according to our tastes.
We bought this house and we share it. You will find my sisters as you walk about. As you can see, I live in the well.
'That's my last husband painted on the wall,' said the second princess, 'looking as though he were alive.'
She took me through her glass house showing me curiosities: the still-born foetus of the infamous Pope Joan who had so successfully posed as a Man of God until giving birth in the Easter parade. She had the tablets of stone on which Moses had received the Ten Commandments. The writing was blurred but it was easy to make out the gouged lines of the finger of God.
'I collect religious items.'
She had not minded her husband much more than any wife does until he had tried to stop her hobby.
'He built a bonfire and burned the body of a saint. The saint was very old and wrapped in cloth. I liked him about the house; he added something.'
After that she had wrapped her own husband in cloth and gone on wrapping the stale bandages round and round until she reached his nose. She had a moment's regret, and continued.
'He walked in beautym,' she said.
'His eyes were brown marshes, his lashes were like y willow trees. His eyebrows shot together made a between his forehead and his face. His cheeks were steep and sheer, his mouth was a volcano. His breath was like a dragon's and his heart was torn from a bull. The sinews in his neck were white columns leading to the bolts of his collar-bone. I can still trace the cavity of his throat. His chest was a strongbox, his ribs were made of brass, they shone through his skin when the sun was out. His shoulder-blades were mountain ranges, his spine a cobbled road. His belly was filled with jewels and his cock woke at dawn. Fields of wheat still remind me of his hair, and when I see a hand whose fingers are longer than its palm I think it might be him come to touch me again.
'But he never touched me. It was a boy he loved. I pierced them with a single arrow where they lay.
'I still think it was poetic.'
My husband married me so that his liaisons with other "omen, being forbidden, would be more exciting. Danger as an aphrodisiac to him: he wanted nothing easy or gentle. His way was to cause whirlwinds. I was warned, we always are, by well-wishers or malcontents, but I chose to take no interest in gossip. My husband was handsome and clever. What did it matter if he needed a certain kind of outlet, so long as he loved me? I wanted to love him; I was determined to be happy with him. I had not been happy before.
At first I hardly minded his weeks away. I did not realize that part of his sport was to make me mad. Only then, when he had hurt me, could he fully enjoy the other beds he visited.
I soon discovered that the women he preferred were the inmates of a lunatic asylum. With them he arranged mock marriages in deserted barns. They wore a shroud as their wedding dress and carried a bunch of carrots as a bouquet. He had them straight after on a pig-trough altar. Most were virgins. He liked to come home to me smelling of their blood.
Does the body hate itself so much that it seeks release at any cost?
I didn't kill him. I left him to walk the battlements of his mined kingdom; his body was raddled with disease. The same winter he was found dead in the snow.
Why could he not turn his life towards me, as trees though troubled by the wind yet continue in the path of the sun?
You may have heard of Rapunzel.
Against the wishes of her family, who can best be described by their passion for collecting miniature dolls, she went to live in a tower with an older woman.
Her family were so incensed by her refusal to marry the prince next door that they vilified the couple, calling one a witch and the other a little girl. Not content with names, they ceaselessly tried to break into the tower, so much so that the happy pah-had to seal up any entrance that was not on a level with the sky. The lover got in by climbing up RapunzeFs hair, and Rapunzel got in