The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror. Fifth Annual Collection

THE OGRE’S WIFE Pierrette Fleutiaux

The Ogre’s wife doesn’t like preparing flesh, although she doesn’t know it. Something comes over her when the smell fills the house and there isn’t a pure breath of air to be had. She pulls out a haunch, dunks it in the fire, which hisses, she eats it, eats another, getting drunk on the smell of charred meat. Then the meat seems to swell up inside her; she feels it pressing against the walls of her stomach. It is as if a new, thick, stubborn life were taking shape in the ruins of that violated flesh, in the black depths of her intestines within her own frightened flesh.

The woman then goes out to the backyard, where she has piled the viscera and entrails by the dung heap. She looks at them, she gags, she vomits all the meat she has eaten in a tremor that resembles a sob.

Then she goes to the well, draws a pail of clear water, bathes her face, her eyes, and at the end cups her hands and drinks deeply. She feels the cool water sliding along the irritated walls of her stomach. The redness leaves her eyes, the nausea leaves her throat, the heavy throbbing leaves her temples. She takes a quick look around, and when she’s certain there’s nobody there she lifts her skirt and washes her legs, her genitals, and after that her arms and armpits, where she has hair, too. Then she throws out the dirty water, draws another pail, and drinks again.

Now the woman is like the well: inside, a silent coolness surrounded by a body set like laid stone, and the chill of the water with which she has just washed lingering on the outside like a thin film of ice.

She returns to the big kitchen. Now she can tend to the dead beasts, rinse the dishes, set the table. She neither sees nor smells the hairy, greasy, bloody, brownish, greenish, winy, livid, insipid, rank morsels of meat. Smells and colors do not tumble down her, they stop short at her rim, and she rests in the somber depths of the water, which reflects no image.

The seven little ogresses come to the table, as rowdy as they are hungry. The wife feeds them, calms the fidgety ones, soothes the anxious ones: each will have her carefully apportioned share of raw meat, and if necessary the wife will offset a greater width by trimming the thickness, and will also remove the bone splinters and the nerves. Then she puts them to bed, having made sure each of them has brushed her teeth, having scraped their gums herself, removing the little shreds of flesh that hang between their sharp teeth.

She puts them to bed and goes back downstairs to wash the rest of the raw meat from their plates. By the time the Ogre comes home, she has set the table again, with a pile of bloody joints built into a handsome pyramid at the center. The Ogre takes his seat, the wife hers, but in her stomach she stirs the well water, making tiny cascades. The Ogre chews, crunches, and swallows; she doesn’t hear him.

“Aren’t you eating?” the Ogre says.

“I ate with the children,” the woman says, smiling like a nymph.

When the Ogre has finished eating and smoked his pipe, he goes up to his daughters’ bedroom to count them. He runs his hand over their heads, where the hair has stopped growing and stands up like hedgehog spines or the iron spikes on a gate. When he comes to the end of the row, he calls out to his wife:

“How many of them are there?”

“Seven,” she says.

“Right,” he says.

Then he goes back down the row of beds, unscrewing a little graduated bar with a number from each one, because the beds are also scales.

“How much meat?” he calls to his wife.

“What you told me.”

“Right,” says the Ogre.

And when he has counted his daughters and verified the amount of meat they’ve eaten, he stretches out in his big bed, grumbling a little because their hair has pricked his hand, and, satisfied, immediately starts snoring.

The Ogre’s wife waits a little longer, and then, when she is sure not a soul stirs in this house where, with smothered tearing sounds, flesh is obscurely transferring its allegiance, she releases the banister and returns to her kitchen. There she puts on the light and feels she is finally emerging from the deep well into which she had withdrawn. The kitchen is spotless; not a trace of blood or bone or flesh remains. Without the Ogre’s knowing, the windows have been left open and have brought in the balmy night air. The other life of the Ogre’s wife begins.

A gentle hunger wakes in her. From beneath a trapdoor she pulls the red potatoes that she grows in a hidden clearing in the forest, picks lettuce and leeks from the pots where they pass for houseplants, and takes artichokes from a vase where their leaves look like the petals of a big, angry rose. She cleans her vegetables meticulously and puts them in a pot on the stove. The water simmers sweetly, emitting delicate, scented vapors in the room, and it seems to her that all these things are arranging themselves in a big, loose, soft nest she will curl up in.

Once the vegetables are cooked, she eats them slowly with a bit of the butter she keeps in a little jar marked “body cream,” and she can feel her stomach opening up and welcoming these foods like a tender paste, telling her when it is full without hiccuping or gagging. Afterward, the woman gathers the peels and throws them out at the edge of the forest, where she knows birds and all sorts of small creatures with which she is familiar will come and make them disappear. Then, walking slowly along the path where the soft grass muffles the sound, she goes back to her kitchen, sits down on the doorstep, and smokes a cigarette while she watches the great, shadowy forest that begins just a few yards from the house. And that is how she falls asleep, her back against the doorpost, carrying the great, dark forest beneath her eyelids, which never quite close. Later, the dawn will wake her, and she will quickly go upstairs to the Ogre so he won’t notice she’s been gone.

