Fairytale
- Fairytale
Once upon a time a man and a woman had a child who lived. Then they had another child and it died, and then another child and that child also died. The first child was a little girl, the second and third were boys. The children were named Katherine, Benjamin, and Robert, but their names were mostly shortened to Kathy, Ben, and Rob. After the death of the third child, the man and the woman chose not to have another child but instead to have a dog that their young daughter christened Lady. The man took pictures of his wife, his daughter, and his dog and then asked his wife to take a picture of himself. The photos were developed and put in the photo album. “Finally, we are four!” the woman wrote beside it, but barely three years later, she left the man and thus, indirectly, her daughter and dog as well.
Once upon a time a man and a woman had a child who lived. Then they had another child and it died, and then another child and that child also died. The first child was a little girl who went on living and got bigger and bigger until, one day, she did not get any bigger: she was fully grown, ready to have children herself who would live or not live.
The little girl knew that once you’ve bled you can have babies, but she bled many times before that finally came to pass: look mama, look papa, a belly for you, a little baby is in there.
The man, the woman, and the daughter sat by the fire and stroked her belly that became fuller and rounder and brought the new child closer. Months went by but the child still wasn’t born. They felt it move in the full, round belly and saw it somersault. Finally they realized the child would never be born and would never die. The little girl would stay pregnant forever and ever; the pregnant belly would be in their midst for always.
Had I dared, I would have shorn off all my hair and carved up my chest with a sharp knife. I would have starved myself and gone around in baggy black clothes. I would have become repentance and mourning.
The night before you died, your father drank from your milk. After that, I couldn’t bear for my breasts to be touched. I didn’t nurse your brother who was born one year later. I wanted to become unsexed, disembodied. There were men, quite a lot of men, for whom grief seemed sexy, who wanted to be in that body trying to disembody itself. The image I had of myself was hardly sexy. A woman who has been skinned and set out on display, naked and rubbed with [End Page 9] salt. Wind is blowing. But nobody sees I am naked and unsexed; nobody sees my veins and muscles and nerves exposed, the salt that stings inside. I must speak. I must open my mouth and let sound come out of it. I am surrounded by beings who laugh and move and eat and roar. They scare me.
I lie in bed and a man lies next to me. My husband. It’s dark, pitch black, we see nothing, only feel. I don’t know what he feels, but what I feel is this: I sit in a deep well and he sits in a deep well. When we both scramble out of our well, we’ll be able to hold hands. It’s not possible to dig a tunnel from my well to his well. There aren’t any ladders against the well’s walls.
Despair’s natural laws are these: a desperate body tries to annihilate itself. There cannot be any contact between desperate and non-desperate bodies. A desperate body that seeks out or has contact with another body is no longer desperate.
Pure despair leads to suicide, to the annihilation of the body, that is to say, of the bond with life, with experience. For the desperate self, the...
