Fisher Queen
My job is to go out to the springhouse with a tin cup and a clay pot, to gather water for the house.
The springhouse is small, as though it were made for dwarves, and I am a small child, so it makes sense to send me. I never bump my head against the lintel. Inside, it smells green and the cool is always warm, and the warm cool, and the rocks seem to sweat tears. Moss moves with the water.
All of this is ordinary, until one day I go to the spring house and there is a man in the water, naked, with silver minnows darting around his face, moss streaming around him. His skin is the color of water, I am not sure he isn’t water. Also I am not sure if he is dead or asleep.
He is naked and that is how I now know what a man looks like and how it is different from how I look — this man, at least. Maybe others are different. Maybe what is true of this man is true only of men who are dead or asleep in springhouses, with minnows circling them, in some complicated fish-dance.
When I tell my parents, “there is a man in the spring house, under the water,” they do not believe me.
When I tell them “I could turn him into a fish, if that would be better,” they do not listen.
But that is what I do. I wave my hands and I sing, and the man becomes a fish. He vanishes in the rush of water and now I am not sure, looking back, if it was true. But I do keep on fishing. People say they never saw a woman as into fishing as I am. I stand out on the shore all day with my back to everyone, feeling the clutch of the water, silver minnows streaming across my feet.
* * * * *
High Priestess
Every night we hear her shuffling around, the baker who bakes the death-bread at 2 am, and in the morning the loaves are neatly laid out like swaddled corpses on the butcher-block. The smell of bread, the smell of blood. We are all hungry in the mornings and try to pretend we don’t see the dusty white flour-footprints leading to the back door. We fight for the end piece: the heel of the bread, or maybe the buttock, it doesn’t care what we call it, dead as it is. Sometimes we go for the butter and slap it over everything, but sometimes we go for the knives and duel it out.
The weight of the bread is heavy in my stomach, and in the night when everyone else is sleeping it off, ears and noses stitched back on with catgut, I rise and go barefoot through the house, collecting what I need, grinding the seeds, pressing the oil, catching the wild yeasts in the air. It is easy to find the blood that is needed, at night, when they all lie unprotected, glitter like rubies on their white unsuspecting skin.
My intention all along was to be anything other than myself. The witch, the dragon, the green snake. The rat faced thing that gnaws your boots in the night. The one who bakes the death bread. The one the death bread’s baked for.
* * * * *
The Tale of the Plague Doctor
At first it was fine, having the plague doctor in the house. He was a bother to no one, just sitting in the corner with his leather jackdaw-mask on, pensively turning his shiny black hat in his hands, rocking in the chair where we had him tied.
I should probably mention that part: that we lured him in with promises of cocaine and hints about sex, then when he was all unsuspecting we tied him to the chair and said, voila! We shall be safe, this winter, at least. Granted, we had to keep telling him stories and plying him with opium to keep him calm, at least from time to time, but for the most part he seemed grateful to be there.
In the streets people were dancing the tarantella, singing and whooping, the women rending their blouses, the men dropping their trousers. Then the monks would come, flagellating themselves, and chanting. Dogs barked and donkeys brayed. Bells rang. But in our house, just us and the plague doctor, peace reigned.
Only, in the night, we would hear him rocking. Is it possible that he is unhappy with us, we asked each other? Impossible, we said. But he stopped eating the pies and pasties we made, stopped taking the opium wine, even. Over the weeks while the music and the chanting and the lamenting and the bodies decaying went on outside the plague doctor got thinner and thinner. Finally he was just a stick with a bird-head on top, a fluttering cloak, and his hands were bird talons.
“One of you will have to take over now,” he said in the note he left us, the morning we found the plague doctor dead, but that was when we found that neither of us wanted it.
“I will go and join the monks,” you said, flinging the jackdaw head aside.
“And I will go and join the dancers,” I said, pulling on the cloak.
Sometimes I see a jackdaw flying, and I think of him. I think of you when I see the whips the boys use, driving the cattle to the fields, cattle with their ribs showing, wild-eyed cattle, plague cattle. The boys are plague boys. I am a plague woman. These are my plague breasts. We are all plague people now, and there was never any point in pretending otherwise.