She is sleeping—but is she really? The great forest is right there before her still half-open eyes. In that dim mass, branches snap, axes ring out against the trees, something flees through the undergrowth, voices cry out, weep, shout, wolves howl, and then there is that sound that has been casting about in the night for some time, now close, now far away, as though searching for an opening in this giant net of vegetation. It is a small and persistent sound, the Ogre’s wife must hear it when she sleeps like that on the doorstep, she must hear it deep inside her head where the forest moves.

Two ogre friends come to dine with her husband, the Ogre. On such occasions, the wife isn’t required to sit at the table or pretend to eat. She has too much to do serving these giants, moving mountains of meat, rolling barrels of blood. That said, the ogres aren’t monsters; they would like to help the slim woman push her excessively heavy loads, but she won’t let them, she doesn’t want them to notice her, she doesn’t want them to see her. The truth is, she doesn’t want to be there. Let them do their feasting, let her do her chores. But there is something else, which is that she likes to listen to them when they talk between rounds of gorging themselves. The ogres have seven-league boots, they have traveled all over the world, and when they aren’t talking about their ungodly hunts, listening to their crude and colorful phrases is like going to the movies. The Ogre’s wife has only her own two legs, and they are not very strong, but she knows a multitude of things exist beyond her forest, and the ogres’ rough descriptions work their way into her and stir up memories. Once she too went far away, to the edge of a big blue sea that wasn’t contained like a well but stretched to the far horizon like a bath for all the creatures of the earth.

The Ogre’s wife remembers. She was walking alone, sadly bent beneath her load— she has forgotten what the load was, but she knows she had been carrying it since childhood. It was winter, her feet sank into the ruts—what the ruts were from she can’t recall either, but they had always been there. The snow began to fall, the little girl could no longer see the path. She stopped walking and started to pray. Almost immediately, a shape appeared against the blurred backdrop of the horizon, a completely white shape that flew over the hills and came toward her through the falling snow. “It’s an angel,” she told herself. “My prayers have been answered.” When the angel reached her, she saw he was very large, with two intense eyes in a face covered with small ice crystals. He took her hand and looked at her closely.

“You’re freezing,” he said in his strange, otherworldly voice.

“I’m cold,” the little girl murmured.

“Doesn’t your blood flow in your veins?” the angel asked.

“My father says I have the blood of a turnip.”

“The blood of a what?”

“A turnip,” the girl said, taking heart.

She could hear the amazement in the angel’s voice. “He feels sorry for me,” she said to herself, and she who had never felt like anything at all suddenly felt very small, which was an enormous change and almost made her dizzy, but also gave her a will she’d never known.

“You’re pale, is your blood pale too?”

“My father says I have the complexion of a rutabaga.”

“A rutabaga?” the angel said, with revulsion.

“Yes,” said the girl.

“You have skinny fingers.”

“I’m nothing but skin and bones.”

“Nothing but bones?” the angel said.

“No,” said the little girl.

“And you're flat,” the angel said, pulling back a flap of her thin coat.

“As flat as an endive leaf. ”

“And I can see through your skin.”

“Like the skin of an onion.”

“An onion?” the angel said, with increasing horror.

“That’s what everyone says,” the girl assured him, now making things up.

She could tell exactly what touched the angel, and she was ready to run through her father’s whole garden if she had to, to keep him interested in her. Because he must be interested in her to ask so many questions. She was so thrilled by this that a little color finally came into her cheeks and her eyes began to shine. The angel, who had the delicacy of his kind, noticed this.

“Of course, your looks aren’t that awful, are they?” he said, looking at her closely. “Only no one would want to eat you up, of course,” he added in the same pensive tone.

The girl went up to him and timidly touched his big, snow-covered boots. “Take me to heaven,” she said.

“What?” said the angel.

“I’d like to go to heaven with you,” the little girl said, pressing up against him and looking him straight in the eye.

“There isn’t much to you,” said the angel, thunderstruck, “but you’ve got brass.”

“I’d do anything for you,” the girl said, more and more taken with the fact that she had startled an angel, and such a big angel at that.

“In that case . . . ,” the angel said, hesitating.

“Oh please, won’t you?” the little girl said, with her arms around his boots.

“It isn’t done,” the angel said.

“You’ve got the power,” the girl said.

“True,” the angel said.

“And besides,” she said, “no one will see us.”

And, in fact, the thick snow falling around them had covered the path. It lay heavily on the drooping branches of the trees and filled the air; there wasn’t a sound, not a soul.

“Since you can fly,” the girl said, “there won’t be any footprints.”

“True,” the angel said, looking at his boots.

“And I don’t weigh much,” she added.

“But,” the angel asked, “are you strong?”

So that’s it, the little girl mused. He thinks I’m afraid to leave this earth, where everything is so heavy and where everyone makes fun of me. He thinks I’ll scream and struggle and make trouble for him in heaven.

“Very strong,” she answered, jumping onto his back and wrapping her arms firmly around his neck.

The angel flew over hills, forests, streams. Sometimes he dropped down and brushed the ground for a moment with the toe of his boot, then he quickly rose again and the little girl closed her eyes to avoid getting dizzy. The angel’s broad head protected her, but she could hear the wind whipping around the sides. She was drunk with speed and height, her head seemed filled with a substance lighter than snow. When night fell, they stopped at the edge of a wood.

“Are we there?” the girl asked. Her body felt weightless to her, she felt nothing beneath her fingers, saw nothing around her but a transparent blackness and white highlights.

“No,” he said, “but I know a shack nearby.”

