THE CHILDREN OF PARADISE

They were a pair of fools, husband and wife, and none of their labors prospered. Their mint grew ragged, their chives sprouted thorns, and their child swelled and shrank with the weather. Nobody knew what this child’s sickness was. In winter he filled up with poisonous gas, his limbs grew too stiff to move, and his parents had to drag him about in a wagon. In summer he withered and red streaks appeared on his skin. His desperate parents devoted their every instant to keeping him alive. They tried hot baths, ice baths, sunshine, darkness, vegetables, sweetbreads, gruels, exercise, study, rest, affection, beatings, purgings, and prayer. Their child possessed none of the patience of dying children in popular novels. “I hate you,” he told them daily, “you fucking losers.” At last his mother collected the dregs of the family silver, packed it in the pig’s bladder that served as her purse, and went to visit the Good Friar Tello.

The Good Friar Tello had been defrocked for practicing black magic, but he still wore his brown robe and hempen belt. He lived in the great pine forest, in a crumbling, deserted abbey, with the grateful animals he had saved from death. An angel of stone wept over the door. When the woman knocked, a milk-white goat came to usher her in. Friar Tello was smoking a pipe, his feet resting on a docile boar. He asked the woman if she knew the Well of the Whores. “Of course,” she said. This well stood at the edge of town; no one drank from it, for in the old days whores had been drowned there. “You must drop one gold piece into this well every Sunday for seven years,” the friar murmured sleepily, as a barn owl gently fanned his tonsured head, “and at the end of them your child will be cured.” The woman burst into tears. “Where am I to get gold?” she sobbed. “Get it you must,” said the friar, with neither cruelty nor pity, “and you must leave off all attempts to cure your child. You must not even speak to him. Nothing matters now but the pieces of gold. Through the well, they will be transported to the Children of Paradise, who are the smallest and most powerful of the angels. They are so pure they feed on gold, so transparent that even God has forgotten them. After seven years, they will reward you.”

The woman went home and told her husband, who wept so hard it frightened her. The two fools began their seven-year quest for gold. They sold all they had. They danced in the streets for coins. They abased themselves before priests and princes. They carried heavy loads, they chopped wood, they reaped, they winnowed. Throughout all this time, they could scarcely care for their child, who looked after himself like a half-grown bear cub. Miraculously, the two fools managed to earn one gold piece a week. Every Sunday the woman took a coin to the Well of the Whores, and as she threw it in, a white bird flew down and seized the gold in its beak. At first she screamed and chased the bird, attempting to get her coin back, but it always flew off, and after some time she began to comfort herself, reasoning that the Children of Paradise, the smallest and purest of angels, could hardly dwell at the bottom of a dark well. “The white bird must be taking the coins to Paradise,” she thought. Perhaps this was true. The bird always flew toward the highest peaks of the mountains. However, some say that the beautiful bird, which was in fact a barn owl, was simply taking the coins to Friar Tello.

In any case, after seven years, the child of the two fools turned into a handsome prince. What joy! This fine creature was their first and only success. Now the old man, his father (for the two fools have grown quite elderly), sits in the café and tells his story for the price of a pint of beer. Sometimes, after an especially lively evening, he can be seen outside the palace where Friar Tello has taken up residence, scraping his feet on the pavement and singing pathetically one of the tunes he used to warble for money during the seven years. Sometimes the Good Friar Tello, who now sports a black satin cape, opens the balcony doors, revealing a pink corner of his illumined parlor, and throws down a copper coin. As for the mother of the handsome prince, she lives winter days, an entire lifetime of winter. It’s as if her whole life is ice, as if she’s trapped in the seven-year winter during which she used to climb the deadly, avalanche-haunted mountains, where she’d squat in the snow and dig for the frozen bulbs of the herb called Reticence, which can be boiled to make a powerful aphrodisiac. The ladies of the town would pay her well for this precious herb. I can see the snow high up, she says, and the snow below. Up high is the realm of Paradise; below, it’s the world of men. Sometimes I recall that there was something I meant to do with my life, but I can’t remember it now, and anyway, I no longer have the strength. I am following the tracks of the Children of Paradise. They hold skiing parties up here, and because they are children, they lose their little gloves, ski poles, and scarves. But what blindness, and what numbness! I can hardly see their tracks in the snow, and when I pick up their tiny ski poles, they feel like icicles. I will dig a hole for myself. I will be the herb called Reticence. When boiled with the angels’ tears, I will create love. After all, it’s preferable to looking down. I can’t bear how high I’ve climbed! Tell me: Who are they? Who are the Children of Paradise?

