A Wild Swan Read Free Page A

imagine themselves? Where were the young lovers in search of secret sylvan places they could claim as their own?
    Time did not pass quickly. There wasn’t much for you to do. You found yourself replacing the frosting and lollipops more often than necessary, simply because you needed projects, and because (it was a little crazy, but you didn’t regret a trace of craziness in yourself) you wondered if a heightened version—a sharpening of cookie smell, some other manufacturer who produced candy with brighter stripes and swirls—might make a difference.
    As eighty approached, your first and only visitors were not quite who you’d been expecting. They looked promising when they first emerged, blinking with surprise, from among the tree trunks into the little clearing in which your house stood.
    They were sexy, the girl as well as the boy, with their starved and foxy faces—that hungrily alert quality you see sometimes in kids who’ve been knocked around a little. They were pierced and tattooed. And they were, even more gratifyingly, ravenous. The boy didn’t seem to mind that the handfuls of icing he stuffed into his mouth were so clearly held together with paste. The girl sucked seductively (with the cartoonish lewdness of girls taught by porn rather than experience) on a scarlet lollipop.
    The boy said, through a mouthful of icing and Elmer’s, “Hey, Grandma, what’s up?”
    The girl just smiled at him, tongue pressed to lollipop, as if he were clever and intoxicatingly dangerous; as if he were a rebel and a hero.
    And what, exactly, did you expect those young psychopaths, those beaten children, to do, after they’d eaten half your house, without the remotest expression of wonder, or even of simple politeness? Were you surprised that they ransacked the place, eating their way from room to room, stopping every now and then to mock the bits of jewelry they found (she, with your pearls around her neck: “Our mother has pearls like these, how do you like them on me?”) or the vase you’d had since your grandmother died, into which the boy took a long, noisy piss. Did you think they’d fail to complain, ultimately, that there seemed to be nothing here but candy to eat, that they needed a little protein as well?
    Were you relieved, maybe just a little, when they lifted you up (you weighed almost nothing by then) and shoved you into the oven? Did it seem unanticipated but right, somehow—did it strike you as satisfying, as a fate finally realized—when they slammed the door behind you?

 
    JACKED
    This is not a smart boy we’re talking about. This is not a kid who can be trusted to remember to take his mother to her chemo appointment, or to close the windows when it rains.
    Never mind asking him to sell the cow, when he and his mother are out of cash, and the cow is their last asset.
    We’re talking about a boy who doesn’t get halfway to town with his mother’s sole remaining possession before he’s sold the cow to some stranger for a handful of beans. The guy claims they’re magic beans, and that, it seems, is enough for Jack. He doesn’t even ask what variety of magic the beans supposedly deliver. Maybe they’ll transform themselves into seven beautiful wives for him. Maybe they’ll turn into the seven deadly sins, and buzz around him like flies for the rest of his life.
    Jack isn’t doubtful. Jack isn’t big on questions. Jack is the boy who says, Wow, dude, magic beans, really?
    There are any number of boys like Jack. Boys who prefer the crazy promise, the long shot, who insist that they’re natural-born winners. They have a great idea for a screenplay—they just need, you know, someone to write it for them. They DJ at friends’ parties, believing a club owner will wander in sooner or later and hire them to spin for multitudes. They drop out of vocational school because they can see, after a