At the shack the angel squeezed her very tight, wrapped her in his warmth, penetrated her with his strength. Everything was the way she had heard it described by people of the faith, even when she didn’t recognize each thing for what it was at first, and it was her great effort to recognize so much that was new that finally put her to sleep.

"Wake up,” said a hard voice the next morning.

The little girl woke with a start, and it wasn’t like coming into a beautiful dream, but like leaving a terrible battle that had covered her in bruises. The angel’s wings were no longer white, nor was his face or his flying boots. He was a big man in a black coat, with tousled hair, a beard, and very big, gaping shoes that gave off a terrible rotting smell.

He’s the devil, the girl thought, and I’m being punished.

“What are you going to do to me?” she asked, trembling.

“What?” the devil said.

“Are you going to kill me?”

“I said I wouldn’t eat you, didn’t I?” said the devil.

“Well, then, what are you going to do to me?”

“Nothing I didn’t already do last night. ”

“Last night?” she said.

She looked down at her legs, her stockings, and her skirt, and saw they were spotted with blood.

“Let’s go,” the devil said, and threw her over his shoulder like a sack.

The snow vanished; it got warm. Cautiously looking down, she suddenly saw an enormous well full of moving water, with a multitude of naked bodies around the rim, strewn this way and that beneath the burning sun. “This is hell,” she said to herself, feeling the harsh glow of the colors against her face. She could already feel her skin cooking. When they touched down, the sand was burning hot; all around, the bodies were stuck to it and charred, like on a grill. “Even the water is boiling,” she said to herself, and when the devil pushed her in she was already nearly dead with fear and exhaustion.

The water didn’t burn her. It was fresh and not very deep, and when you stopped being afraid to look at it, it had the blue of real stained-glass windows. It wasn’t boiling, but the little waves came lapping against her legs like minnows in a stream. The devil had moved off; now he had turned into a fish and was slicing through the water with big strokes of his fins. “Is he leaving?” she asked herself, astonished. She looked behind her, but her anxious gaze couldn’t get beyond two little girls leaning over side by side on the damp strip of beach, busily digging a canal. The devil was coming back; in his hand he held a potbellied fish with black whiskers and red scales.

“I’ll cook it for you,” the girl said, suddenly ecstatic.

“Don’t bother,” the devil said.

And before her startled eyes he bit right into the fish, which quickly ceased struggling, and in five big bites had swallowed it.

“I don’t like white flesh like that,” he said, “but it’s all they’ve got here.”

He too was looking at the little girls, who were bent so far over their canal that all you saw were their round, golden buttocks. And as he looked at them a fit of hiccuping suddenly came over him, his face turned red, he couldn’t breathe.

The girl plunged her hand down his throat. Her hand and wrist were so slim that they had no trouble going down the pipe, and in a second she had pulled out the fish's whiskers, which had stuck in the devil's esophagus.

“You saved my life,” the devil said.

“You mean you can die?” the girl said.

“Just like anybody else, and often over something as trivial as that.”

“So much the better,” the little girl said.

“So much the better what?”

“That you owe me your life.”

The devil looked at her in surprise; then, finding he could breathe freely, he cleared his throat just for the pleasure of it.

“You're not so bad after all,” he said.

The Ogre's wife no longer believes in angels and devils. She has left all of that far behind. The life of an Ogre’s wife has taken hold of her in the invisible way lives have of being always present, so that even if you want to get rid of them you can’t, and you need another life—hungrier, tougher, or more cunning—to make the first one let go.

So now this is what happens. The Ogre comes home. He takes off his big boots and tosses his catch onto the table: breastplates with ribs jutting out like long curving teeth, but mostly hindquarters, legs and thighs of every size and shape, torn down the middle. The Ogre throws down these gaping, bleeding thighs with the fur still hanging from their sides; all at once he opens his fly, pulls out his huge ogreish member, and shoves it into the folds of flesh, where it instantly turns red. He grabs a thigh in each hand, squeezes them against his member, spreads them apart again; the bones crack. He groans with each back-and-forth movement of the thighs; his wife has to stay and watch, but the dead beast does not give him what he wants—he has brought home doe haunches and sow haunches, but their cold, slack vaginas are not what he needs. With a quick motion he flips his prey onto its belly, lifting the hind legs high as though they were flags, then slamming them roughly down and driving his member deep into the ruptured organs. He opens and closes the dislocated thighs; the broken bones tear at his member; he howls with his head thrust forward, as if the voice of the quartered animal were passing through his body and rising in a desperate appeal to the unfathomable god of the flesh. But he is still not satisfied.

One day he brings home the rump of a cow, and his wife stares in horror at the great white hind legs splattered with blood and dung. He makes her come to him and tosses her onto the cow, pulls up her skirt, and seizes her slender thighs. The woman trembles—someday, without thinking, he will spread them brutally apart as well and crack them with a single stroke; her belly will be ripped open, he will flip her over and thrust himself into her erupting entrails. The Ogre finds no satisfaction in her, either; her body is too tiny. He brings in a live bull, binds its hooves to the four corners of the kitchen, and impales his wife on its member. The animal’s spasms, its bellowing and twisting, whip him into a frenzy, he breaks off its horns, shoves his member into its eyes, and crawls across the rough hide.

