through a glass, darkly

i wonder if this is wisdom but this is what i know more, now at the dusk of another year -

a pedestal is the most uncomfortable place to be at.

regard is the heaviest burden to bear.

the self is a selfish beast.

a christmas present for the sailor man

Two of my favorite short stories by Neil Gaiman

SNOW, GLASS, APPLES

I do not know what manner of thing she is. None of us do. She killed her mother in the birthing, but that's never enough to account for it.
They call me wise, but I am far from wise, for all that I foresaw fragments of it, frozen moments caught in pools of water or in the cold glass of my mirror. If I were wise I would not have tried to change what I saw. If I were wise I would have killed myself before ever I encountered her, before ever I caught him.
Wise, and a witch, or so they said, and I'd seen his face in my dreams and in reflections for all my life: sixteen years of dreaming of him before he reined his horse by the bridge that morning, and asked my name. He helped me onto his high horse and we rode together to my little cottage, my face buried in the gold of his hair. He asked for the best of what I had; a king's right, it was.
His beard was red-bronze in the morning light, and I knew him, not as a king, for I knew nothing of kings then, but as my love. He took all he wanted from me, the right of kings, but he returned to me on the following day, and on the night after that: his beard so red, his hair so gold, his eyes the blue of a summer sky, his skin tanned the gentle brown of ripe wheat.
His daughter was only a child: no more than five years of age when I came to the palace. A portrait of her dead mother hung in the princess's tower room; a tall woman, hair the colour of dark wood, eyes nut-brown. She was of a different blood to her pale daughter.
The girl would not eat with us.
I do not know where in the palace she ate.
I had my own chambers. My husband the king, he had his own rooms also. When he wanted me he would send for me, and I would go to him, and pleasure him, and take my pleasure with him.
One night, several months after I was brought to the palace, she came to my rooms. She was six. I was embroidering by lamplight, squinting my eyes against the lamp's smoke and fitful illumination. When I looked up, she was there.
"Princess?"
She said nothing. Her eyes were black as coal, black as her hair; her lips were redder than blood. She looked up at me and smiled. Her teeth seemed sharp, even then, in the lamplight.
"What are you doing away from your room?"
"I'm hungry," she said, like any child.
It was winter, when fresh food is a dream of warmth and sunlight; but I had strings of whole apples, cored and dried, hanging from the beams of my chamber, and I pulled an apple down for her.
"Here."
Autumn is the time of drying, of preserving, a time of picking apples, of rendering the goose fat. Winter is the time of hunger, of snow, and of death; and it is the time of the midwinter feast, when we rub the goose-fat into the skin of a whole pig, stuffed with that autumn's apples, then we roast it or spit it, and we prepare to feast upon the crackling.
She took the dried apple from me and began to chew it with her sharp yellow teeth.
"Is it good?"
She nodded. I had always been scared of the little princess, but at that moment I warmed to her and, with my fingers, gently, I stroked her cheek. She looked at me and smiled -- she smiled but rarely -- then she sank her teeth into the base of my thumb, the Mound of Venus, and she drew blood.
I began to shriek, from pain and from surprise; but she looked at me and I fell silent.
The little Princess fastened her mouth to my hand and licked and sucked and drank. When she was finished, she left my chamber. Beneath my gaze the cut that she had made began to close, to scab, and to heal. The next day it was an old scar: I might have cut my hand with a pocket-knife in my childhood.
I had been frozen by her, owned and dominated. That scared me, more than the blood she had fed on. After that night I locked my chamber door at dusk, barring it with an oaken pole, and I had the smith forge iron bars, which he placed across my windows.
My husband, my love, my king, sent for me less and less, and when I came to him he was dizzy, listless, confused. He could no longer make love as a man makes love; and he would not permit me to pleasure him with my mouth: the one time I tried, he started, violently, and began to weep. I pulled my mouth away and held him tightly, until the sobbing had stopped, and he slept, like a child.
I ran my fingers across his skin as he slept. It was covered in a multitude of ancient scars. But I could recall no scars from the days of our courtship, save one, on his side, where a boar had gored him when he was a youth.
Soon he was a shadow of the man I had met and loved by the bridge. His bones showed, blue and white, beneath his skin. I was with him at the last: his hands were cold as stone, his eyes milky-blue, his hair and beard faded and lustreless and limp. He died unshriven, his skin nipped and pocked from head to toe with tiny, old scars.
He weighed near to nothing. The ground was frozen hard, and we could dig no grave for him, so we made a cairn of rocks and stones above his body, as a memorial only, for there was little enough of him left to protect from the hunger of the beasts and the birds.
So I was queen.
And I was foolish, and young -- eighteen summers had come and gone since first I saw daylight -- and I did not do what I would do, now.
If it were today, I would have her heart cut out, true. But then I would have her head and arms and legs cut off. I would have them disembowel her. And then I would watch, in the town square, as the hangman heated the fire to white-heat with bellows, watch unblinking as he consigned each part of her to the fire. I would have archers around the square, who would shoot any bird or animal who came close to the flames, any raven or dog or hawk or rat. And I would not close my eyes until the princess was ash, and a gentle wind could scatter her like snow.
I did not do this thing, and we pay for our mistakes.
They say I was fooled; that it was not her heart. That it was the heart of an animal -- a stag, perhaps, or a boar. They say that, and they are wrong.
And some say (but it is her lie, not mine) that I was given the heart, and that I ate it. Lies and half-truths fall like snow, covering the things that I remember, the things I saw. A landscape, unrecognisable after a snowfall; that is what she has made of my life.
There were scars on my love, her father's thighs, and on his ballock-pouch, and on his male member, when he died.
I did not go with them. They took her in the day, while she slept, and was at her weakest. They took her to the heart of the forest, and there they opened her blouse, and they cut out her heart, and they left her dead, in a gully, for the forest to swallow.
The forest is a dark place, the border to many kingdoms; no-one would be foolish enough to claim jurisdiction over it. Outlaws live in the forest. Robbers live in the forest, and so do wolves. You can ride through the forest for a dozen days and never see a soul; but there are eyes upon you the entire time.
They brought me her heart. I know it was hers -- no sow's heart or doe's would have continued to beat and pulse after it had been cut out, as that one did.
I took it to my chamber.
I did not eat it: I hung it from the beams above my bed, placed it on a length of twine that I strung with rowan-berries, orange-red as a robin's breast; and with bulbs of garlic.
Outside, the snow fell, covering the footprints of my huntsmen, covering her tiny body in the forest where it lay.
I had the smith remove the iron bars from my windows, and I would spend some time in my room each afternoon through the short winter days, gazing out over the forest, until darkness fell.
There were, as I have already stated, people in the forest. They would come out, some of them, for the Spring Fair: a greedy, feral, dangerous people; some were stunted -- dwarfs and midgets and hunchbacks; others had the huge teeth and vacant gazes of idiots; some had fingers like flippers or crab-claws. They would creep out of the forest each year for the Spring Fair, held when the snows had melted.
As a young lass I had worked at the Fair, and they had scared me then, the forest folk. I told fortunes for the Fairgoers, scrying in a pool of still water; and, later, when I was older, in a disc of polished glass, its back all silvered -- a gift from a merchant whose straying horse I had seen in a pool of ink.
