Toad Words(18)

Sometimes she smiles up at that young man, the way she smiled up at her prince. I think perhaps she doesn’t remember the difference anymore.

That’s a happy ending if you like. I see them sometimes, the old woman and the young servant, looking out over the ocean. The tide comes in, the tide goes out.

Anyway. The story got around a bit differently. Stories always do. Turning your back on a story is like turning your back on the ocean. Everybody adding details, everybody adding lines that fall on the ear like music and never mind where the truth falls by the wayside.

Everybody wants a hero so they know who to cheer for.

That’s fine. I don’t expect cheering.

She doesn’t look unhappy when she walks along the shore. But perhaps some day that young man will look the other way—distracted by a pretty girl’s smile, say—and she’ll make her way down to the water.

And if she wants—and if she still remembers–she’ll be welcome back here. You can always reverse engineer a gill slit. Who knows, all those mortal years might have been enough to learn wisdom.

We’ll still be here, under the waves. Nothing much has changed.

The tide comes in, the tide goes out.

All the same in the end.





NEVER





“Pudding,” said Stunky, licking his lips. “Blood pudding, with the greasy crunchy bits around the edges.”

Myrtle groaned. After a minute, she said, “Cheese.”

“Cheese?” asked Stunky. “Just cheese?”

“Just cheese nuthin’,” hissed Myrtle. “All melty over a slice of bread, or on a cracker, or—or—anything. How long has it been since you had cheese?”

Stunky didn’t answer. There was no cheese in Neverland, as there were no cows. There was plenty of blood, but nobody ever thought to make pudding out of it. Possibly no one knew how.

It was all very well to go away in the night with an elfin boy with laughing eyes who taught you how to fly, and promised that you’d never have to grow up, but it turned out that grown-ups had a great deal to do with meals arriving regularly and on time. To get food, you had to beg it off the Indians or steal it from the pirates, and as a result, nearly everyone was hungry all the time, except perhaps Pan.

It almost hadn’t been that way. A farm boy named Albert had come with Pan one night, a stolid presence who’d come along only because his little sister had been intent on going off with the wild boy. He had borrowed seed from the Indians and begun a garden, silently hoeing with a broken sword blade tied to a broomstick and bringing buckets of water up from the spring.

And when the plants were knee high and the tomatoes were throwing out round green balls and every Lost Boy was drooling at the thought of a real meal, something other than fish (oh god, they were so sick of fish) Pan had one of his wild moods and set the whole thing on fire.

“Vegetables!” he cried, hovering over the plants, which didn’t burn well but which stomped and flattened beautifully. “We don’t eat vegetables! Yuck! That’s grown-up stuff!”

Albert, still stolid and wordless, picked up his makeshift hoe and went for Pan’s throat.

Stunky could have told him how it would end. Pan was wicked fast and even if he hadn’t been, he had the fairies. The little brutes had put Albert’s eyes out with their knitting-needle swords before he’d gotten five feet. Pan had stabbed him a few times, mostly as an afterthought, and then thrown the body off a cliff, and that was the end of organized agriculture in Neverland.

They lived mostly on bird’s eggs and nestlings when they could get them. And fish. Always fish. One of the Indians had showed Stunky how to salt a fish with the rough, impure salt that dried on the rocks. You had to scrape it off with a knife and it didn’t work very well, but it was better than nothing. The fish took longer to rot, anyhow.

“I’d kill for a bit of cheese,” said Myrtle, and sighed.

“Sure,” said Stunky, stirring the pot of boiling water than contained the evening’s fish and a couple of hunks of coconut, “but who would you kill?”

Myrtle lifted her head and looked across the room, if you could call the ruined cargo hold of a wrecked ship a “room.”

Pan was lounging on a makeshift throne of old nets and packing crates, regaling some of the younger Lost Boys with tales of wild battles against the pirates. Two fairies squatted on either shoulder, casting their rotting swamp-gas light across his cheekbones, and a third crouched on the back of the throne. It scanned the room ceaselessly, wings twitching like the ears of a sleeping dog.

Stunky elbowed her. “Stop looking!” he hissed, and Myrtle dropped her head obediently. “You want ‘em to think you’re watching ‘em?”