John Crowley: Little, Big

“How,” he said, and swallowed, and began again. “How did I come into it? You said someone told you…”

“Spark,” she said. “Or someone like him.”

She looked closely at him, and he tried to compose his features into a semblance of pleasant attention. “Spark is the dog,” he said.

“Yes.” She had become reluctant, it seemed, to go on. She picked up her spoon and studied herself, tiny and upside down, in its concavity, and put it down. “Or someone like him. Well. It’s not important.”

“Wait,” he said.

“It only lasted a minute. While we stood there, I thought —” guardedly, and not looking at him “—I thought Spark said…” She looked up at him. “Is this hard to believe?”

“Well, yes. It is. Hard to believe.”

“I didn’t think it would be. Not for you.”

“Why not for me?”

“Because,” she said, and cradled her cheek in her hand, her face sad, disappointed even, which silenced him utterly, “because you were the one Spark talked about.”

It was probably only because he had nothing at all left to say, that in that moment—or rather in the moment after that moment—a difficult question or delicate proposition which Smoky had been mulling over all day tumbled out of his mouth in a far from finished ftrm.

“Yes,” she said, not raising her cheek from her hand but with a new smile lighting her face like a morning rainbow in the west. And so when the false dawn of the City’s lights showed them the snow piled deep and crisp and even on their window-ledge, they lay with the deep crisp bedclothes up around their necks (the hotel’s heat had failed in the sudden cold) and talked. They hadn’t yet slept.

“What,” he said, “are you talking about?”

She laughed and curled her toes against him. He felt strange, giddy, in a certain way he hadn’t felt since before puberty, which was odd, but there it was: that feeling of being filled up so full that the tips of his fingers and the top of his head tingled: shone, maybe, if he were to look at them. Anything was possible. “It’s make-believe, isn’t it,” he said, and she turned over smiling and fitted their bodies together like a double s .

Make-believe. When he was a kid, when he and others found some buried thing—neck of a brown bottle, tarnished spoon, a stone even that bore half an ancient spike-hole—they could convince themselves it was of great age. It had been there when George Washington was alive. Earlier. It was venerable, and immensely valuable. They convinced themselves of this by a collective act of will, which at the same time they concealed from each other: like make-believe, but different.

“But see?” she said. “It was all meant to be. And I knew it.”

“But why?” he said, delighted, in torment; “why are you so sure?”

“Because it’s a Tale. And Tales work out.”

“But I don’t know it’s a tale.”

“People in tales don’t know, always. But there they are.”

One winter night when he was a boy, boarding then with a half-brother who was half-heartedly religious, he first saw a ring around the moon. He stared up at it, immense, icy, half as wide as the night sky, and grew certain that it could only mean the End of the World. He waited thrilled in that suburban yard for the still night to break apart in apocalypse, all the while knowing in his heart that it would not: that there is nothing in this world not proper to it and that it contains no such surprises. That night he dreamt of Heaven: Heaven was a dark amusement park, small and joyless, just an iron Ferris wheel turning in eternity and a glum arcade to amuse the faithful. He awoke relieved, and never after believed his prayers, though he had said them for his brother without rancor. He would say hers, if she asked him to, and gladly; but she said none, that he knew of; she asked instead assent to something, something so odd, so unencompassable by the common world he had always lived in, so—he laughed, amazed. “A fairy tale,” he said.

“I guess,” she said sleepily. She reached behind her for his hand, and drew it around her. “I guess, if you want.”

He knew he would have to believe in order to go where she had been; knew that, if he believed, he could go there even if it didn’t exist, if it was make-believe. He moved the hand she had drawn around her down her long flesh, and with a little sound she pressed herself against him. He searched himself for that old will, long in disuse. If she went there, ever, he didn’t want to be left behind; wanted never to be farther from her than this.

In May at Edgewood Daily Alice in the dark of the woods sat on a shining rock that jutted out over a deep pool, a pool made by the fall of water down a cleft in high rock walls. The stream that hurtled ceaselessly through the cleft to plunge into the pool made a speech as it did so, a speech repetitive yet always full of interest; Daily Alice listened, though she had heard it all before. She looked a lot like the girl on the soda bottle, though not so delicate and lacking wings.

“Grandfather Trout,” she said to the pool, and again: “Grandfather Trout.” She waited then, and when nothing came of this, took up two small stones and plunged them into the water (cold and silky as only falling water held in stone pools seems to be) and knocked them together, which within the water made a sound like distant guns and hung longer than sounds hang in air. Then there swam out from somewhere in the weed-bearded hidey-holes along the bank a great white trout, an albino without speckle or belt, his pink eye solemn and large. The repeated ripples caused by the waterfall made him seem to shudder, his great eye to wink or maybe tremble with tears (can fish cry? she wondered, not for the first time).

When she thought she had his attention, she began to tell him how she had gone to the City in the fall and met this man in George Mouse’s house, and how she had known instantly (or at least decided very quickly) that he would be the one that it had been promised she would “find or make up,” as Spark had long ago put it to her. “While you slept through the winter,” she said shyly, tracing the quartz muscle of the rock she sat on, smiling but not looking at him (because she spoke of whom she loved), “we, well we met again, and made promises—you know—” She saw him flick his ghostly tail; she knew this to be a painful subject. She stretched out her great length on the cool rock and, chin in hands and eyes alight, told him about Smoky in terms glowing and vague, which didn’t seem to move the fish to enthusiasm. She took no notice. It must be Smoky that had been meant, it could be no other. “Don’t you think so? Don’t you agree?” More cautiously then: “Will they be satisfied?”

“No telling,” Grandfather Trout said gloomily. “Who’s to say what’s in their minds?”

“But you said…”

“I bring their messages, daughter. Don’t expect any more from me.”

“Well,” she said, put out, “I won’t wait forever. I love him. Life is short.”

“Life,” said Grandfather Trout as though his throat were thick with tears, “is long. Too long.” He turned his fins carefully and with a motion of his tail slid backwards into his hiding place.

“Tell them I came, anyway,” she shouted after him, her voice small against the waterfall’s. “Tell them I did my part.”

But he was gone.

She wrote to Smoky: “I’m going to get married,” and his heart turned cold where he stood by the letter-box, until he realized she meant to him. “Great-aunt Cloud has read the cards very carefully, once for each part, it’s to be Midsummer Day and this is what you have to do. Please please follow all these instructions very carefully or I don’t know what might happen.”