The stallholders at the fair were afraid of the forest folk; they would nail their wares to the bare boards of their stalls -- slabs of gingerbread or leather belts were nailed with great iron nails to the wood. If their wares were not nailed, they said, the forest folk would take them, and run away, chewing on the stolen gingerbread, flailing about them with the belts.
The forest folk had money, though: a coin here, another there, sometimes stained green by time or the earth, the face on the coin unknown to even the oldest of us. Also they had things to trade, and thus the fair continued, serving the outcasts and the dwarfs, serving the robbers (if they were circumspect) who preyed on the rare travellers from lands beyond the forest, or on gypsies, or on the deer. (This was robbery in the eyes of the law. The deer were the queen's.)
The years passed by slowly, and my people claimed that I ruled them with wisdom. The heart still hung above by bed, pulsing gently in the night. If there were any who mourned the child, I saw no evidence: she was a thing of terror, back then, and they believed themselves well rid of her.
Spring Fair followed Spring Fair: five of them, each sadder, poorer, shoddier than the one before. Fewer of the forest folk came out of the forest to buy. Those who did seemed subdued and listless. The stallholders stopped nailing their wares to the boards of their stalls. And by the fifth year but a handful of folk came from the forest -- a fearful huddle of little hairy men, and no-one else.
The Lord of the Fair, and his page, came to me when the fair was done. I had known him slightly, before I was queen.
"I do not come to you as my queen," he said.
I said nothing. I listened.
"I come to you because you are wise," he continued. "When you were a child you found a strayed foal by staring into a pool of ink; when you were a maiden you found a lost infant who had wandered far from her mother, by staring into that mirror of yours. You know secrets and you can seek out things hidden. My queen," he asked, "what is taking the forest folk? Next year there will be no Spring Fair. The travellers from other kingdoms have grown scarce and few, the folk of the forest are almost gone. Another year like the last, and we shall all starve."
I commanded my maidservant to bring me my looking-glass. It was a simple thing, a silver-backed glass disk, which I kept wrapped in a doe-skin, in a chest, in my chamber.
They brought it to me, then, and I gazed into it:
She was twelve and she was no longer a little child. Her skin was still pale, her eyes and hair coal-black, her lips as red as blood. She wore the clothes she had worn when she left the castle for the last time -- the blouse, the skirt, -- although they were much let-out, much mended. Over them she wore a leather cloak, and instead of boots she had leather bags, tied with thongs, over her tiny feet.
She was standing in the forest, beside a tree.
As I watched, in the eye of my mind, I saw her edge and step and flitter and pad from tree to tree, like an animal: a bat or a wolf. She was following someone.
He was a monk. He wore sackcloth, and his feet were bare, and scabbed and hard. His beard and tonsure were of a length, overgrown, unshaven.
She watched him from behind the trees. Eventually he paused for the night, and began to make a fire, laying twigs down, breaking up a robin's nest as kindling. He had a tinder-box in his robe, and he knocked the flint against the steel until the sparks caught the tinder and the fire flamed. There had been two eggs in the nest he had found, and these he ate, raw. They cannot have been much of a meal for so big a man.
He sat there in the firelight, and she came out from her hiding place. She crouched down on the other side of the fire, and stared at him. He grinned, as if it were a long time since he had seen another human, and beckoned her over to him.
She stood up and walked around the fire, and waited, an arms-length away. He pulled in his robe until he found a coin -- a tiny, copper penny, -- and tossed it to her. She caught it, and nodded, and went to him. He pulled at the rope around his waist, and his robe swung open. His body was as hairy as a bear's. She pushed him back onto the moss. One hand crept, spider-like, through the tangle of hair, until it closed on his manhood; the other hand traced a circle on his left nipple. He closed his eyes, and fumbled one huge hand under her skirt. She lowered her mouth to the nipple she had been teasing, her smooth skin white on the furry brown body of him.
She sank her teeth deep into his breast. His eyes opened, then they closed again, and she drank.
She straddled him, and she fed. As she did so a thin blackish liquid began to dribble from between her legs...
"Do you know what is keeping the travellers from our town? What is happening to the forest people?" asked the Head of the Fair.
I covered the mirror in doe-skin, and told him that I would personally take it upon myself to make the forest safe once more.
I had to, although she terrified me. I was the queen.
A foolish woman would have gone then into the forest and tried to capture the creature; but I had been foolish once and had no wish to be so a second time.
I spent time with old books, for I could read a little. I spent time with the gypsy women (who passed through our country across the mountains to the south, rather than cross the forest to the north and the west).
I prepared myself, and obtained those things I would need, and when the first snows began to fall, then I was ready.
Naked, I was, and alone in the highest tower of the palace, a place open to the sky. The winds chilled my body; goose-pimples crept across my arms and thighs and breasts. I carried a silver basin, and a basket in which I had placed a silver knife, a silver pin, some tongs, a grey robe and three green apples.
I put them down and stood there, unclothed, on the tower, humble before the night sky and the wind. Had any man seen me standing there, I would have had his eyes; but there was no-one to spy. Clouds scudded across the sky, hiding and uncovering the waning moon.
I took the silver knife, and slashed my left arm -- once, twice, three times. The blood dripped into the basin, scarlet seeming black in the moonlight.
I added the powder from the vial that hung around my neck. It was a brown dust, made of dried herbs and the skin of a particular toad, and from certain other things. It thickened the blood, while preventing it from clotting.
I took the three apples, one by one, and pricked their skins gently with my silver pin. Then I placed the apples in the silver bowl, and let them sit there while the first tiny flakes of snow of the year fell slowly onto my skin, and onto the apples, and onto the blood.
When dawn began to brighten the sky I covered myself with the grey cloak, and took the red apples from the silver bowl, one by one, lifting each into my basket with silver tongs, taking care not to touch it. There was nothing left of my blood or of the brown powder in the silver bowl, save nothing save a black residue, like a verdigris, on the inside.
I buried the bowl in the earth. Then I cast a glamour on the apples (as once, years before, by a bridge, I had cast a glamour on myself), that they were, beyond any doubt, the most wonderful apples in the world; and the crimson blush of their skins was the warm colour of fresh blood.
I pulled the hood of my cloak low over my face, and I took ribbons and pretty hair ornaments with me, placed them above the apples in the reed basket, and I walked alone into the forest, until I came to her dwelling: a high, sandstone cliff, laced with deep caves going back a way into the rock wall.
There were trees and boulders around the cliff-face, and I walked quietly and gently from tree to tree, without disturbing a twig or a fallen leaf. Eventually I found my place to hide, and I waited, and I watched.
After some hours a clutch of dwarfs crawled out of the cave-front -- ugly, misshapen, hairy little men, the old inhabitants of this country. You saw them seldom now.
They vanished into the wood, and none of them spied me, though one of them stopped to piss against the rock I hid behind.
I waited. No more came out.
I went to the cave entrance and hallooed into it, in a cracked old voice.
The scar on my Mound of Venus throbbed and pulsed as she came towards me, out of the darkness, naked and alone.
She was thirteen years of age, my stepdaughter, and nothing marred the perfect whiteness of her skin save for the livid scar on her left breast, where her heart had been cut from her long since.
The insides of her thighs were stained with wet black filth.
She peered at me, hidden, as I was, in my cloak. She looked at me hungrily. "Ribbons, goodwife," I croaked. "Pretty ribbons for your hair..."