His wife is very white against the bull’s black belly, he slobbers toward her, crying, “The last hope! The last hope!” He still has not had enough, he throws himself down on all fours and sinks his teeth into the animal’s living flesh, where its limbs are stretched tight. Its agony causes the whole house to shake, and the wife atop its disintegrating body senses she has lost control; the monstrous member slides between her pale thighs and she doesn’t know what to cling to.

“Stop!” she cries out suddenly. “Stop, stop!” The Ogre looks up, and their eyes meet for an instant.

“Up there,” she says urgently.

At the head of the stairs, the seven little ogresses in their white nightgowns are crowded together, staring at their mother, naked atop the black beast, and at their father, on all fours with his penis in his hand and his mouth full of raw flesh. The seven little ogresses survey the carnage, but their faces show neither fear nor revulsion; their eyes are glittering.

“Go to bed!” the Ogre roars in a terrifying voice, and the disappointed ogrelettes retreat and vanish.

Pacified, the Ogre pulls his wife off the bull, politely stretches her out on the ground, finishes his business inside her with a modest convulsion, and then gets dressed again. He triumphantly summons his children and shows them the parts of the beast with care, giving them the names, the tastes, the scents; he quizzes each of them, and when they respond correctly he lets them throw themselves on the twitching mass with their pointy ogresses’ teeth, their dozens of pointy little teeth.

“Put on your napkins!” their mother cries.

But they don’t listen.

“Use your knives and forks!”

But they glance at their father and see him laughing, and they shrug off her recommendations.

“Don’t take such big bites!” their upset mother cries, but the little ones throw themselves even more greedily onto the beast, which has finally finished dying.

“Chew!” their mother says.

No one listens.

“They'll choke!” she pleads with the Ogre.

Sensing their mother’s helplessness, the ogresses continue even more eagerly, despite her despair. The Ogre finally deigns to hear her. “Go along with your mother now,” he says.

And the wife takes them off to the well and washes them one by one. Weeping, she washes their little lamprey mouths that tear at flesh so eagerly. She talks to them, tells them their sharp teeth wound and cause suffering, but the ogrelettes laugh, they don’t understand their mother’s arguments, they make fun of her, they’re aroused and euphoric. When they’re clean, their mother puts each of them in a white nightgown that still shows sharp creases from ironing. The children tolerate it, and now their mother sees all seven of them, clear and distinct among the pails gleaming softly in the moonlight, their little feet all white in the evening dew on the grass. She sees their round cheeks, their pink lips, their air of good health, and a door closes inside her on the bloody scenes as though they belonged to another time, another life. She kisses her children tenderly, and when they are all in bed she begins telling them a story.

“Once upon a time, there was a little girl who lived in a village. Her mother and her granny loved her to distraction, and they had made her a little red ridinghood—”

“What color red?” the ogrelettes call out.

“Poppy,” their mother says, thinking of the flowers she loves along the roadsides. “No!” the children say.

“Strawberry,” their mother says, thinking of the delights she has walking across the fields.

“No!” the children cry.

“Tomato,” their mother says, seeing her secret garden in the clearing.

“No way!” the children cry; a tomato is to them what spinach is to others. “Cherry,” their mother says, looking at the little pink print on the curtain at the window.

“Oh, come on!” the children cry, practically choking with laughter.

And when the wife, bewildered, falls silent for a moment, the children immediately begin yelling, “Cow’s blood, bull’s blood, cow’s blood, bull’s blood!”

The woman sighs and continues her story. “Her mother and her granny had made her a little blood-red ridinghood. One day, when her mother had baked and decorated some cakes—”

“Yuck, yuck!” the children yell.

“What’s wrong?” their mother asks.

“Not cakes, not cakes!”

“Then what?” their mother asks.

“Snakes, snakes!”

“Oh,” their mother sighs.

“Trapped and skinned,” the children say.

“Fine. So, one day when her mother had trapped and skinned some snakes, she said, ‘Go see how your granny is doing and take her this snake and this little pot of jam ... of ham.’ ”

“That’s it, that’s it!” the children encourage her.

Pleased to see their faces light up, the wife goes on. “As she was going through the woods, she met the Big Bad Wolf, who would have loved to eat her up.” “No!” the children yell.

“Well, what now?” their mother says.

“The Big Bad Wolf, whom she would have loved to eat!” the children yell, so excited they stand up in bed.

“Sit down,” their mother says, “or I won’t go on.”

The children sit down again and she goes on.

“She met the Big Bad Wolf, whom she would have loved to eat only he didn’t dare—”

“Only she didn’t dare—”

“Only she didn’t dare.”

“Why not?” one of the ogresses cries.

“Because there were some woodcutters there,” one of them answers.

“Because her granny was waiting for her,” another says.

“Because her mother had told her she couldn’t,” the youngest says.

“Well, then, let her eat them all!” the eldest yells in a strident voice.

At these words, the ogresses look at their mother. Their round, opaque little eyes settle on her tender skin, on her rumpled collar, on her breasts, which show through her blouse in the moonlight, on her arms where the bull has bruised them. The children are silent and their focused eyes don’t move.

Uneasy, their mother murmurs, “You shouldn’t eat wolves.”

Then, nervous, she goes on, “You shouldn’t let wolves eat you.”

Then, at a loss, “You should eat what is right.”

