Spīdala

You trust the people you love. Don’t you?

Once there were two lovers, and they were parted by a sorceress who sought the handsome woodcutter for herself when he came by her forest. The sorceress begged the handsome woodcutter to love her three times, promising him riches, then power, then dominion over death. The woodcutter sought the last and brought back his dead bride and slew the sorceress. But she cursed him to live forever while his bride grew old-

Asenka slammed the book shut and rested her forehead on the cool of her forearms. It was unbearably hot, burningly so, the library licked in the orange gauze of the electric heater. She had tired of Proppian archetypes and Gaulic pentameters, tired of the rattle of riches and riddles and sacred threes. The simplest of things, a child’s tale, a folklore, thicketed like a brushland in June under her analysis until her mind ached and her eyes shut fast to sleep. There were a thousand stories here, each one like the last, whispered into something new for the next generation of small slumbering ears.

There are two lovers, and there is love

There are two lovers, and there is a marriage

There are two lovers, and one is gone

The Romanian slipped to Yiddish, and the Yiddish grazed to Polish, but it was all the same. Over, and over…