She smiled and beckoned to me. A tug; the scar on my hand was pulling me towards her. I did what I had planned to do, but I did it more readily than I had planned: I dropped my basket, and screeched like the bloodless old pedlar woman I was pretending to be, and I ran.
My grey cloak was the colour of the forest, and I was fast; she did not catch me.
I made my way back to the palace.
I did not see it. Let us imagine though, the girl returning, frustrated and hungry, to her cave, and finding my fallen basket on the ground.
What did she do?
I like to think she played first with the ribbons, twined them into her raven hair, looped them around her pale neck or her tiny waist.
And then, curious, she moved the cloth to see what else was in the basket; and she saw the red, red apples.
They smelled like fresh apples, of course; and they also smelled of blood. And she was hungry. I imagine her picking up an apple, pressing it against her cheek, feeling the cold smoothness of it against her skin.
And she opened her mouth and bit deep into it...
By the time I reached my chambers, the heart that hung from the roof-beam, with the apples and hams and the dried sausages, had ceased to beat. It hung there, quietly, without motion or life, and I felt safe once more.
That winter the snows were high and deep, and were late melting. We were all hungry come the spring.
The Spring Fair was slightly improved that year. The forest folk were few, but they were there, and there were travellers from the lands beyond the forest.
I saw the little hairy men of the forest-cave buying and bargaining for pieces of glass, and lumps of crystal and of quartz-rock. They paid for the glass with silver coins -- the spoils of my stepdaughter's depredations, I had no doubt. When it got about what they were buying, townsfolk rushed back to their homes, came back with their lucky crystals, and, in a few cases, with whole sheets of glass.
I thought, briefly, about having them killed, but I did not. As long as the heart hung, silent and immobile and cold, from the beam of my chamber, I was safe, and so were the folk of the forest, and, thus, eventually, the folk of the town.
My twenty-fifth year came, and my stepdaughter had eaten the poisoned fruit two winters' back, when the Prince came to my Palace. He was tall, very tall, with cold green eyes and the swarthy skin of those from beyond the mountains.
He rode with a small retinue: large enough to defend him, small enough that another monarch -- myself, for instance -- would not view him as a potential threat.
I was practical: I thought of the alliance of our lands, thought of the Kingdom running from the forests all the way south to the sea; I thought of my golden-haired bearded love, dead these eight years; and, in the night, I went to the Prince's room.
I am no innocent, although my late husband, who was once my king, was truly my first lover, no matter what they say.
At first the prince seemed excited. He bade me remove my shift, and made me stand in front of the opened window, far from the fire, until my skin was chilled stone-cold. Then he asked me to lie upon my back, with my hands folded across my breasts, my eyes wide open - but staring only at the beams above. He told me not to move, and to breathe as little as possible. He implored me to say nothing. He spread my legs apart.
It was then that he entered me.
As he began to thrust inside me, I felt my hips raise, felt myself begin to match him, grind for grind, push for push. I moaned. I could not help myself.
His manhood slid out of me. I reached out and touched it, a tiny, slippery thing.
"Please," he said, softly. "You must neither move, nor speak. Just lie there on the stones, so cold and so fair."
I tried, but he had lost whatever force it was that had made him virile; and, some short while later, I left the Prince's room, his curses and tears still resounding in my ears.
He left early the next morning, with all his men, and they rode off into the forest.
I imagine his loins, now, as he rode, a knot of frustration at the base of his manhood. I imagine his pale lips pressed so tightly together. Then I imagine his little troupe riding through the forest, finally coming upon the glass-and-crystal cairn of my stepdaughter. So pale. So cold. Naked, beneath the glass, and little more than a girl, and dead.
In my fancy, I can almost feel the sudden hardness of his manhood inside his britches, envision the lust that took him then, the prayers he muttered beneath his breath in thanks for his good fortune. I imagine him negotiating with the little hairy men - offering them gold and spices for the lovely corpse under the crystal mound.
Did they take his gold willingly? Or did they look up to see his men on their horses, with their sharp swords and their spears, and realize they had no alternative?
I do not know. I was not there; I was not scrying. I can only imagine...
Hands, pulling off the lumps of glass and quartz from her cold body. Hands, gently caressing her cold cheek, moving her cold arm, rejoicing to find the corpse still fresh and pliable.
Did he take her there, in front of them all? Or did he have her carried to a secluded nook before he mounted her?
I cannot say.
Did he shake the apple from her throat? Or did her eyes slowly open as he pounded into her cold body; did her mouth open, those red lips part, those sharp yellow teeth close on his swarthy neck, as the blood, which is the life, trickled down her throat, washing down and away the lump of apple, my own, my poison?
I imagine; I do not know.
This I do know: I was woken in the night by her heart pulsing and beating once more. Salt blood dripped onto my face from above. I sat up. My hand burned and pounded as if I had hit the base of my thumb with a rock.
There was a hammering on the door. I felt afraid, but I am a queen, and I would not show fear. I opened the door.
First his men walked in to my chamber, and stood around me, with their sharp swords, and their long spears.
Then he came in; and he spat in my face.
Finally, she walked into my chamber, as she had when I was first a queen, and she was a child of six. She had not changed. Not really.
She pulled down the twine on which her heart was hanging. She pulled off the dried rowan berries, one by one; pulled off the garlic bulb - now a dried thing, after all these years; then she took up her own, her pumping heart -- a small thing, no larger than that of a nanny-goat or a she-bear -- as it brimmed and pumped its blood into her hand.
Her fingernails must have been as sharp as glass: she opened her breast with them, running them over the purple scar. Her chest gaped, suddenly, open and bloodless. She licked her heart, once, as the blood ran over her hands, and she pushed the heart deep into her breast.
I saw her do it. I saw her close the flesh of her breast once more. I saw the purple scar begin to fade.
Her prince looked briefly concerned, but he put his arm around her nonetheless, and they stood, side by side, and they waited.
And she stayed cold, and the bloom of death remained on her lips, and his lust was not diminished in any way.
They told me they would marry, and the kingdoms would indeed be joined. They told me that I would be with them on their wedding day.
It is starting to get hot in here.
They have told the people bad things about me; a little truth to add savour to the dish, but mixed with many lies.
I was bound and kept in a tiny stone cell beneath the palace, and I remained there through the autumn. Today they fetched me out of the cell; they stripped the rags from me, and washed the filth from me, and then they shaved my head and my loins, and they rubbed my skin with goose grease.
The snow was falling as they carried me -- two men at each hand, two men at each leg -- utterly exposed, and spread-eagled and cold, through the midwinter crowds; and brought me to this kiln.
My stepdaughter stood there with her prince. She watched me, in my indignity, but she said nothing.
As they thrust me inside, jeering and chaffing as they did so, I saw one snowflake land upon her white cheek, and remain there without melting.
They closed the kiln-door behind me. It is getting hotter in here, and outside they are singing and cheering and banging on the sides of the kiln.
She was not laughing, or jeering, or talking. She did not sneer at me or turn away. She looked at me, though; and for a moment I saw myself reflected in her eyes.
I will not scream. I will not give them that satisfaction. They will have my body, but my soul and my story are my own, and will die with me.
The goose-grease begins to melt and glisten upon my skin. I shall make no sound at all. I shall think no more on this.
I shall think instead of the snowflake on her cheek.
I think of her hair as black as coal, her lips as red as blood, her skin, snow-white.
END - 5,000 words