The mother feels her thoughts tripping her up. She no longer knows which way to turn, fears lurk on all sides, the ogresses’ eyes are glued to her skin. She is overcome by a tremendous fatigue, and she would like nothing better than to let herself slip to the ground and surrender to whatever happens, but she forces herself to continue her story.

“The little girl took the long way around, and had a good time gathering herbs—”

“Birds,” the ogresses say.

“Had a good time gathering birds and chasing butterflies—”

“Frogs and flies,” the ogresses say.

“And making posies of the little flowers that she found—”

“And making mush of the little slugs that she found.”

“The wolf didn’t waste any time getting to the granny’s house.”

“Wrong,” the eldest says. “She got there first, and do you know why, sisters?” “Because she had taken the Ogre’s boots,” the others answer.

“Terrific!” the youngest yells excitedly, and they all applaud.

The mother looks at them, sitting in their beds so cheerfully and clapping their hands the way children do. Her exhaustion goes away and a little joy returns: a joy that is worn and tattered like an old delusion, but that she has never thrown out for good and that now comes back to envelop her—still useful, if only for a moment. She wants to tell her children a story, to be there in that room with the seven little beds all in a line, talking softly in the dim light of the moon, while the curtain sways softly at the window in the shadow of the cherry tree and the room expands and contracts in time with all those small, attentive breaths as though all of them, she and her children, were being rocked upon a great warm bosom.

“I’ll go on,” she says. “The little girl got there first and told her granny what had happened. Tut your snake, your birds, your frogs, your flies, and your slugs on the doorstep so the wolf can eat them,’ her granny said. Then he won’t be hungry anymore and he’ll go away. ’ ”

“No, no!” the ogresses cry.

“I don’t understand,” their mother says.

“She wants to eat the wolf,” the youngest murmurs.

“And to eat him when he’s good and fat,” the eldest cries.

“I was forgetting,” their mother says.

“Go on, go on,” the ogresses say.

“All right,” the mother says. “The little girl got into bed with her granny, and when the wolf arrived, she pounced on him.”

“No, no,” the children cry.

“That’s not how it goes?” the mother asks, distraught.

“Details, give us details,” the children say.

“I’ll tell it,” the eldest says. “The wolf ate everything on the doorstep, but that only made him more hungry, so he got into bed with Little Red Ridinghood, who was dressed up as her grandmother. He was pretty surprised to see how that granny looked in her negligee. ‘Granny, what pretty eye shadow you have on!’ he said.” “ The better to seduce you, little wolf!’ ” all the ogresses but the youngest cry out.

“ ‘And what pretty lipstick you have on!’ ”

“ ‘The better to kiss you, little wolf. ’ ”

“ ‘And what pretty arms!’ ”

“ ‘The better to squeeze you, little wolf.’ ”

“ ‘And what pretty breasts!’ ”

“ ‘The better to arouse you, little wolf.’ ”

“That’s enough,” their mother says. “It’s time for bed. Now, here’s the end of the story. ‘Granny, what pretty pointy teeth you have,’ said the wolf. ‘The better to eat you with, little wolf!’ And as she spoke those words the naughty little girl jumped on the poor little wolf and ate him up. ”

The ogresses are very dissatisfied with this ending, but since they can’t tell why, they allow themselves to be put to bed. Their mother straightens the tips of their hair, which have become bent in the course of the story, pulls the curtain across the moon, and leaves, feeling chilly and numb.

The Ogre comes in his turn to the ogresses’ room.

“How many?” he says.

“Seven,” she says, leaning against the banister.

“Right,” the Ogre says.

Eating a whole bull this evening has calmed him down. It doesn’t even occur to him to check the graduated bars; he calls for his wife and goes to bed. The bull has calmed him down, and all he wants from her tonight are her slim thighs, which he will open without violence. He mounts her and moves without frenzy. The Ogre is so big his wife can’t feel where his body ends. She can’t touch his feet and she can’t see his head, which lies well beyond her, rubbing and hitting the wall as though involved in something that has nothing to do with her, in a language she doesn’t know. Her own head is against his ribs, and she looks for the most yielding spot to rest her face in and get a little air. All she knows of the Ogre are his lower rib cage pressing against her forehead; his stomach—she can hear the muffled echoes of the dead flesh battling inside—pressing against her ears; his enormous thighs, which immobilize her own and give her endless cramps; and his penis, which fortunately isn’t so big, and moves inside her without her feeling it—an absence sometimes rubbery, sometimes hairy and sticky. It’s just that the Ogre’s head is so far from hers, and what he is doing so far from being what she might enjoy, that she never feels even the beginning of pleasure, never even a hope of a beginning.

When he’s done, his mood sometimes softens for a few minutes, and the wife climbs up near his head and brushes aside his sweat-soaked locks.

“At least let me cook the flesh,” she says.

“I can’t,” he says.

“Why not?”

“I have to have it raw, otherwise ...”

“Otherwise?” the wife says.

“Otherwise my hunger is like a solid wall, a web of gray threads, parching illness, a constant grinding that drives me mad.”

“Yes,” the wife says.

“I need flesh that cries out. My hunger comes back in a rush, and I fill myself with what I need.”

“Yes,” the wife says.

“The wall opens, and everything that is parched and gray and grinding suddenly explodes, and I fill myself with what I need.”

