Second Reading by Antony Osgood

Several months after her daughter turned herself into a cat, Ahmya’s mother grew sufficiently brave to begin the onerous task of cleaning and tidying Ahmya’s bedroom, in readiness of her girl’s discharge from hospital. Amongst the usual debris of a Japanese teenager’s room, Ahmya’s mother discovered, between the pages of a diary she was loath to read, a fairytale written more than a year before. The girl’s mother had begun to return the diary to its drawer when the lose leaves fell to the floor; in that moment the mother believed she would never forget the gentle slap against her ankles—it felt like a scream, it reminded her of her daughter’s many subtle hints concerning what she was experiencing. Ahmya had shown her mother the fairytale, She’d been obliged to read it while her daughter watchfully waited—but she had not understood, had given back the story and poured a gin. And so she paused her tidying to read the story with more care. Later, as Ahmya’s mother took the train to the hospital, a sea of tears pooled in her head and she feared she would drown—she did not wish to swim. She reddened in shame. Second readings are devastating in two ways. First there is recognising yourself as a shallow reader—how could you have not understood before what is on second reading so obvious? Secondly, you must admit to your own callousness for relying on platitudes rather than taking seriously what the writer is trying to say. Ahmya’s fairytale was more than a fable; the story was a wish for her mother to understand the things her daughter was otherwise unable to express.

Liliana and the King of the World

Far away but not so far you wouldn’t recognise the place, and a while ago now, but not so long that you would feel lost, yet distant enough in time for the world to be less wrinkled, a carpenter set off from her village to seek her fortune. You will understand of course, because our fortunes and happiness always seem to wait anywhere but home. True to her youth she packed without planning, and stowed in a bag fresh bread and old cheese, a bottle of beer, two good books—one very bad book, too, for when the nights were lonely—and flint from the garden. She left her carpentry tools behind, for they were too heavy to carry. At midnight during a full moon, as her parents raged in their cages of rusting iron, and her brothers slept in their paddocks of stone, and the pigs who cared for her turned on their straw mattresses next to hers, Liliana picked the lock that kept her inside her bedroom and climbed through her window. She shinned the drainpipe, and without looking back escaped along the road that snaked through the forest.

By the cold dawn following a warm night, Liliana had reached the top of a hill without trees, and she looked in wonder at what seemed to be a city but was only ever a poor town. When you’re raised by wolves and horses, and your nannies are sows, even a poor town seems like paradise, and if not quite an eternal city, maybe Sodom—haven’t you also confused the two? The carpenter rushed into the town’s wide piazza, overlooked by what seemed to Liliana’s eyes to be the grandest palazzo in the world. It was in truth only the home of the sindaco metropolitano, a mere man who was terribly pleased with himself for conspiring to become Mayor. He was a man with not many ideas above his station but several below his bursting navel. His clothes and thoughts were inherited. Once, a hundred years before, his coat had been woven from the brightest of silks but had by now faded. He grew a poor beard to hide rich chins that danced when he laughed, but his merriment was infrequent. Liliana knocked on the imposing but worm-ridden door and the mayor’s wife—a shrewd but exhausted woman twice the age of her husband, four times the age of Lilana—was startled to discover a stranger.

‘I am a craftswoman,’ Liliana began in a rush, ‘good with her hands, strong, able to see the possibilities in any grain of wood. I work hard and honestly.’

The mayor’s sour wife took in Liliana’s long hair, slender body, her sinewy and strong hands marked by cuts and splinters, bruises and calluses. She looked closely at the stranger’s innocent eyes and desperation—she looked drawn but beautiful.

‘You poor thing! Come and rest. I’ll wake my husband—the Mayor will know what work needs doing about the town better than I, and he controls the public purse.’

When the Mayor came down to see what the fuss was about, when he saw Liliana, he sucked in his chins and regretted not brushing his teeth. He patted his Mayoral blue sash—for he wore it in bed over his nightdress—and his mouth watered. He gruffly improvised a list of tasks about the town. Whilst he was a man who prided himself on being able to think on his feet, he imagined Liliana on her back. He caught his tired wife’s dull eye and he smiled. Of course, he continued, Liliana might demonstrate her talents in this very house! It would not do, he explained, to immediately employ Liliana for municipal works without first inspecting her qualities nearer to home.