THE PRICE

Tramps and vagabonds have marks they make on gateposts and trees and doors, letting others of their kind know a little about the people who live at the houses and farms they pass on their travels. I think cats must leave similar signs; how else to explain the cats who turn up at our door through the year, hungry and flea-ridden and abandoned?
We take them in. We get rid of the fleas and the ticks, feed them and take them to the vet. We pay for them to get their shots, and, indignity upon indignity, we have them neutered or spayed.
And they stay with us, for a few months, or for a year, or for ever.
Most of them arrive in summer. We live in the country, just the right distance out of town for the city-dwellers to abandon their cats near us.
We never seem to have more than eight cats, rarely have less than three. The cat population of my house is currently as follows: Hermione and Pod, tabby and black respectively, the mad sisters who live in my attic office, and do not mingle; Princess, the blue-eyed long-haired white cat, who lived wild in the woods for years before she gave up her wild ways for soft sofas and beds; and, last but largest, Furball, Princess's cushion-like calico long-haired daughter, orange and black and white, whom I discovered as a tiny kitten in our garage one day, strangled and almost dead, her head poked through an old badminton net, and who surprised us all by not dying but instead growing up to be the best-natured cat I have ever encountered.
And then there is the black cat. Who has no other name than the Black Cat, and who turned up almost a month ago. 