The woman continues to smooth his matted curls, but she knows she mustn’t say a word, mustn’t look him in the eye, or the Ogre will rise in anger and she will see that look he has when he brings home the beasts.

This evening, though, he goes on talking.

“Even the beasts,” he says. “Their flesh is dull, they don’t understand me. They can’t share with me, they aren’t with me. Soon I’ll have to, I’ll have to—”

Horrified, the wife puts out the light. “Let’s go to sleep,” he says.

In the night, the open window, at first cloudy, little by little becomes clear. The great forest looms up beyond in the pale light. The wife carries the great forest in her eyes, which are always half-open, and as she sleeps the little noise that has been hovering about for some time, now near, now far, comes back more loudly. Twigs can be heard breaking, leaves being crumpled, brambles crunching; something small and very determined is casting about, trying to get out of that great forest, trying to get into her head.

The wife is dreaming. The street is empty, she is sitting alone on the edge of the sidewalk. A little girl comes down the street, very little, almost an infant. There is a fairly high wall running along the sidewalk, and on the other side of the wall, down below, the wife knows there is a ledge covered with weeds and wildflowers. The ledge isn’t very wide; there is nothing beyond it but sky, emptiness. Suddenly the little girl breaks away and jumps onto the wall. She has already thrown one leg over to the other side. The wife doesn’t understand why no one is rushing up, why she herself doesn’t budge. But she can’t take her eyes off what is happening. The child moves with the deftness of a serpent, the control of a well-trained predator, and suddenly, just as her whole body is about to go over, she raises her face. The wife is stunned by the girl’s expression. The child isn’t just playing, she knows what she is doing, her baby eyes are set and full of fury. Her glance goes right through the wife, as though she were nothing but a vague shape made of mist on the sidewalk, but she doesn’t know what feeling it fills her with. The face of that child on the wall, and that little leg sliding over! Then it’s done. The wife listens for the dull thud of the child’s fall onto the grassy ledge, but none comes, and she waits a long time, her heart repeating the same, pounding question: “But there was a ledge, wasn’t there? There was a ledge?”

She wakes up expecting the noise, fearing the emptiness in which the noise doesn’t come. And suddenly she hears a very soft snapping in front of the house. Her skin prickles. It is as though her dream has jumped tracks: the fall into the abyss beyond the ledge has happened, and now something—the remnants of the sound she didn’t hear—is gently scratching at the membrane of silence and darkness around the house, around her sleep.

Trembling, she goes down into the kitchen, crosses to the door, and opens it suddenly. On the doorstep there is only a very small boy, scantily clothed, his whole body trembling.

“I want to come in,” he says.

The woman looks at him, thunderstruck.

“I’m lost,” he says. “My brothers and I are cold. Let us in.”

“God help you,” the wife murmurs. “Don’t you know this is the Ogre’s house?” “The wolves will eat us too,” the little boy whispers. “Let us in.”

They debate it, the little boy numb with cold and the wife numb with fear. He won’t retreat toward the forest and she can’t retreat into her house. They walk in the garden, on the path, back and forth at the edge of the forest. The wife has never met such an obstinate and contentious person. She forgets her fear.

“The wolves mean death,” he says.

“The Ogre means death as well,” she says.

“The wolves mean a brute death, my screams will be lost in their rough fur, their jaws, their dirty black claws. There’s nothing more brutal than that, there's nothing more terrible than my screams drowning in brute flesh.”

The woman listens passionately. “How will it be different with the Ogre?” she asks, forgetting he’s her husband, forgetting he’s in her bed, forgetting he’s there, close by, in the house.

“His eyes will look at me, they will return my screams and add something to them. The Ogre will understand me, there will be two of us at my death, we will share something.”

“That’s odd,” the wife says. “The Ogre said that too.”

“You see?” he says. “It will be better than with the wolves.”

“It will be worse,” says the wife, who can’t understand where all these words are coming from. “You’ll want to ask him for mercy.”

“It’s you I’ll ask for mercy,” he says. “You’ll protect me, I know it.”

“I won’t be able to do anything,” the wife says, “and my heart will break with sadness. ”

“We’ve been abandoned,” he says. “I’ll think of you suffering for me and I’ll have that solace. With the wolves, all I’ll have is the pain and the brutishness.”

“You mean you want me to suffer?” the wife says.

“Maybe that’s what you need,” the little boy says. “How long have you been living here?”

“A long time,” the wife murmurs.

She sees the child in her dream just as its legs slide over the wall, its face turned toward her with those eyes full of something she doesn’t understand. She is seized with fury.

“Why have you come here?” she cries.

“Because of the wolves,” he says.

“But there aren’t any more wolves,” she cries.

“Why are you shouting?”

“Because you’re here,” the wife says.

“But I’m here because you’re here,” he says.

They walk faster and faster at the edge of the forest, coming and going rapidly. The wife is completely absorbed in this argument that rises and falls around them, looping and knotting and binding them so completely they don’t want to get loose. Caught up in their argument, they talk more and more loudly, so loudly that they hear nothing around them, nothing of what is going on at the same time across the garden, in the house.

Thumbkin’s six brothers had gone into the house. They were cold and they couldn’t stand waiting anymore; their little brother was palavering and not coming back. They went in and went upstairs one after the other. Drawn by the heat, they found the ogresses’ bedroom, and each one slipped into a bed without thinking, without even undressing, they were so tired and frozen.

