Page 40 of How To Survive This Fairytale

“I loved being a swan, Hans,” he murmurs.“Most people see my wing and pity me, but I was so happy then.No one ever imagines I was happy.Wewere happy.”His irises swallow the moon when he turns his head to look at you.“Gertrude wants to forget it ever happened.Our brothers, too.But I don’t want to forget.I carry the proof in my body.I can never leave it behind.”

Twenty-Five

On a crystallized morning,inside your coming-along home, watching snow as soft and white as down feathers falling from the sky, you ask him: “What was it like?”

A hard question.He smiles as he thinks about it.

“It taught me humility,” he says.“It taught me there’s more to this world worth caring about than money and glory.I never thought the plants that grow in the lakebed could taste better than a feast served on golden platters, but they did.And to move through the water—to feel it part for you, to feel it roll off your back… I didn’t know, until I was a swan, that it was possible to feel so intensely thatI belongedin this world.Inthis world, andtoit.And the sky, Hans.Thesky.Sometimes at night, I’d take to the sky, and I’d open my mouth and pretend I was eating the stars.”

“Isthatwhat you were up to?”You never could have known, and your heart clenches.“I remember you doing that.”

“I’d pretend I was eating them, that I was full of stardust and glowing, so as I came back to earth I must have resembled a falling star.I used to hope someone near or far would make a wish on me.I felt so full of magic I thought I could make someone’s wish come true.”

He looks down at the mug of tea in his hand.His eyes are far away—years away, a different life away.

“I didn’t know I could be that happy,” he says.

Twenty-Six

You are always goingto be a huntsman.It’s your trade and your livelihood and everything you are, like it or not.But that doesn’t mean you don’t get choices.You learned a long time ago you have as many choices as you want.

From now on: no more ducks, no more geese.No more pheasants or grouses.No bird will ever know your arrow again.

Twenty-Seven

After a long dayof renovating the house (so foolish to do this in winter, with the snow and the cold), you sit down on your floor (the table’s laden with tools) and eat a bowl of the stew Cyrus made for you.Bite by bite.Sometimes you need to eat as fast as you can, get it all down before you lose your nerve.Other nights, like tonight, you need to eat slowly.Talk yourself out of the nausea that roils up the back of your throat.Convince yourself to go through with it.Let yourself feel that there is no witch, there is no cage, there is no cauldron.The oven in this house doesn’t even work.Can’t cook me if there’s nothing to cook me in, you tell that childhood fear, and the childhood fear snaps,Could roast you on a spit.You can only talk yourself out of so much.That doesn’t mean it’s not worth trying.

* * *

The next morning, you walk the quarter mile to Cyrus’s cottage to return his dishes.“You know, when I became human again,” he says, taking the dishes and balancing them with arm and wing, “I had to relearn how to chew food.Forgot I couldn’t just swallow.”

There’s a joke you could make here.You don’t.“Must have taken time,” you say.

“Sometimes Istillgo to swallow things whole,” he laughs.“Only remember at the last second that I can’t.”He gives you one of his meaningful looks.“Everything takes more time than it damn well should.”

Twenty-Eight

“I may be old,but I’m notuseless,” says Granny.“Hand me a rake, Hans.”

Once it melts, the snow reveals a blanket of brown, dried grass.Tangles of overgrown weeds.A mess of fallen leaves.A few rotten logs, fallen branches, broken trees.Looking at your wild land, you can’t imagine you’ll ever tame it.You’re sorry you asked for help when the task will doubtless prove futile.

Cyrus claps a hand on your shoulder.“You’ve got an axe, haven’t you?You can take those trees.We’ll clear out the debris.”

“Do you really think we can do this?”

Before Cyrus can answer in his gentle, reassuring way, Granny interrupts.“You wanna leave it this way?”

“No, but?—”

“Then don’t leave it this way.”

The teeth of her rake capture a thick pile of leaves.Red starts picking up branches and carrying them away.You look at Cyrus and catch him smiling.

“You heard the lady,” he says.“Let’s get to work.”

There was a time in your life when a handful of seeds and fertile soil in which to plant them might have saved you.Back then, you never got the chance to find out the difference it might have made.But you can find out now.You can find if it willsave you now.

Twenty-Nine