When Liliana dared ask for the fee she had struggled to decide upon during her walk, the mayor doubled, waving his hands magnanimously. Paying twice what she had asked would be the cheapest labour he had ever arranged. He was pleased to see, ignited in Liliana’s eyes, admiration for his generosity. He granted her use of a room at the top of his house where she would not be disturbed, where for only a little rent she could sleep. And for a little extra, she would be fed—his wife was a wonderful cook. Why, Liliana would be treated like their own dear but dead daughter. The Mayor’s wife sobbed once and was hushed by her husband.

‘We do not speak of our daughter these days,’ the Mayor explained.

Liliana was given an advance by the Mayor—at very low interest—in order that she might buy the tools she required, which the Mayor was very pleased to sell her at a discount.

Liliana began her work with the renewal of the great stairs in the Mayor’s house—one stairway for ascending, another for descending. She studiously carved decorations for the kitchen panels, made three new beds and four thick doors, a dining table, cherrywood earrings for the mayor’s wife. Wherever she worked the Mayor would happen by. Liliana assumed he was as fascinated by her craft as he claimed—being raised by animals had left her innocent of human perfidy.

For a month Liliana worked hard for many hours each day—‘Work is worship!’ the Mayor claimed. Exploitation tastes sweet as rose-petal lokum if you’re told often enough the stench of servitude smells of perfume. Wasn’t she blessed to stumble upon the little town of Rome? Wasn’t she fortunate to be given such an opportunity? She had never had so much money—even if in Rome that counted as a pittance—and she had never met so many people, and she had never heard such praise for her carpentry. Young men in the street sang to her poems. Married women crossed the road to avoid being compared to her. Young girls followed when Liliana took an evening stroll and they grew their hair like her. And as for married men, why, they cowered, looked away from Liliana’s charm, mindful of how the Mayor stayed the Mayor for election after election; their fearful inurement involved staying away from their own bride on their wedding night so that the Mayor could pay his respects.

Now on the night of the second full moon of Liliana’s sojourn a great noise woke everyone in the town, and everybody—knave, child, grandmother, baker, cobbler, mother, and brewer—rushed to the piazza.

Using two great horns to hoist himself from the tunnels beneath the earth, the King of the World crashed through the granite paving, upended the fountain, and used the flagpole to pick rotten meat from his fangs. The creature sat on the wall of the well from which he had smelled Liliana and detected the deceit of the Mayor and his wife. There he sat, proud as a devil, harvesting from his hooves shit and straw on which he feasted. He was red as a crimson dawn, as tall as a house, as gaudily dressed in dyed leather as St.Peter’s Basilica would ever be once it was built.

‘Bring me the carpenter!’ the King of the World bellowed.

The Mayor had been rudely disturbed in his spying upon Liliana. He had made for himself a crawl space in the loft that allowed him to stare for as long as he longed, stare from above into her bedroom through the eyes of a faux naïf decorative hunkypunk—for the Mayor kept his horrors and gargoyles inside. When the King of the World emerged steaming from the earth, the Mayor scurried on all fours and clambered down the secret loft ladder to the landing and stared in horror from the window at the creature. When the monster demanded Liliana, the Mayor felt umbrage, was sick with fear and disgust, but he felt excitement grow. A Mayor is a politician first and foremost. He ran to fetch his sash—without his blue sash, who would recognise him? He woke his wife, who for a horrified moment assumed her husband had once more found himself desirous of her. When the Mayor explained the King of the World had tunnelled into his submissive town she felt great relief. When she was told the creature was demanding Liliana, she chewed the inside of her mouth as relief evaporated—for if the monster ate Liliana, who would her husband spend his nights watching? Good God in heaven—what if he returned to her bed?

‘We must save Liliana!’ the wife cried. Thus it might be seen that charity is perhaps more often than we would wish motivated by self-interest.

‘We must pay the King his tax!’ the Mayor replied. If the carpenter was to die, his only regret was not forcing himself upon her beforehand. ’The King of the World will destroy this town! A shame, but Liliana is a small coin of tribute in exchange for our safety!’

‘Could we live with ourselves after?’ the wife asked, not thinking of Liliana whatsoever.

‘We must do what is best for the town! One life for our continued prosperity! She has finished the work on the house!’

‘You’re a monster,’ the wife said quietly, going to wake Liliana.

Liliana obediently followed the Mayor’s wife to the piazza where the King of the World was picking his arse and inspecting the worms he discovered.

‘I smell,’ the creature bellowed, turning to the two women, ‘a woman of pure heart with tasty flesh! A Mayor’s dog-tired wife, who isn’t even fit to be an entrée.’

