Grim Tales (7 page)

She brought a small round white stone from the seaside because it pleased her – its touch and that it had come from the ocean floor (from how many miles distant, over how many years?). She placed it carefully on her windowsill, in the sun, between the African violet and the cedar box containing threads from her mother's sewing basket she had once taken in remembrance. During the night, she drowned in her bed. The man in the apartment below hers said that he had heard a noise “like the crashing of waves.”

He would not have kept a gun in the house. He hated them “on principle” and because his children were there with him. He would not for a moment have considered possessing any sort of weapon. He was, in fact, afraid of them. That night when he came home from the office, he found a revolver waiting for him on the desk, behind the locked door of his study. No one knew how it had come to be there, or why he should have shot himself in the head with it.

He bludgeoned the old woman to death and, on his way out the door with her valuables, had his eyes sewn shut by the needle and thread with which she had been darning a sock. Blinded, the man stumbled into the street where he fell, fatally, beneath the wheels of a truck.

He brought home a stone from Pompeii – a fragment of igneous rock. In the evening, he would hold it in his hand, dreaming always of the same lovely woman whose eyes searched the harbor for her husband's ship and whose sandaled feet walked the footpaths, from the flower stalls to the villa of the Mysteries. One night his house burned. They found him kneeling in the ruin – his arms embracing empty air, his body untouched by the fire. In his hand, a stone.

His dog flushed a vole from out the ground. The vole had – he was sure of it – the face of an old man who made small, terrified cries before the dog ate it.

He was one who did not believe in metamorphosis. Until one morning he woke up to find his skin turned to bark. His screams confirmed for him his error. He was well on the way to becoming a tree when his wife finished carving her initials in his trunk.

He was turned into a hill so that small animals might make their burrows inside and, through the long winter, gnaw his bones.

He was turned into a house so that there could be no turning away from people – their joy, sorrow – he, who had always been indifferent to others.

He was turned into a field so that the harrow might pierce his heart – he, who had not once in his life been moved by anything.

He was turned into rain so that his rocklike certainty might slowly erode.

He was turned into a river so that he might be broken over rocks and mend, only to break again and so on, in torment, forever.

He was turned into an animal so that at last he might understand the ways of men.