We did not realise he was going to be living here at first: he looked too well-fed to be a stray, too old and jaunty to have been abandoned. He looked like a small panther, and he moved like a patch of night.
One day, in the summer, he was lurking about our ramshackle porch: eight or nine years old, at a guess, male, greenish-yellow of eye, very friendly, quite unperturbable. I assumed he belonged to a neighbouring farmer or household.
I went away for a few weeks, to finish writing a book, and when I came home he was still on our porch, living in an old cat- bed one of the children had found for him. He was, however, almost unrecognisable. Patches of fur had gone, and there were deep scratches on his grey skin. The tip of one ear was chewed away. There was a gash beneath one eye, a slice gone from one lip. He looked tired and thin.
We took the Black Cat to the vet, where we got him some antibiotics, which we fed him each night, along with soft cat food.
We wondered who he was fighting. Princess, our white, beautiful, near-feral queen? Raccoons? A rat-tailed, fanged possum?
Each night the scratches would be worse -- one night his side would be chewed-up; the next, it would be his underbelly, raked with claw marks and bloody to the touch.
When it got to that point, I took him down to the basement to recover, beside the furnace and the piles of boxes. He was surprisingly heavy, the Black Cat, and I picked him up and carried him down there, with a cat-basket, and a litter bin, and some food and water. I closed the door behind me. I had to wash the blood from my hands, when I left the basement.
He stayed down there for four days. At first he seemed too weak to feed himself: a cut beneath one eye had rendered him almost one-eyed, and he limped and lolled weakly, thick yellow pus oozing from the cut in his lip.
I went down there every morning and every night, and I fed him, and gave him antibiotics, which I mixed with his canned food, and I dabbed at the worst of the cuts, and spoke to him. He had diarrhoea, and, although I changed his litter daily, the basement stank evilly.
The four days that the Black Cat lived in the basement were a bad four days in my house: the baby slipped in the bath, and banged her head, and might have drowned; I learned that a project I had set my heart on -- adapting Hope Mirrlees' novel Lud in the Mist for the BBC -- was no longer going to happen, and I realised that I did not have the energy to begin again from scratch, pitching it to other networks, or to other media; my daughter left for Summer Camp, and immediately began to send home a plethora of heart-tearing letters and cards, five or six each day, imploring us to take her away; my son had some kind of fight with his best friend, to the point that they were no longer on speaking terms; and returning home one night, my wife hit a deer, who ran out in front of the car. The deer was killed, the car was left undriveable, and my wife sustained a small cut over one eye.
By the fourth day, the cat was prowling the basement, walking haltingly but impatiently between the stacks of books and comics, the boxes of mail and cassettes, of pictures and of gifts and of stuff. He mewed at me to let him out and, reluctantly, I did so.
He went back onto the porch, and slept there for the rest of the day.
The next morning there were deep, new gashes in his flanks, and clumps of black cat-hair -- his -- covered the wooden boards of the porch.
Letters arrived that day from my daughter, telling us that Camp was going better, and she thought she could survive a few days; my son and his friend sorted out their problem, although what the argument was about -- trading cards, computer games, Star Wars or A Girl -- I would never learn. The BBC Executive who had vetoed Lud in the Mist was discovered to have been taking bribes (well, 'questionable loans') from an independent production company, and was sent home on permanent leave: his successor, I was delighted to learn, when she faxed me, was the woman who had initially proposed the project to me before leaving the BBC.
I thought about returning the Black Cat to the basement, but decided against it. Instead, I resolved to try and discover what kind of animal was coming to our house each night, and from there to formulate a plan of action -- to trap it, perhaps.
For birthdays and at Christmas my family gives me gadgets and gizmos, pricy toys which excite my fancy but, ultimately, rarely leave their boxes. There is a food dehydrator and an electric carving knife, a bread-making machine, and, last year's present, a pair of see-in-the-dark binoculars. On Christmas Day I had put the batteries into the binoculars, and had walked about the basement in the dark, too impatient even to wait until nightfall, stalking a flock of imaginary Starlings. (You were warned not to turn it on in the light: that would have damaged the binoculars, and quite possibly your eyes as well.) Afterwards I had put the device back into its box, and it sat there still, in my office, beside the box of computer cables and forgotten bits and pieces.
Perhaps, I thought, if the creature, dog or cat or raccoon or what-have-you, were to see me sitting on the porch, it would not come, so I took a chair into the box-and-coat-room, little larger than a closet, which overlooks the porch, and, when everyone in the house was asleep, I went out onto the porch, and bade the Black Cat goodnight.
That cat, my wife had said, when he first arrived, is a person. And there was something very person-like in his huge, leonine face: his broad black nose, his greenish-yellow eyes, his fanged but amiable mouth (still leaking amber pus from the right lower lip).
I stroked his head, and scratched him beneath the chin, and wished him well. Then I went inside, and turned off the light on the porch.
I sat on my chair, in the darkness inside the house, with the see-in-the-dark binoculars on my lap. I had switched the binoculars on, and a trickle of greenish light came from the eyepieces.
Time passed, in the darkness.
I experimented with looking at the darkness with the binoculars, learning to focus, to see the world in shades of green. I found myself horrified by the number of swarming insects I could see in the night air: it was as if the night world were some kind of nightmarish soup, swimming with life. Then I lowered the binoculars from my eyes, and stared out at the rich blacks and blues of the night, empty and peaceful and calm.
Time passed. I struggled to keep awake, found myself profoundly missing cigarettes and coffee, my two lost addictions. Either of them would have kept my eyes open. But before I had tumbled too far into the world of sleep and dreams a yowl from the garden jerked me fully awake. I fumbled the binoculars to my eyes, and was disappointed to see that it was merely Princess, the white cat, streaking across the front garden like a patch of greenish-white light. She vanished into the woodland to the left of the house, and was gone.
I was about to settle myself back down, when it occurred to me to wonder what exactly had startled Princess so, and I began scanning the middle distance with the binoculars, looking for a huge raccoon, a dog, or a vicious possum. And there was indeed something coming down the driveway, towards the house. I could see it through the binoculars, clear as day.
It was the Devil.
I had never seen the Devil before, and, although I had written about him in the past, if pressed would have confessed that I had no belief in him, other than as an imaginary figure, tragic and Miltonion. The figure coming up the driveway was not Milton's Lucifer. It was the Devil.
My heart began to pound in my chest, to pound so hard that it hurt. I hoped it could not see me, that, in a dark house, behind window-glass, I was hidden.
The figure flickered and changed as it walked up the drive. One moment it was dark, bull-like, minotaurish, the next it was slim and female, and the next it was a cat itself, a scarred, huge grey-green wildcat, its face contorted with hate.
There are steps that lead up to my porch, four white wooden steps in need of a coat of paint (I knew they were white, although they were, like everything else, green through my binoculars). At the bottom of the steps, the Devil stopped, and called out something that I could not understand, three, perhaps four words in a whining, howling language that must have been old and forgotten when Babylon was young; and, although I did not understand the words, I felt the hairs raise on the back of my head as it called.
And then I heard, muffled through the glass, but still audible, a low growl, a challenge, and, slowly, unsteadily, a black figure walked down the steps of the house, away from me, toward the Devil. These days the Black Cat no longer moved like a panther, instead he stumbled and rocked, like a sailor only recently returned to land.
The Devil was a woman, now. She said something soothing and gentle to the cat, in a tongue that sounded like French, and reached out a hand to him. He sank his teeth into her arm, and her lip curled, and she spat at him.
The woman glanced up at me, then, and if I had doubted that she was the Devil before, I was certain of it now: the woman's eyes flashed red fire at me; but you can see no red through the night-vision binoculars, only shades of a green. And the Devil saw me, through the window. It saw me. I am in no doubt about that at all.
The Devil twisted and writhed, and now it was some kind of jackal, a flat-faced, huge-headed, bull-necked creature, halfway between a hyena and a dingo. There were maggots squirming in its mangy fur, and it began to walk up the steps.
The Black Cat leapt upon it, and in seconds they became a rolling, writhing thing, moving faster than my eyes could follow.
All this in silence.
And then a low roar -- down the country road at the bottom of our drive, in the distance, lumbered a late-night truck, its blazing headlights burning bright as green suns through the binoculars. I lowered them from my eyes, and saw only darkness, and the gentle yellow of headlights, and then the red of rear lights as it vanished off again into the nowhere at all.
When I raised the binoculars once more there was nothing to be seen. Only the Black Cat, on the steps, staring up into the air. I trained the binoculars up, and saw something flying away - - a vulture, perhaps, or an eagle -- and then it flew beyond the trees and was gone.
I went out onto the porch, and picked up the Black Cat, and stroked him, and said kind, soothing things to him. He mewled piteously when I first approached him, but, after a while, he went to sleep on my lap, and I put him into his basket, and went upstairs to my bed, to sleep myself. There was dried blood on my tee shirt and jeans, the following morning.
That was a week ago.
The thing that comes to my house does not come every night. But it comes most nights: we know it by the wounds on the cat, and the pain I can see in those leonine eyes. He has lost the use of his front left paw, and his right eye has closed for good.
I wonder what we did to deserve the Black Cat. I wonder who sent him. And, selfish and scared, I wonder how much more he has to give.
ENDS-2400 words


