Grim Tales (8 page)

He was turned into a revolver so that, one day, he might feel his cold mouth against hers – the woman he had destroyed – when, in despair, she shot herself.

He was turned into a house so that one day boys might break in and set fire to it – he, who had always hated children.

He was turned into a bed so that he might lie beneath a woman night after night and burn with unappeasable desire – this philanderer, who had broken the hearts of so many women.

He was turned to stone (all but his heart), so that he might suffer in silence.

He was turned to earth so that he might bury himself, then turned to rain so that he might weep; for who else was there to grieve for him?

He was turned into a book so that he might disappear inside it.

The hedgehog, dead by the side of the road, was once a man who refused to believe in fairy tales.

That winter morning, the boy went out into the snow and brought back a snowball. He had packed it tightly, in his ungloved hands – packed it and smoothed it until it was like glass. The day was cold – a chill came off the snow. Snakes of snow writhed along the ground in the wind. Even inside the house, there was a chill to make the bones ache. He carried the snowball upstairs and set it on his dresser, on a saucer decorated along its rim with holly leaves and berries. The snowball remained there undisturbed and undiminished through the long, cold winter – even through the spring, though no one could explain how. In July when the house felt like an oven, the boy's room was pleasantly cool. His mother liked to sit there in the hot afternoon and evening before the wind rose up and blew away the heat – liked to sit and read a book in the boy's attic room. No one thought any longer about the snowball lying in the saucer like an extinguished crystal ball. The family had long since ceased advancing possible theories to one another about the enduring ice. In August the boy's father came home – “sick to death” of the woman he had run away with in the fall of the previous year. The boy now sat waiting for his father to come upstairs to say whatever he would say to him, turning his hat in his hands the way he did when he was uneasy in his mind. The man knocked once at his son's door, then entered. Before he could open his mouth to remark on the freezing room (in the dog days, look – frost on the windowpanes!), he was struck dead. It took only minutes for the ice to melt.

Believing his time had come, he avenged himself on all those who had shown him contempt, then took his own life. But he had been mistaken in this belief just as he had mistaken the intentions towards him of those he murdered, which were always friendly, even affectionate.

The flowering peach tree was not the first place he had thought to hang himself. But it was the most picturesque. That it should be so was important for his own pleasure, when his eyes closed for the last time on earth and for the shock he hoped the incongruity would cause his wife when she found his body. In this way her pain would be increased – a thing that made him glad as he stood on the ladder and prepared to jump.

He said that a filament, very nearly invisible, connected all people, one to the other. Should it be broken – by death, for example – all feel it – feel death, their own and suffer it, an agony, if only in nightmare. Remembering the woman who, years before, had made him suffer, he killed himself, almost with pleasure.

In the yard outside the man's house, a swamp maple grew “overnight,” at least this is the impression those who lived in the neighborhood had. (There were some others, of course, who claimed it had always been there – but that could not be. It would have been noticed before then, certainly.) A little later – more quickly than anyone could have believed possible – a vine grew up the side of the tree, climbed out over the lowest branch and now hung down, lolling – its thick stem twisted into a kind of loop. The milkman was the first to see him – his body hanging from the tree, the vine around his neck. None knew his crime.