by Mark Jacobs
*****
“Did he just wink at me?” Pence asked himself. He was watching the reunion from inside his old husk, which the wind had blown to the edge of the small clearing.
The Prince raised his axe over the gardener, screaming, “Arrrrrgh! I’m serious!”
Pence saw there was no time to spare. He raised the penny up high in both hands and looked to the sun confidently. The engraving of the princess’s sad smile glinted in the dwindling light like a candle’s flicker in a small, round window.
Across the garden, cued to the signal of the glinting penny, a bell began to ring.
The Prince looked to the sound, his long nose sweeping side to side like a lighthouse beacon on a foggy night.
Pence ran from the husk to the Queen’s side, but there was nowhere to hide. The Prince turned his head back, unable to spot the source of the ringing noise. Just before he saw Pence standing uncovered next to the Queen’s armpit, the ringing din burst out from a patch of moondaisies and flew straight for the Prince’s face–it was a silver bell with brown and black wings, ringing as hysterically as when the Queen had crashed into the garden gate.
“What’s this? More garden mischief?” the Prince cried in alarm, raising his axe like a field-tennis racket.
The nut wren flew in tightening circles around the Prince’s head, evading his haphazard swings with ease, but the Prince soon saw that this was no enchantment, only a bird and the bell from the bicycle. He calmed his nerves and waited for a clean hit.
Pence had just enough time to climb over the Queen’s shoulder and whisper in her ear, “It is I, Pence. Hurry, this is your only chance for love!”
The Prince took one well-aimed swing at the nut wren and made contact with the broad side of the axe like a steel flyswatter. The silver bell soared like a batted ball over the fence with a final tinny ring; the wren crashed into the underbrush near the gate like a fizzled comet.
While the Prince was distracted the Queen crawled the final pace to the gardener. Pence found a snug ride in the hanging crevice of her bodice, smiling like a child on a swing as he rocked back and forth. And in the short moment before they reached the stump, Pence caught a view of the sun. “You helped me sneak past the Prince–you are a true ally, and I call you my friend in the end, for I expect I go to die. No, no, don’t say anything–it’s true. But I have lived a long and prosperous life. I am an old man, now. I have no regrets. I do wish you to look after my Mother for me when I’m gone–she will need much comfort, for I am her favorite son. Give her warmth from me.” Pence cleared his throat as if embarrassed. “You know I was just kidding the whole time about plotting your untimely demise, right?”
The sun smiled brightly.
“Good,” said Pence, much relieved. “Shall we shake on it?” He held out his hand pleasantly, but just then the Queen touched the gardener’s foot, surprising both the old man and the boy. The gardener’s left hand twitched at the familiarity of her warm skin on his own.
“Yes, yes, almost there,” Pence murmured in rapturous anticipation, getting ready to jump to the gardener’s knee as soon as he was within range. The heartseed pounded fiercely in his chest.
The Prince saw them then and stepped on the Queen’s ankle, stopping her short with a splintering of delicate bones. “Yes, almost there,” echoed the purple-clad giant. “My, listen to your heart, sister… are you scared of me? Whatever I do to you–should I slaughter you now–I will wish you back to your window. Do not fear it.” Then he raised his axe and without ado he cut off her left hand.
The Queen fell flat on her stomach; Pence was squished in her bosom as she fell. A torrent of blood gushed from her arm like a bust dam. Her wrenching screams echoed through the garden; beyond the fence, droves of birds rushed from their trees like startled bats out of a cave. Pence covered his ears with his arms in agony at her shrill, mashing his seashell-sculpted ears into chunky clumps that resembled stepped-on sand castles.
“Tell me now, old fool, how I may live forever,” said the Prince when the Queen ran out of voice, “or it will be her heart I cut for next. I will not ask again.”
The Prince’s words no more reached the gardener’s ears now than a penny ever reaches the bottom of a wishing well. The old man looked only at his princess, who, though losing blood like a bubbling spring, pulled herself up to his side. She nestled into the nook of his armpit and smiled like a girl in the branches of her favorite tree.
“I knew you would be here,” she said to him. “I think a flower told me… But your heart…?” she tried to ask, her pulse fading fast.
“You are my heart,” the gardener whispered in the Queen’s ear. He raised his left arm, weightless as green mist, and placed it on her fresh bleeding stump. A hiss filled the air for a moment, the same as when the old man’s dismembered finger had landed on the white stump the previous afternoon.
Their arms were made into one when the hiss abated. The Queen’s hand and wrist were as white as snow and the blood was gone, evaporated in the fusion. Together, their arms fell into the gardener’s lap. Quickly the whiteness spread to the Queen’s forearm, her elbow, and above. The gardener’s chest, a moment ago ashen gray, was now white as plain as root. Soon his right arm turned white as well, solid wood, still, but no longer charred and cracked. The stub of his excised forefinger grew out like a sapling breaking out of the soil for the first time. His left arm thickened, like a hose filling with water, until it was strong and sturdy. When the Queen’s heart beat, Pence heard it echo in the gardener’s chest and it filled him with excitement.
He leapt from the Queen’s bodice into the gardener’s tangled beard. “When they tell my story, they shall say I crossed from heaven to hell in a single bound, and it shall not be a lie,” he narrated to himself with wry chagrin.
“Did you not hear me last I told you, on that fateful day?” the Prince lorded over them. “Your love I shall not allow. It does not please me. I do not wish it.” He lifted his axe to swing at the gardener. “What say you, now?”
The old man said nothing while the Queen closed her eyes and died, content in his embrace.
“A man of few words,” remarked the Prince. He reared the axe back. “So be it.”
With his head resting at the edge of the stump where half of a charmed heart was carved, the old man closed his eyes to wait. What ancient thoughts swirled through his head then, no one can say. This is the last mystery of old men, and with none but the old is it shared.
Pence looked back and forth from the Prince’s axe to the gardener’s face. All he could see was the old man’s walnut nose and the hairs growing out of it. “This is it,” Pence whispered to his creator, “you’ve got him right where you want him. Use your powers. Obliterate him. He deserves it! Massacre him! Put the hurt on!”
The gardener smiled his best grandfatherly smile.
The Prince swung his ancient weapon, the dragonheads screeching their air-splitting whistle.
The old man’s leg jerked as he died, kicking the bucket beside him. The water soaked into the ground around his heels and his feet sank slowly into the wet silt like thirsty roots.
There were a hundred and more rings in the old man’s neck, now a stump in its own right. His head rolled into the checkered pumpkin patch. His heart, of course, had stopped beating long ago.
The gardener’s beard was cut free along with his head, and Pence–peeking out curiously as he waited for his creator to fight back–had nearly lost his own. When the beard fell away, Pence managed to dive into the cut hole in the gardener’s breast pocket without being seen, balancing there like a tightrope walker on the blade of the whittling knife which had never been removed from the old man’s ribcage.
Snug inside the gardener’s tunic, pressed against the savage scars on the old man’s chest, Pence flung a hand over his mouth as though it could stifle the heartseed, which was drum-rolling fiercely to a final act.
