escape flames or find themselves devastated by infernos of their own. The lover is busy building graves for the bodies, distracting himself from the fact that more and more of the his one true love disintegrates with each passing hour.
One day, the lover finds the doppelgänger waiting for him at the gate of the village cemetery. She beckons him to follow and he trails her to the village, taking in the charred remains of homes and shops, meeting the eye of locals smeared with soot. The doppelgänger wears a pristine, fitted jacket and gorgeous silk pants, carrying a bouquet of first-spring blooms as the barren trees along the path smolder.
She leads the lover to the ceremonial chest in the village square. Open it, she says, and the lover lifts the lid. Inside, curled up, is the eldest daughter, fully in-tact and beautiful as ever. Asleep, he thinks with a rush, until he notices the blueness of her lips, her fingers shredded from desperate clawing at the chest’s walls, the stillness of her chest.
The tiny skeleton, tasked with keeping watch over the chest, droops on its tiny throne, drunk. He watches the doppelgänger dry the drops of wine from the carafe with a silk scarf and put it in her bag. The doppelgänger who resembles the lover’s dead love invites him to a village not too far away, a village just through the forest, a village where they make beautiful slippers, silk slippers fit for the gods, but he is no longer listening.
Image: Leonora Carrington (England, 1917–2011). Bird Bath/Baño de pajaros, 1974. Color serigraph on paper, ed. 13/50. Robert Gumbiner Foundation Collection.