The Reasonable Ogre

by Mike Barnes

  And she needed to stand, not kneel. Looking down, she spotted two glass flowers she could just reach, close to the centre, standing a little lower than their neighbours. She reached down and snapped one off near the base. With a flick of her wrist she knocked it to the porcelain, where it broke with a powdery pop into slivers and dust. Then its neighbour; she did the same to it. Still standing, but bending low to see, she peered down the stretch of road that had opened to her view. It was a country lane, with trees clustered close on either side, the sunlight through their moving leaves making dappled patterns on the packed brown dirt. Up the way a bit, she saw the trees thin to bushes, lilacs perhaps, and then open out onto what looked like the soft greens and browns of a field—

  The view closed. Not swiftly, but decidedly, as it had the day before. First the creeping fog edge, nibbling it back, then the quick swallow, like a gulp.

  That night, when the other door opened in her sleep (or at least, when she had her eyes tightly closed, to make it happen faster), she saw a stillness, a hint of tension in the shoulders and neck of the man beside the window, as if he sensed her behind him and was about to turn. She was afraid, and not afraid. The dark browns and golds in his hair were a blend of the wood chips, the straw, and the packed earth of the road. Would his eyes be green?

  When she returned to the glass garden the next afternoon, her heart sank to see that the hole made by the two snapped flowers was more obvious than she’d thought. The artist had done his work too well, grouping the blooms with a casualness that mimicked natural profusion but which had a symmetry easily disturbed. Even the first hole, from the broken rose, seemed to glare out at her like an eye. She saw that she would not be able to proceed as she had planned, granting herself gradually larger views of the world behind—behind or within—the glass garden. Standing a few moments above it, she felt disconsolate . . . and then determined. Going round to where she’d been yesterday, she knelt down and, rather brutally, snapped off three daisies standing right at the edge, rapping with the backs of her fingers low down on their stems—pop, pop, pop.

  Beyond the fields, which were covered with a variety of low grasses and clover, as if they might have been farmed but not recently, stood a small, neat house, more like a cottage than a farmhouse, though rather dark, at least on this side, where only a single arched window broke the stone-and-timber wall.

  “We’re going to spend the day tomorrow with the—,” said her mother that night at dinner, naming the childless couple down the lane whom they counted as their closest friends. “We won’t be back till late. Will you be all right on your own?”

  She nodded, and her father said, “She’s not a child, remember. She’s growing up on us.”

  And her parents beamed at her, not with sidelong glances and a quick return to their own conversation, but straight on, for long moments that stretched tenderly; as if their eyes were portholes usually fogged by the heat of the ship, which had cleared suddenly, and Penelope, not knowing what had wiped or cooled them, didn’t know either whether to feel grateful or sad, as she felt both, in a complex welling, as the clear round panes showed both the greenish sea, close and sloshing, and the departing shore’s toy-like spires and roofs, receding.

  THE ROAD she was walking on was packed firm; the spring and early summer had been dry. How different it felt to be walking somewhere when you knew you would not be retracing your steps. Her eyes drank everything in, and she kept looking from side to side, afraid to miss a single detail. The air had a sharp, singed smell, with hints of coming rain, advance cool puffs of it. The smells of the new place had come to her a second before its sights, when the crash and splintering of the smashed glass garden were still echoing in her mind, waves of tinkling breakage, and she had let fall the rake she had swung with such abandon and, with eyes pressed shut, drawn in a great, slow breath to steady herself before she looked.

  Out in the field, past the green bushy lilacs, the walking was still easy. The land was lumpily humped and furrowed, like plasticine kneaded and tugged—she wondered again what it had been used for. Whatever its uses, they were long past. A lush carpet of low grasses and clover, dotted with wildflowers, felt spongy and soft as carpet underfoot. But the carpet was bunched, with those sudden lumps and knolls, and she stepped carefully to avoid twisting her ankle. Easy as it was, the walking tired her.