Neil Gaiman
Neil Gaiman was born November 10, 1960. He lives in an odd, rambling house of uncertain location, where he writes in a basement room filled books and old armchairs. He has two cats, who are both quite mad, and two children (make that three children), who are, to his occasional surprise, fairly sane, and a very nice wife. He has recieved a number of awards, and, while he no longer believes that being a grown-up is all it's cracked up to be, still enjoys staying up after his bed-time.

cuteness attack

the neighbourhood stray gave birth to a litter of seven. there are two brown and white speckled ones, a brown one with a white-tipped tail, a white one, two brown ones and two black ones. the fairness complex seems to have gotten to the blackies. they always remain hidden behind the papapet, while their brothers and sisters explore the world on chubby, tottering steps.

when i go downstairs, i usually find them awake and harassing their reed-thin mother. as soon as they see me, they rush towards me. little dogs seem to suffer from the notion that the entire world is their oyster, people included.
the brown one approaches in a fat sideways gait, and sniffs at my toes. when they dont growl, snap, bark or bite back, he decides to get brave, and pounces on them. then he waits expectantly for retaliatory action. when nothing happens for a while, and when i detect what seems to me to be a cocky, show-offy gleam in his little black eyes, i wiggle my toes, and he jumps back like he's been shot, right into the middle of a huddle of the rest of his brothers and sisters, who had gathered behind the brave explorer to watch the show. then everyone runs on drunken little legs back to mom.

nyeh,nyeh,nyeh......i strike terror into canine hearts!

winter is officially begun. there are many little nips in the air. now no one needs to laugh at my nose sticking out of my shawl.

prrrbht!

i have many many new pairs of socks and as a result am very very happy.
i love socks!

revolving resolutions of a revolutionary mind

even atlas must have shrugged sometime under all that load. i am quite certain he must have, otherwise why would that horrid woman get it into her head to write a book about strange well-muscled men cavalierly, rather moronically, carrying a minor planet relieving a slight shoulder-ache? if a half-clad greek (roman? one never knows with those incestuous long-pasters) hero whose very existance is in grave doubt can do it, so can i! i gave in to all the snide remarks about the blog gathering a lot of virtual dust.

so well.

yesterday i saw a horrible, horrible apparition. enough to make my blood run cold. enough to make each hair stand on end (even the ones not on my head). enough to make me stop short in my tracks (and also in the tracks of totally insensitive people who insisit on driving on the same road). enough to make me drop my jaw in horror (metaphorically, mind. even i am not daft enough to do so with so many people watching. allright, possibly watching). enough to make me forget all my favourite hyperboles (and that, my friend, is quite high on the horrible-o-meter).

i came face to face with potential terrors hurtling fast towards me across space and time.

i saw this being who vaguely resembled the possible result of an unfortunate union between a very cross mosquito and an even more cross stick-figure. for kindnes's sake let us call it a 'girl', and i shall henceforth, for the purposes of this peice refer to the being as a 'she'.

the word that most comes to mind while describing her would be 'sharp', followed closely by 'angular' and 'pointed'. sharp nose, sharp fingers, sharp elbows, sharp knees and i wouldn't be surprised if she had sharp eyeballs too. the next time someone spings a 'sharp featured' comment on me, i'm just going to faint away.

i dont want to go that way. no way, no way, no way.
i have made my decision and am going to stick to it now. i'll swallow all the black, gooey, dribbly, congealed messes that my mom forces down my throat in the name of tonics without a murmur, n add a beatific smile while i'm doing it. i'll put one five kilos if it kills me ....... though i can't see what use it will be then. ofcourse the obituary photo will look quite nice....

but this voice in my head cannot be shut up. i mean, the voice that keeps insisting that at the rate that i seem to down vast amouts of tar-like substances (which might actually be tar, for all i know. u can't trust these ayurvedic doctors, i'v always maintained. the 'no side effects' tag is a bit too good to be true) i must be a potential fire-hazard. i might end up spontaneously combusting even if i so much as think the word 'fire'.

oh anyway,
day-1. get-fat-quick-scheme. watch this space. milligram-by-exciting-milligram updates follow.

yi yam not happy

i must have been a hen in my past life. rains make me feel gloomy. feeling under the cloud all day. or is it u-know-what?