In his bed, the Ogre is having a bad night. He has talked too much this night, and the words have muddled his brain like bad wine. He wakes in a storm cloud and immediately smells fresh flesh, very much alive and fragrant with the scent of the outdoors. He rises, reeling, and follows the smell to the ogresses’ bedroom. The boys hear the floor shaking as though trees were falling in the forest. They quickly slide under the beds and wait, holding their breath. The Ogre comes into the room and bends over his daughters; he smells the smell that is driving him mad in their sheets, on their skin.

“Get up!” he cries.

Startled from their sleep, the ogrelettes rise like little serpents. They too catch the scent, and a thrill runs through them. They gather and sniff at each other like a pack of jackals, their eyes shining in the night. The Ogre places his big hands on them, bends over to catch the scent too, and they turn on him suddenly and bite his hand with their pointy little teeth. The Ogre growls.

The little boys have fled during this commotion, crawling into the darkness. They have found another pocket of warmth—now they’re in the Ogre’s big bed, snuggling and squeezing against one another; half-asleep, half-awake, they listen to the growling and hissing that comes from beyond the staircase.

The Ogre has withdrawn his bloody hand, and, retreating with a growl, he goes back to his room. The horde of ogresses follow him. They smell the wild odor in the bed where their father has lain down again, they mill around him, sniffing, and climb onto him with their little pointy teeth unsheathed and gleaming like razor blades.

The little boys had thrown themselves under the bed, and now they flee toward the other bedroom, slithering like little beasts. The ogresses and the Ogre race from one room to the other. The smell grows stronger all the time, they circle one another, their little teeth sink in farther and farther, the Ogre’s hands squeeze at random, blood flows, bones crack, the scent in the air baffles them, drives them mad, blinds them, the ogresses are upon their father like a pack, he shakes his enormous arms and bites to the right, to the left, crushes and tears. When the noise finally dies down and the little boys venture out again, there is nothing left but a mangled heap at the head of the stairs between the two rooms. They go downstairs and find themselves a place in the kitchen near the hearth, where a little bit of heat still lingers, and then, finally at peace, they fall asleep with the scent of the forest wafting over them through the open door.

When the wife returns, still debating with Thumbkin, she sees his six brothers lying there asleep.

“You see?” Thumbkin says. “Nothing happened.”

“You win,” the wife says. “Lie down beside them.”

Then she goes out on the doorstep as is her wont and sits there bolt upright. Her mind is compact as a stone, as though the world had just changed and there was no room yet for many murmuring thoughts. When Thumbkin and his brothers leave at dawn, she hardly moves. She remains alone in the house with the corpses she hasn’t yet seen.

The wife has the house to herself. The first few days, she comes and goes. When she thinks of the ogrelettes in their white nightgowns by the well, she weeps. When she thinks of their pointy teeth and the shreds that hung between their pink lips, her tears stop. And the Ogre? The memory of him leaves a black hole that swallows up thought. They are all under the earth now, and no one in the village complains about them anymore; in their dead-and-buried state they have become like everybody else, and now they can be forgotten. At the cemetery, the big tomb and the seven little ones lie there as submissively as all the others. People say the ogrelettes’ hair has grown up through the ground and become the hedge of spiky bushes against the wall at the back. For a long time the wife comes to straighten the thorns into a proper crown at the head of the tombs, but one day she no longer sees her children’s hair in them and leaves them to disorder.

The wife no longer vomits. Once, in town, she saw magazines with animals and whips and leather instruments and vampires. She came home, and ever since she has found herself laughing, suddenly laughing midway up the stairs, laughing at the thought of those magazines, at her memories, which insert themselves between the pages, making the printed images pale by comparison. In the middle of her kitchen, she raises her skirt and looks at her long white thighs, no longer bruised or cramped. She has sold the salting tubs, the mincers, the slaughtering pens; she has sold the guns, the hooks, and the big jugs saturated with indelible brown stains. Her garden is full of fruit and handsome green plants that grow in broad daylight, her stomach feels better, she has little to say. She receives newspapers, all the newspapers that come to the village—she reads incessantly. Massacres, carnage, killings, and crime; torture in basements, booby-trapped summer homes, deranged gunmen, explosions; and children, children burned, children gunned down like clay pigeons, raped, cut up, as well as children in uniforms with guns in their hands, and children in gangs with chains. The Ogre’s wife clips these articles and pastes them on big sheets of cardboard, which she puts up here and there around the house—it doesn’t matter where, since no one comes to visit— and now and again she comes to a stop before one of them and falls into a revery, an anxiety, an oblivion.

Days pass. One morning, the Ogre’s wife opens a cupboard and sees the Ogre’s big boots standing there. She turns around. Beyond the windows (which are almost always open now), beyond the garden, she can see the great forest drawn like a thick black line against the clear and empty sky. She comes back down as she used to long ago and sits on the kitchen doorstep. Night falls. The dim tangle of the forest twines firmly around her gaze, and when she drifts off, the branches, the twigs, the leaves enter her half-open eyes, and in the depths of her sleep a small noise begins casting about.

The following day, the wife returns to the cupboard, takes out the boots, and slides her feet into them. Being enchanted, the boots immediately settle against her skin, feel their way along her toes, her heels, her ankles, then find their marks and take on the shape of the feet of the Ogre’s wife.

