A Wild Swan Read Online Free PDF Page A

earth so hard his body crashes through the topsoil, imbeds itself ten feet deep, leaves a giant-shaped chasm in the middle of a cornfield.
    It’s a mercy, of sorts. What, after all, did the giant have left, with his gold and his hen and his harp all gone?
    *   *   *
    Jack has had the giant-hole filled in, right over the giant’s body, and in a rare act of piety he’s ordered a grove of lilac bushes planted over the giant’s resting-place. If you were to look down at the lilac grove from above, you’d see that it’s shaped like an enormous man, arms and legs akimbo; a man frozen in an attitude of oddly voluptuous surrender.
    Jack and his mother prosper. Jack, in his rare moments of self-questioning, remembers what the mist-girl told him, years earlier. The giant committed a crime. Jack has, since infancy, been entitled to everything the giant owned. This salves the stripling conscience that’s been growing feebly within Jack as he’s gotten older.
    Jack’s mother has started collecting handbags (she especially prizes her limited-edition Murakami Cherry Blossom by Louis Vuitton), and meeting her girlfriends for lunches that can go on until four or five p.m. Jack sometimes acquires girls and boys in neighboring towns, sometimes rents them, but always arranges for them to arrive late at night, in secret. Jack is not, as we know, the brightest bulb on the Christmas tree, but he’s canny enough to understand that only his mother will uncritically adore him forever; that if one of the girls or boys were suffered to stay, the fits of mysterious frustration, the critiques, would set in soon enough.
    The hen, who cares only for the eggs she produces, lays a gold one every day, and lives contentedly in her concrete coop with her twenty-four-hour guard, Jack’s attempt at exterminating all the local foxes having proven futile.
    Only the harp is restive and sorrowful. Only the harp looks yearningly out through the window of the room in which it resides, a room that affords it a view of the lilac grove planted over the giant’s imbedded body. The harp, long mute, dreams of the time when it lived on a cloud and played music too beautiful for anyone but the giant to hear.

 
    POISONED
    You wanted to last night.
    And tonight, I don’t think I want to.
    Why, exactly, is that?
    It’s weird. Don’t you think it’s at least a little bit weird? And I’m, well, getting tired of it.
    When exactly did you change your mind?
    I didn’t. Okay, I’m tired of pretending that I’m not tired of doing it.
    Is it because of that apple joke, today at the market? Did that bother you?
    Hell no. You think I’m not used to apple jokes by now?
    You’ve always told me you liked it. So, you’ve been lying?
    No. Well, not exactly lying. I suppose I’ve liked it because you like it so much. But it seems that tonight, I don’t really want to.
    That’s a little ever so slightly humiliating, don’t you think? For me, I mean.
    No. I’ve been doing it because I love you. When you love somebody, it makes you happy to make him happy.
    Even if you think it’s weird. Even if you think it’s disgusting.
    I didn’t say disgusting. “Weird” and “disgusting” are not synonyms.
    You didn’t get tired of doing it for the midgets.
    They weren’t midgets. They were dwarfs. I don’t know why you refuse to understand the difference.
    Sorry. I’m sorry. I’m displacing my emotions.
    You got that phrase from your shrink, do you even know what it means?
    I’m sorry about the dwarfs . I know you loved them.
    Or I loved it that they loved me, I’ve never been completely sure.
    Do you think we should have them over again?
    Because it was so much fun the last time?
    I wouldn’t say it was un fun. Did you think it was?
    You had to lift them up to get them into our chairs. Our spoons were the size of