am i turning into that most horrendrous of creatures - a giggler? the gang better kill me in the most painful of ways, before i go the aishwary rai way.

fever-pitch

my throat feels as if there are many many many little monsters scraping at its insides with rusty razor-blades .
my eyes feel like they are on fire.
my tongue feels like sawdust.
my nose feels like it would get ripped off from all the itching.
my right ear is aching proper to fall off my head.

someone is going to pay for this!

weird happening number god-knows-what

i yawned so widely (deeply?) that i have pulled something in my right arm. all the lost sleep is telling.
b****y painful.

kathalaya workshop

day one of the storytelling workshop by ms.geeta ramanujam from kathalaya. http://www.kathalaya.org
i am going to use a word i hate - eye-opening. well it was, so hang me. the face, voice, eyes all are such potent tools for weaving stories that captivate and hold a child's attention. it must have been this that mom must have known instinctively all those years back, when as a young mother, she was faced with a rambunctious bundle that demanded to be entertained every moment. i remember nothing of the plots of her stories, but the sense of being very close to a comforting presence and of being tricked into swallowing umpteen balls of rice just so that the story would go on. she could make up stories as she went, and had mastered the art of stopping a story at just the point where the suspense got too much to bear. this is where she would wheedle in one more ball of rice, and i would gulp it down to speed the story along. i remember that after bro n i were a bit more grown up, we would demand to be told stories of trutles that ate moong. dont ask me why turtles, and why ones that did something so unnatural as eat moong. i'v no idea. perhaps kids are just ornery for the fun of it.
anyway,

i cant wait to have my own kids. i'l try eveything i learnt here on them. after all the effort i go through to make them, they better well like it.

hoppity

we caught a frog today.
the little fellow was labouring under some severe identity crisis. the boys found him in the class courtyard, trying to climb up the glass doors, all spread-eagled like spiderman or something. i am now convinced that that old dreaded word-problem from my school days, which went something like if a frog slides back 2 metres for every 3 metres it climbs up a pole (maybe it was not a frog after all. perhaps a monkey?) when will it be able to get out of a hole that is some umpteen metres deep? struck some text-book writer with a sadistic streak when he might have been watching some distant relative of our slimy friend go through a similar circus . anyway,
after getting a ringside view of the amphibian-acrobatics for a good 10 minutes of lunchtime, kalpit caught him/her, and instantly became a hero among the girls who did their bit by squealing most satisfactorily in the best tradition of heroines.

now we are faced with the necessity of having to go insect-hunting to feed him/her, everyday. zenith suggests that we go looking for cobwebs every morning, as they are sure to have some insects trapped in. not a bad idea, but noone seems to have any sympathy to spare for the poor spiders who are soon going to find themselves homeless -and, to add insult to injury- hungry as well! i didnt dare raise this question, coz i dont want my brains picked by demands to go cricket-harvesting, instead of cobweb-robbing. anyway, i hope poor froggy has not given up his soul in the plastic dabba that is his temporary home.

oh, and the paper-crane idea worked! and how!
we now are going to make as many paper cranes as we can, and send it all to the sadako shrine at the hiroshima peace park. the kids are a bit upset that they won't be able to manage a thousand cranes before august 6th, but are chipper about sending a package to japan. some of them are already working on the letter that they plan to send with the cranes.

me jane, you tarzan

i feel like yelling aloud the song 'the wind beneath my feet.....' from the rooftops at dandiya-time loudspeaker pitch. no such song? il just have to write it then.
here goes;

i float, and float and float away,
on a cloud to somewhere far away
the wind beneath my feeeeeeeeeeet.......yay!

everything looks shaky-shimmery
as if through a vaseline-coating...
terrible wish to go about gloating
the wind beneath my feeeeeeeeeeeeeeet.....yii!

not very poetic? so who said i was a poet?

weird happening number 9999

love letter couched in terms of spinoza and physics. what, in god's name is happening?

beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder (causing major eye-ache)

the class decided to have an origami workshop. they are to teach each other whatever items they know. so far, so good.
my death-wish leaped to the fore, and i offered to teach them how to make a paper crane. this met with unanimously approving noises, and i got all self-congratulatory thinking of what a master manipulator i am - the idea being, to trick the little dragons into getting interested in cranes, then in japan, and then to lead it to the hiroshima-nagasaki bombing and then on to a discussion on ww2.
i spent the entire evening learning to make the crane, and got frustrated to the point of wanting to personally shoot/poison/strangle/pan-fry all cranes in the world. i finally did master it - i am not called obsessive for nothing. i managed to finish making one crane, and rushed into class holding aloft the magenta masterpeice and yelled eureka fashion - look-at-this, look-at-this! what's this?
the answer? dinosaur!!!!

robert burns did get it right when he wrote - "The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men / Gang aft a-gley" in his ''to a mouse'.
in case anyone is interested in learning to make the crane, this is a good link http://monkey.org/~aidan/origami/crane

i used this, though.

writers' block? or am i just being a total blockhead? or is my life so non-happening that there is nothing to write about?

konfessions of a kolicky bed-bug

happy are those who get to sleep the livelong day, and then sleep some more.
one of the secrets to having a long and happy life - spend as much of it as you can in the bed. that way,you ensure that you are in no road accident or hijacking or anything else. the worst that could happen is that your family might murder you for being a total sod(ette?). the possibilities of what you could do to pass the time are endless.

a sari spectacle!

aha! i didn't look like a toothpick after all! to quote teesta, merely like a stick! success!!! the blouse dipped scandalously low at the back and equally low at the front. but the argument in some snide corners is that if one does not have anything much at either side, there is not much to fear.
ah well. the kids thought that moa looked smashing. the girls were unanimously in agreement, and the lil' guys thought i looked 'different'. lil'boy english translated into normal human lingo is 'nice'.
clicked many many pictures with the kiddos.

empty nest

last day of school. the kids left today. the girls were in tears. they will always remain special - and to think that i had thought last year that they were the special-most batch that i shall ever teach. now i feel the same about this batch as well.....that no one shall be so special.