THE LITTLE CHILD WITH THE UNFORTUNATE CONDITION

She was a little child with an unfortunate condition. She had acquired it, perhaps, on a family vacation, though no one was sure; she might have been served a piece of poisoned meat at the hotel restaurant or gotten stung by a strange animal in the woods. The important thing, her mother always said, was not where the unfortunate condition had come from, but how the child could live with it most easily, especially since a number of doctors and specialists had confirmed that it could never be cured, but was rather like something bonded to the child’s genes. It was the child’s father who lay awake at night, gazing at the curtains that enfolded a fatty, yellow, gelatinous moon, and castigating himself for his bad decisions—for everyone knows it’s dangerous to take your child on foreign holidays. In the dark, he could hear the weeds in the yard growing right up to the windowsill. He could hear, sometimes, an owl cry among the cedars. And he could hear the child singing, because one of the many symptoms of her unfortunate condition was insomnia.

Happily, the mother possessed a less brooding, more practical nature. She was the one who made the orthodontist appointments. She taught the child to put in the daytime retainer, a discreet, ivory-colored appliance, and helped her attach the massive nighttime retainer with its absorbent pads, steel rods, and straps like a piece of medieval armor. In the nighttime retainer, the child looked sweet, peeking over the apparatus with her soft, dark eyes. The mother kissed her on the top of her head. As the sun sank, the child was seized by an exultant mood, and jumped up and down on the bed while the mother read her a story.

“She is a perfectly contented child,” the mother declared to anyone who would listen. “She has a beautiful disposition.” There was no reason the child could not lead an exemplary life. She had excellent grades and played the violin. She even had friends, despite her bulbous sunglasses and the nylon garments that covered her down to the ground. Of course, there had been difficulties. Children are naturally cruel, and at first no one wanted to sit by the weird little girl whose gloves were infused with zinc oxide. But her teacher—a brilliant, compassionate, generous teacher, to whom the mother was forever grateful—managed to turn the unhappy situation into a learning opportunity, showing the class a video about people with a range of unlucky conditions, which captured the children’s sympathy. Moreover, some of these people had become CEOs or television personalities. It was entirely possible, the teacher lectured, that the little child with the unfortunate condition might, like these luminaries, contain some invisible gift that would benefit her society. The children looked at their classmate with new interest. Despite the lethargy typical of her during the school day, especially when it was almost time for her pill (a nasty, dirt-brown pill, the others had whispered before their conversion, like a scab), the power of their youthful imaginations transformed her into a latent employee of the month. After this, many friendly little colleagues came to visit her house. The child’s mother, glowing with enthusiasm, would serve them raspberry popsicles, reserving for the child a special popsicle, prepared according to her restricted diet, which was of a darker color.