  Clouds built quickly overhead, and before she was halfway to the house, she felt the first drops of rain. Cool spatterings on her face, and then more stillness, a fresh waiting, while the piled clouds darkened and rumbled. The hail began when she was almost at the house, which was probably just as well, because she had been wondering if she would be brave enough to knock on the door when she got there. Now, with the hard lumps pelting her, she just hurried forward with her arms flung over her head, ducked in under the peak of roof, and turned the knob.

  Inside, in a narrow vestibule, she stood for a moment getting her bearings. There was a dull beating in her head, and she was very tired. The clattering on the roof trailed off and stopped. Sun slanted through a window, the way it will sometimes an instant after the end of a summer storm. But there was no window, as she saw a moment later. Only a flickering, irregular kind of light, making a part of the room glow softly, then fall dim again, then brighten—as if lamps placed here and there couldn’t decide whether to stay on or off. Except that she didn’t see any lamps.

  Someone else was in the house. She could feel him . . . and feel that it was him. Slowly and unsteadily

  —what has happened to my legs? she wondered—she crossed to the doorway and stepped through it into a larger room. The intermittent beams of light played over furniture and surfaces. The bookcases of her dream were there, two of them, but merely standing against the far wall, not framing the arched window. Though there was a window; yes, arched; and filled with a gray light. No one at it.

  She turned at a sound, and saw an old man smiling kindly at her from in front of a stove. The sudden sight of him startled her, but did not frighten. Nothing familiar was in his face, but nothing fearful either. He was old and stooped, with wisps of white hair dressing his baldness. He was clothed with old-fashioned formality: a dark gray cardigan over his black trousers and white shirt, and a dark, perhaps navy bowtie with light dots on it. He had a wooden spoon in one hand, and he turned with it to a small pot he was stirring on the stove.

  “I saw you coming back,” he said with his back to her. “Yesterday a bit. And then this morning.”

  Back was what she thought he said. He was saying more now, but it had become the garbled rumbling of her dream, the drone that might be music or another language. It rumbled comfortably, like thunder in a bottle, and then, just as she was beginning to ignore it, turned into normal speech she could understand. “We’ll drink this outside in the garden when it’s ready,” he said now, clear as a bell. And then began rumbling again, fussing in the light that glowed and dimmed, illuminating him and then leaving him in shadow, as he took a jar from a shelf and added a pinch to whatever he was cooking.

  Constant inconstancy was the law here. Or inconstant constancy. It worked either way, she saw.

  Now she was sitting at a wooden table, with no memory of having crossed to it. Though it was just in time: her legs felt like stumps beneath her. Looking from the funny old man to the window, she remembered why she’d come. Questions popped into her mind, like bubbles in a froth of sudden comedy. Where’s your son? Or grandson? Which is better? she thought, and brought her hand up to stifle a giggle. A cramped old claw with great knuckles hung in front of her, attached to a withered arm draped with loose, brown-spotted skin. It looked odd, distinctly and abruptly odd, but not surprising or out of place. Or no more so than anything else in this funny little house. Everything here could startle, nothing surprise.

  A light went off. And then came on again. Brighter, now. They were outside at a little round table on a kind of patio. The air was cooler after the rain. It smelled fresh. She closed her eyes. She o
pened them. Had he helped her—carried her?—outside, to this chair? Was that the effort that had made his face go red?

  Strange, she thought. I was a girl this morning . . . and now this. And yet I don’t feel any different than I ever did.

  “. . . Drink it slowly,” he was saying. “Don’t rush.” And looking down she saw a cup in her hands—How did that get there? she thought—and set it down on the saucer with a clatter.

  He was rumbling again, his lips moving around a garble, his small old hands curled around his own cup. Beyond him, colours in a handful caught her eye. She leaned to the side and raised her head to see them. Inside a square of short grass bordered by a low, trimmed hedge, the flowers in an oval bed lay twisted every which way, some knocked flat and broken, some struggling to rise, a few spared and erect.