the senior section's galaxian tonight. going to wear a sari. the bro is going bonkers with glee making dire predictions about how i shall look like a toothpick with a ribbon around it.

how does one erupt into spontaneous elbow-claps if one has not sharpened one's saw/not had an aha-moment/light-bulb experience/paradigm shift?

ponder-point: what is an 'elbow clap'? does one bang one's elbows together? mine hurt. too bony. and the only sound produced are quiet ouches.
it is one of those institutional idiosyncrasies which get irritatingly popular amongst the worker ants, and become dangerously commonplace. it is like how a hurricane can never be anything but 'devastating' or a review can never be anything but 'rave' or an odour can never be anything but 'rank'........
my teeth are near-worn out from all the gnashing i make them do these days. some others i can't stand are;
paradigm shift (which happens to everyone every other split-second, this being a school for 'life work change' - we take our motto seriously, we do.)
aha moment (which, more often than not, is an OHO!moment or an OH YEAH???moment, or an OH!NO!moment in these parts)
sharpening the saw (all the better to cut each others' necks with? apart from our motto, we take steven covey very seriously too. perhaps more seriously than his wife or son or publisher or even his dog do.)
light-bulb experience (for the chronically dim-witted? one is expected to have one such 'experience' every day. all the energy i burn in getting those bulbs afflicker can probably light up the entire earth for a day or something.)

the gang plus one husband and two kids home for dinner. glad they came. the day was not a total washout after all.
a very nice morning today. dewy. drops kept falling onto our faces and arms as bro drove me to the bus. frosted windows.

things are looking up.







waiting for summer. pomegranates. very oriental. very my name is red. fruit salad time.






reading teesta's manga shakespeare version of romeo and juliet. liking it. plan to use it next year to design a unit on the bard. also thinking of using excerpts from the original, some abridged peices and baz luhrmann's william shakespeare's romeo+juliet. should be fun.

here is a review of the book - readingyear.blogspot.com

the cover looks thus:

that strange feeling around the heart,,, true love or gas?

heppy-wala birthday! silver jubilee!
in amma's words, half a lifetime gone phut!

what a dud day. did nothing but correct the galaxian round 2 essays, and sundry other totally immaterial things. wore the magenta kurta, n the curly cloud. no motivation to dress up. smiling is such a chore.

feeling lost. people are starting to comment. the gang keeps ragging me about the look and are convinced there is some deep dark secret that i'm not divulging. well, there is a deep dark secret, but i'm in no divulging mood thank you. come clean, n have everyone rag me to death? huh! fat chance!that i can do without. i catch myself staring off into space, missing snatches of conversation, sometimes missing entire
conversations....i guess i'l have to wait for it to pass, n hope that it passes. things would be very awkward otherwise.

well.
i made my bed, so now i must do the lying on it, i guess. not very comfortable.

if wishes could be horses....silver jubilee approacheth!

the numbers seem incredible. come tomorrow, n i'l be 25! quarter-century. two and a half decades of walking this earth, and nothing major achieved. time to compose the to-do-before-i-die list.
here goes;
a) travel to the mountains with a biker party, roughing it out, eating momos by the wayside, staying at dharamshalas, breathing fresh air, feeling the wind whip through my hair...
b) straighten the curly cloud
c) adopt a kid
d) get glamorous
e) retire at 40 to a stone cottage in laddakh. totally unwired - no phone, internet, TV
f) volunteer teaching at a school which needs it the most. laddakh again? in the snow bound winters when schools shut down for lack of teachers?
g) learn to play the violin
h) learn urdu. bliss! to be able to read manto and chugtai in the original...
i) get a puppy- a pug or an alsatian
j) write a book
k) buy mom a house in kerala with a mango orchard around it. hens, a vegetable patch, a central courtyard, a swing, red plaster on the sit-out floor....
l) wear an off-shoulder dress! cherry red!
m) learn to apply eye-liner. properly, i mean. atleast enough not to look like a kid has been at one's eyes drawing particularly ziz-zaggy zig zags around them. looking like a colicky panda kills all glamour, past experience tells me
n) learn to eat with chopsticks
o) sponsor a kid's education
p) learn to cook biryani
q) learn karate. will be such a pleasure to kick certain people in the mouth!
r) build my own library
s) backtrack across turkey. with someone.
t) take a road-trip. again with someone.
u) find the someone.
v) watch basic instinct without flinching
w) teach a unit on shakespeare. make it fun. make kids fall in love with the bard's golden words.
x) watch 'the phantom of the opera', and 'jesus christ superstar' live
y) go to the promised land, visit the wailing wall, float on the dead sea, live in a commune
z) swim with the dolphins, snorkel


so many things. will have to keep updating this.

oh, in case any of the gang is wondering what to give me for the b'day, here are a few subtle hints...picture book style.

these are a few of my favourite things.....


a greek island. a house on it. simple stone cottage. freshwater spring.







a pug! to make me feel less bad about the early crows-feet and laugh lines.






a girl's best friend...a pair of them. solitaires.








a bonsai.

the i who came in from the cold

some words that i like - gossamer, epiphany, equivocal, melancholy, lapis lazuli....
such blue words.what do the words one likes the most tell about oneself? that one is an incorrigible kill-joy?

the words just fly off...

farewell

dear sakina aunty,

i hope wherever you are, you are at peace.

on building walls

the idiot needs to be ignored. strongly. cold shouldered. freezingly.
oblivion to idiots!

it does not help that one keeps feeling like one is struggling at one side of a divide.
bad things never come in ones. atleast not to me these days. someone up there is in some foul mood.

shr leaving uk-wards by the 9th. one more friend lost to unholy matrimony.

wanderlust

this is one resolution that i am going to keep - go everywhere that i can, travel, n see how wide-angled it makes my lens to the world.
this weekend it is a'bd again, for the Saptak music festival's last two days.


saw taare zameen par. a relief to like at least one movie! nowhere does it preach, and understands that parents and teachers become tormentors not through sadism or lack of caring, but often through ignorance. the emotional quotient is a bit too high for my taste. still, all for a good cause.
the lil'guy is a find, n aamir looks great, though a bit jaded in some places.



this is the link to the official TZP website. rather well-laid out, much like aamir's blog .