A condition is not the end of the world. It’s all a matter of management. Eventually, even the child’s father was won over to this rational view. His nights of wakefulness ceased, and he was rarely troubled by skeletal trees or baleful clouds the color of human liver. As for the mother, she was an inspiration, everyone said. How cheerfully she had accepted her fate! Only those who had known her from her youth perceived how her face, despite its good nature, was slowly collapsing, undermined by fear. It was as if the bones of her jaw were being ground away by an endless dread, and by the effort of telling herself there was nothing to be afraid of, for after all, plenty of people have sensitivities to certain foods, even just the odor of those foods can be enough to bring on an attack, and plenty of people have strong feelings, inexplicable dislikes and phobias that require attention, for example a horror of spiders, and with a little caution it’s possible to avoid ever seeing a spider or, as it might be, a certain four-legged, spidery symbol. All of this was quite manageable. But what the mother really feared, with a terror she buried beneath concerns about allergies, diet, and periodontal health, what she feared with that ruinous panic that was destroying her body from the inside, was that one day her precautions would no longer be necessary. One day—one night—the child with the unfortunate condition would look out the window and see her reflection for the first time. She would see, in the darkness, a figure, or perhaps a group of figures, possessed of an anemic, bone-chilling beauty. Suddenly, as these figures gestured and tapped on the windowpane, the child would realize that she did not, in fact, suffer from any kind of misfortune, and that rather than struggling to overcome her deficiencies in the hope of one day becoming useful to her society, she might, with the flick of a window latch, cast off an order that had never suited her and take her place in the sisterhood of the damned. “How hard I’ve worked,” the little child would exclaim, “and all for nothing!” She would open the window. Her lovely sisters would slip inside, chuckling softly, and with a few twists of their clever fingers remove the hateful retainer so that the child could feel her whole, triumphant mouth. Oh, how good it feels to flex one’s jaws! How nice to clasp hands, to belong! The child would lead her new friends down the hall, where, with a jubilant clamor that resembled the shrieking of owls, they would all fall upon her parents and eat them up.

THE LITTLE DAY-MOTHER

The little day-mother carried daylight and no one knew.

She trotted around the town with it. When she passed the iced fish in the grocery store, everything pinkened. Children riding electric scooters on the opposite side of the street glittered like dew as the day-mother neared the door of the church.

She liked the big church, which she entered like a tiny singing lamp. As she stepped quietly into the sanctuary, a baby squirming in the first row saw the stained-glass angels stir their wings and lean toward one another, smiling.

One morning the day-mother realized she would have to find a new house. Every night her legs were growing a little shorter. She could no longer climb the stairs. She could not trot very far. For some time, her toes had not reached the gas pedal of the car moldering in the drive.

She thought of going to live in the Gray Hotel with the other old people. But then she would not be able to walk to town. How could she live so far away from the grocery store, the church, and the public library, whose glassy dome was covered with fine blue ivy?

She began to search for a little house in town—one with no stairs. Also it had to be cheap, for the day-mother was not rich. A fox in a white cravat, who did not understand why the lobby had brightened so, laughed at her from behind his desk at the Urban Spring Apartments.

The landlady on Main Street, a great green macaw, had no prejudices against old women. She simply could not abide their smell.

The kindly badger on High Street did not wish to rent to someone who might set the place on fire in a moment of abstraction, or simply fall down dead.

The little day-mother trotted back and forth, carrying the daylight, through which bright snowflakes had begun to fall.

One day she did, in fact, leave the stove on. So people were right about her! But nothing happened; only the house was a little warmer. Worse was the day she knelt as usual to wash the kitchen floor and wondered if she would ever be able to get up again.

She thought of buying an electric cart in which she could ride to town. But these were expensive. In order to purchase one, she would have to sell her house. How could she sell her house when she had nowhere else to live? Would she ever sell it? Nobody was interested in buying her old car, though she had gone to the office of the local paper to advertise it months ago, dispersing a silver light among the bulletin boards. Moreover, she had once seen an old man fall over on one of those carts! The pavements of the town were very uneven. No, feet were better—her own minute, trusty feet, which had supported her so cheerfully all her life.

She walked downtown, carrying the string bag for her groceries. Blue light bathed the marble owls on the courthouse steps. No one could pinpoint the source of this light. They simply felt that things were brighter. A young girl shoveling snow in front of her father’s restaurant began to whistle.

One afternoon the fox with the white cravat was returning from lunch when he saw a bundle of gray-haired rags lying in the snow. It was the little day-mother! The fox dialed 911 on his cell phone in an icy gloom that, even for winter, seemed extraordinarily deep. Only the day-mother’s body showed up softly in that darkness, with a light that, had the fox only known, he could have enjoyed every day.

He glanced about him, whimpering faintly. Sirens wailed in the distance.

Then the Wolf of Night came and swallowed up the earth.

• • • •

“But,” argued Little Dimple, whose grandmother told this story, “the day-mother would have died anyway! She was very old.” Of course. Our subject here is not eternity. It is daylight. “Clink! Clink!” cried the broken teapot from its grave among the marigolds.