  “Yes,” he said, nodding, following her gaze. “It was the hail that did it. All in a few angry seconds. They’ll come back, though, most of them. No worries.”

  Something in the way he said this, nodding over the cup in his hands, as if addressing it instead of her, filled her with a strange cold fright; and at the same time ordered her to look behind herself. When she did, her parents were leering at her from two feet away, their faces huge and self-delighted. They had followed her! Even here! She gasped, and would have dropped the cup had she still been holding it. She covered her eyes against their grinning, and felt herself shaking, trembling like a leaf all over. Through her clamped fingers, she felt a wet warmth sliding, and realized she was crying. Crying as she hadn’t let them make her cry in years. What was happening to her here?

  “Pet, pet,” he was saying. Or perhaps it was “Pen, Pen . . . .” He pried at her hands, his fingers weak against her fear; and then she let him lift them away. His strange face was kind; it meant no harm. And when he began talking again, his words were clear and free of the rumbling; though what they said made only a cloudy kind of sense, they distracted her from the frights at her back; in a way she didn’t understand, they kept them from reaching her. “It’s only our stone pair. Our laughing lovers,” he said, affecting a chuckle to comfort her. “Look around at them, you’ll see.” She wouldn’t, not in this light. So bright it was, glaring, just when she wouldn’t have minded some of the flickering and dim.

  She looked down at the thin old hand patting her own on the table top. She had a fleeting sense of having reached a safe place, even if she’d missed the man in the arched window.

  “It was my fault. My mistake,” he was murmuring, to her but with his head lowered, as if in apology. As if she could—forgive him? “It was the right charm, I thought. A charm to make the living lifeless, and the lifeless living. It would keep you safe. Keep you near.”

  He looked up guiltily, his eyes pink-rimmed. “I’ve got it now,” he said. “It went too far, before. Or not far enough. But I’ve got it now,” he said again.

  He waited, as if expecting her to say something, and then, with a sigh, looked around the garden and got to his feet. Gathering the cups and saucers, he said, “Come inside, now. Come inside.”

  A LIGHT OFF, then on. Then almost off. Left low.

  The old man was asleep beside her. That did not seem strange. Her body ached and she was glad at last to be lying down. Something warm moved in her chest. It shifted, and seemed to slide a layer further down inside her. She heard her heavy-footed parents moving upstairs, then all around her, thumping and clumping in their lifelong gleeful chase. Quickly, while there was still time, she stole outside and found the two glass figurines where she had hidden them in the shed. She stepped back over the iron fence and placed them carefully amid the slivers and shards of glass: the little bent gardener with his hoe, and his equally ancient wife with her bonnet and rake. No more than four inches high, they were her delicate rebuke to the huge and rigid figures locked in their embrace over by the trellis hung with sweetpeas. She wanted to see their faces when they found them, but didn’t dare let them catch her. Any second now, the echo of what she had done would reach their slow ears and they would lumber over here, and discover—

  But she would be safe inside, in the best hiding place she’d found yet, clutching a treasured old book as she listened for the distant grunts of surprise. And then, before the stamp and crunch of boots, the echo of faroff tinkling—in the pause of life simply astonished at itself—

  Through that pause, a door she had left ajar, she would slip and be gone.

  Falling Water

  Lars and Elskelyn had been dancing partners for many years, but lately they had fallen out of step. They could still find the rhythm at the heart of a song, but each heard that rhythm at a different speed. Lars began to move a step or two faster, sometimes so much faster that Elskelyn cried, “Slow down, slow down. I can’t keep up.” Whereas Elskelyn, it seemed to Lars, always lagged at least a half measure behind, swaying in such a dreamy manner that he snapped, “Pick up the pace! We’ve lost the beat!”

  Dancing, which had been their most effortless joy together, became a tense and clumsy stumble, and they soon found excuses to avoid it. If either of them wanted to try a new pattern of steps, it was easier to do it alone, when the other was away. Though they still slept and ate under the same roof, they seemed to live in different zones, moving to clocks that could no longer be synchronized.

