Page 55 of How To Survive This Fairytale

You’re trying not to want anything at all, which is maybe the best you can do.

“Let me see your wing,” she says to Cyrus, and he offers it.She examines it as one might examine a dissected newt, eyes hard and scientific behind her glasses, ideas blowing smoke out her ears.

“And you want this transformation to be permanent?”she asks.

“If that’s possible,” he says.

She clicks her tongue.

“Come back in three days’ time.”

Forty

Memorizinghis body with your eyes.Memorizing his body with your mouth.Memorizing his body with your hands.Letting your body be memorized by his eyes, mouth, hands.In between:Cook, little pot, cook.Holing up at a local inn and never leaving the room.Keeping him safe.Being kept safe.Helping him write a letter to Gertrude.Promising.Confessing.Reassuring.Trying to picture your life and what comes next without him.Coming up with no answer.

Forty-One

You don’t knowif it’s fair to ask this.And you don’t want to be unfair to him, not now, not after how far you’ve come together.You don’t want to be the fisherman’s wife, asking for too much.But you have to ask.You have to ask, so that you never look out at a lake or up at the sky andwonder.You have to ask so you don’t spend every day at the window or on the front porch.You have to ask so you don’t leave the door open.

“Will you visit me?Even just once.”

He takes your face in his hands, soft palms against your beard.

“Do you think, by changing my shape,” he says, “I’m changing my heart?”

Forty-Two

In three days,you take him to the apothecary.

She gives him a vial, and says, “This tincture reactivates the residual magic inside you.One drop works for a day.”

Cyrus looks at the vial, and the milky-white liquid inside it, like an answered wish he cannot yet bring himself to believe in.“So,” he says, “the whole bottle, then…?”

“Would last you for alongtime,” she says.

In a quietly bewildered voice, he says, “Thank you.”

“I could not fix up something permanent like you wanted,” she says, “but I made a second vial.If you drank them both… Well, that is as close to permanent as anyone could make for you.”

When he takes the second vial from her, his shoulders sag with relief.He says, with more feeling, “Yes, thank you.”

You are losing him.Two vials, and that’s it.You have lost him.

“Maybe start with one drop to see if it works,” you suggest as you lead him out of the shop.It is your way of ensuring the tincture’s success as much as it is your attempt to hold onto him for just a little longer.If he sees through your scheme, he doesn’t say as much.He simply agrees with you.

At the lake, Cyrus swallows one drop.

And you’ve never seen anything more beautiful in your life than his body becoming his body.

Forty-Three

You takehim to the place where your story entwined with his, and the lake is the same but the hovel is even more decrepit.Still, there is a hearth inside, and after he swallows his potion, you tuck both vials into the unused hearth for safekeeping.

You spend the whole afternoon watching the water part for him, the ripples he makes.In the evening you whisperCook, little pot, cook, and you eat on the shore while he sinks his elegant neck beneath the surface of the water to eat delicacies he has not tasted in years.He survives his first night of swanhood.He survives the second, too.And the third, fourth, fifth, and sixth.

On the morning of the seventh day, you decide it’s time.

There is a kiss goodbye, except this last kiss is like the first kiss: you press your mouth to his beak, slide your palms over his feathers, and neither of you changes shape.