She goes outside. With one step she is already at the other end of her garden, another step and she is at the edge of the forest. Then the Ogre’s wife takes a very deep breath, squares her timid shoulders, flexes her slim thighs, and suddenly she takes off in a great leap over the forest.

She is flying, flying over the forest in her seven-league boots. In the dim undergrowth, Thumbkin is wandering once again, followed by his six sniveling brothers, still tripping over roots, filled with the chimerical desire to find their parents and with a neurotic fear of wolves. Thumbkin lets them talk. He’s got other things to think about: once was enough to shatter his universe. Being deserted a second time, having to march again among these enormous black trunks, where each branch seems to snap beneath his skin like an unknown organ exploding, sending unheard-of sounds along his nerves—all this, instead of stamping Thumbkin into the soil of the forest, has freed him from it forever. He doesn't want to go back, but where can he go, and what should he do with the six whiners who are holding him back?

Thumbkin climbs a tree. He scans peaks and valleys, and then, in the misty distance, he notices a shape that seems to be flying toward him. His heart beats quickly, he waves wildly from his branch, he shouts and struggles. Oh, if only she will see him and come over, he will know how to hold her.

She has seen him, and in two strides she is beside him. He has grown, she has changed—they greet each other eagerly.

“I’m taking you with me,” she says.

“What about the others?” he asks, pointing at the six crybabies sitting in a circle at the foot of the tree.

The Ogre’s wife bends down, pushing aside two or three branches.

“It’s you I want, not them,” she says.

How she has changed, Thumbkin muses, and he admires her so much he’d like to jump into the pocket of her blouse right now and never leave it.

“They are my brothers,” he says reluctantly, “and they don’t know how to care for themselves.”

The Ogre’s wife takes a package out of her bag.

“Here’s everything they’ll need,” she says, throwing it through the branches. “Let’s go.”

“Right,” Thumbkin says. He listens to the sound of the falling package and to his brothers’ voices as they howl like puppies at the moon. Then he jumps into the big pocket of the wife’s blouse and off they fly over the great forest, through the pale air, which slowly clears, lights up, bursts into flame.

Inside the pocket, Thumbkin doesn’t stir. Sometimes he very gently rests his head on the wife’s breast. The wife feels this pressure on her breast at the same time as she feels the thrill of flight in her legs and the warmth of the sun on her cheeks. How close her lover’s head is to her heart, how swift their flight, how vast and open the earth!

They stop at nightfall in a clover patch. Thumbkin comes out of her pocket, stretches his folded limbs, but he doesn’t leave the wife’s body. He settles in the other pocket, lays his head on the other breast, and his heat radiates softly through the wife’s body. They sleep that way. The next day, Thumbkin moves into the big pocket on her skirt, he stretches his legs in the hollow of her thigh, he rests his head and his open arms against the wife’s rounded belly. Come evening, he settles on the other side, and the heat in the wife’s body continues to grow.

They pass through the countryside, camping out wherever they like, leaping over borders, sight-seeing and visiting, always body to body. Thumbkin has moved from her front to her back, from one shoulder to the other, from one buttock to the other, he has stopped in the small of her back, beneath her armpits, at the bend in her arms, he feels her sweat running in rivulets around him, and the wife’s body continues gently heating up. One evening, they come to a great city spread out along a river. The river makes a bend downtown, a space full of gardens with bridges radiating out and a hotel at the back sparkling with lights and surrounded by multicolored flags trembling in the breeze. The place looks like a big butterfly at the heart of the city, and the wife lands on its back. They have a room in the shining hotel, with a bay window overlooking the river at the point where it forks. Thumbkin searches the wife’s body in the places he couldn’t reach when they were flying across the countryside in the seven-league boots. He places himself between her legs and gently spreads them, he spreads the great purple lips and lays himself down in the middle of that wet and odorous bed, his head on the little pillow at the top and his arms extended in the fur. The window is wide open, and the river waters flow with a strong and steady sound. They remain this way a long time, until all the heat that has been dispersed, forgotten, extinguished in the wife’s body rises to the surface, gathers into a compact, vibrant beam, and then Thumbkin starts to move, following the lines of force from that beam as it hesitates and casts about. In the dim undergrowth of her body, the Ogre’s wife hears a small noise like something gliding through leaves and branches; as she follows it, all the energy contained in her body rises into that vibrant beam and suddenly explodes, sweeping away her troubles, her memories, her fears, sweeping away all the vines and brambles and deadwood, flowing like the great river outside that shimmers and undulates at the center of the city.

She sleeps, and Thumbkin, who has brought this woman, so big and beautiful and strong, to climax—Thumbkin changes. He feels himself growing by the minute. Nothing will ever abandon him again. He thinks of his brothers, who are probably still following one another Indian file through some ravine with no sky, he thinks of the city with that big river he can see through the window, and the ancient hunger that has tormented him for so long changes inside him and flows throughout his body like a fine, placid water with which he will wash down big, sugary slices of the countryside, waiting while he rests.

Thumbkin's head lies by the wife's and his feet lie by hers. The wife dreams she is on the back of the world, which is a big, bright, velvety butterfly, flitting through space where it is king.

The seven-league boots fell under the feet of a passing mosquito, and, being enchanted, they immediately shrank to its modest scale and vanished with the tiny creature, fading into thin air like a mirage before dazzled eyes.