  Despondent over this, for they loved each other deeply, they walked out of town to find an old woman who, it was said, sold charms to treat strange maladies. They found the forest track their neighbours told them of, and had gone a good distance down it (they even walked at different paces now, so that Lars had to keep stopping and waiting, trying not to look impatient, for Elskelyn to catch up)—when they came upon a chubby little boy tending a low fire.

  “Hello,” Lars called, reaching him first. But the boy, who had scruffy red hair and a freckled face, smudged with dirt in places, merely shot them a sullen glance and continued his work by the fire. They watched him. Despite his lumpish body, he had quick, clever hands with which, using a small sharp knife, he fashioned objects out of wood and bark. These were laid in a row on a flat rock, like wares set out for sale, even though no other customers were in sight, and he showed no interest in Lars and Elskelyn.

  While they watched, he removed two slender sticks he had been charring in the embers and placed them to one side to cool. He took another lying there and, with deft flicks of his blade, sharpened its blackened tip. On a square of birchbark, he used the charcoal stick to sketch a forest scene: two trees, a pool, and a bubbling waterfall. After a few seconds, the simple black lines began to glow with colour. Greens and blues, and the browns and grays of rocks appeared—until the fast sketch resembled a painting done in rich oils, almost a little window into an actual forest.

  Lars and Elskelyn exchanged a look of wonder, but when the boy passed the drawing stick behind him, shoving it toward them as if he hoped they would take it and move on, Elskelyn said quietly, “It’s lovely, but we’re dancers.”

  The boy half-turned and scowled. He seemed bad-tempered, or displeased in particular by what she had said. When he resumed fussing over his fire, the couple felt they’d been dismissed, but they stayed to watch out of curiosity. From a little pot of water standing in the ashes to one side, he retrieved two strips of what looked like green willow wood. Though tiny bubbles in the pot told that the water was near boiling, his hand went in and out without starting. With fast movements that Lars and Elskelyn had trouble following, he cut the willow strips to size, bent them into rings, and fitted each with a clasp of a different, darker wood. He shoved them behind him with the same rude gesture.

  As soon as they put on the willow bracelets, which fit their wrists exactly, Lars and Elskelyn felt the urge to dance. Unembarrassed by the boy’s presence, they held each other and began moving slowly to a tune that entered their heads at the same time. They smiled with shy pleasure that after such a long interruption their steps again meshed perfectly. Somehow, by some magic in the willow rings, Lars heard the tune
a little slower, and Elskelyn a little faster, and they glided through a few figures as one person.

  Suddenly remembering the boy, they stopped, and Lars said, “We should pay—”

  But the boy was gone. Though they could not have been dancing more than half a minute, there was no sign of his pot or sticks or finished wares, and dirt was kicked over the embers, which steamed through it like angry breaths.

  Despite this unfortunate ending, the meeting with the boy began the happiest period in the dancing couple’s life. Wearing the willow bracelets, they danced better than ever before. So well, in fact, that their dancing gave pleasure not only to themselves and to their neighbours who cleared a space at gatherings to cheer and clap them on, but even to strangers in sometimes distant towns, who invited them to dance in public in return for lodging and a small sum. Thus, in middle age, they finally found themselves able to earn a modest living doing what they loved.

  It was a pleasant dream that continued for several years, before troubles reappeared to warn of an awakening.

  They began to go out of step again. Not often, at first, and not by much—but then, they were expert dancers, who noticed the slightest wobble in the patterns they traced together. They quarreled for the first time in years, each blaming the other when their timing went off. Then, ashamed of their harsh words, they thought to blame the willow bracelets. No good lasted forever. For years, by some magic of their maker, the willow rings had remained soft and supple as fresh wood; lately, however, they had begun to dry and show fine cracks, as if age was finally turning them brittle.