‘King of the World—what do you want?’ Liliana asked. Her voice did not falter, her gaze did not stray from the coal-like eyes of the creature.

‘What’s that to you?’ the King of the World asked.

‘I wish to know my fate,’ Liliana answered softly. And though she was certain she would die, she was content. She had escaped her bestial family, she had mastered her craft, seen a little of the world. Even if it is only a slice of life, enough is as good as a feast.

The King of the World looked around the dirty village, spied the Mayor cowering at the window, and looked into his sordid heart. The king, once an angel, had not so much been expelled from heaven as seconded, and he divined the wife’s motivation, too.

‘Look!’ the King of the World shrieked. The King of the World produced from the earth the trunk of a giant ebony, a wood so hard it might as well have been coal. ‘You have a choice, little Liliana. Carve a chain from the black-heart wood in three nights so you might attempt to bind the monster’s hunger, else this instant be consumed.’

‘You can make anything from wood!’ the Mayor’s wife declared. For praising others can serve our own interests—it might sway a person to do as we wish, for not all coercion is explicit.

‘Accept your fate or try for salvation!’ the creature sniffed.

‘Three nights!’ the Mayor called out. ‘A great deal can be done in three nights.’

‘I will carve chains to bind the monster,’ Liliana said softly. She raised her eyes to stare at the creature. ’I shall try my best.’

The King of the World disappeared in a stink of sulphur and slivovitz.

Liliana spent three sleepless nights carving from ebony a chain to bind the monster. She crafted a key made of wood, and she bound giant millstones to the chain. Her hands bled, her wrists blistered, her tears cleared the dirt from her face. She refused the food the Mayor’s wife brought. The Mayor visited her in his dressing gown and sash, leaned over her, told Liliana he was sure she’d succeed in binding the monster. He walked away and sniffed Liliana’s bed, and after whispered to his wife that the girl was dead meat he would never taste, more’s the pity.

On the fourth night the King of the World tore from the core of the world a new tunnel, and he appeared on the swampy bank of the river that would one day be named the Tiber. He leapt from hill to hill, danced over Rome, shat bitumen on the house of the Mayor, heckled the moon and stars, landed silently in the piazza where Liliana toiled. The girl leant back exhausted, her task complete. Whether the ebony chains would be strong enough to bind the monster she did not know. She had tried her very best; what more can we do but try to complete the impossible tasks demanded by the King of this World?

The creature wondered at the innocence of Liliana. How could such a peaceful heart survive this town? How might Liliana look upon the darkness of men and woman and expect only light? How was it possible for her to find hope when he saw only shit? He took the giant chain of ebony. The King of the World shook the giant millstones with a brimstone limb. He beckoned Liliana toward him. He gazed into her heart. The King of the World took a step backwards and straightened.

‘You accept your fate?’ he asked the carpenter.

‘Don’t tarry. Do what you must as it pleases you.’

The King of the World reached out a giant claw that stretched over Liliana’s head. He thrust an arm into the Mayor’s house where from Liliana’s bed the creature lifted the shrieking Mayor, and there in the piazza the King of the World bound the monster.

Which was fortunate for the King of the World, for Liliana had carved from the dense heart of the ebony tree an axe to which she tethered the sharp flint she had carried from home. Had the King of the World not bound the monstrous Mayor, Liliana intended to cut off the heads of all the monsters of Rome—the head of the Mayor and his wife’s head, too. And so Liliana lived a long life, and the King survived for a few more centuries. But the wife, who spent her remaining seven years thinking on the lessons of this story, was never able to rest easy in her bed, husband or no husband.

After her visit to her daughter, as she was struggling at the exit of the psychiatric hospital, Ahmya’s mother felt the airlock-like suction block her leaving—it was as if the world did not wish it’s atmosphere to be spoiled by the suffering the hospital contained. It was not only the complexity of the code the exit requires, nor the weight of the door, but the granite-like edges of the fairytale in her bag that caused the girl’s mother to stumble a little, feel helpless, caught between two worlds. For a moment—trapped between an institution where a daughter had to pretend to be a cat so that she might retain her sense of choice, and a world when men can harm girls in their own home with seeming impunity—the girl’s mother was unsure where she best belonged.

Antony Osgood

Image: – carpentry tools in a workshop from Pixabay.com. Tools on shelves and hooks and an old bench and chair.