From the Bookshelf of Get Your Shorts in a Bunch…

(view spoiler)[“What's this?” she said.

“Polly. My new wife,” he said. “Polly, this is Lucia.”

“Your new what?” Lucia asked, only slightly dimming my pleasure in his finally having told someone. “Welcome.” She embraced me swiftly, kissing my sweaty forehead.

“Guess what?” she asked Nelson. “Just yesterday I got a postcard from Marianna. She is in India at an ashram, fucking hundreds of people a day. She writes she is finding enlightenment through nonstop tantric fucking.”

***

I didn't know what to say. I felt I should praise everything I could—nice house, nice land, nice view, nice sky—without sounding truly psychotic. Finally I said, “What beautiful blue flowers!” The field was completely blue.

***

It was no accident that I was drawn to a volume of Grimm's Fairy Tales, nor was it accidental that I turned to “Hansel and Gretel” and read it for survival tips as much as for entertainment.

***

—I thought, say the women, that upon stamping the ground you fell to the center of the earth. Or that you merely bruised your heel and wandered off in a fit of malaise.

No, says Half of Rumpelstiltskin, those are just myths.

—Is it true, ask the women, that you wish to huff and puff and blow our houses down?

No, says Half of Rumpelstiltskin. You're thinking of the Big Bad Wolf.

—Is it true what we hear about you and the girl with the grandmother?

No. That, too, is the Big Bad Wolf.

—Is it true that you'd like to cook our children in your large, cast-iron stewpot?

Half of Rumpelstiltskin sighs. No, he says, I am in fact a strict vegetarian.

—Do you believe in the interdependence of name and identity? ask the women.

Yes, I do.

—Why don't you change your name?

Because I'm still Rumpelstiltskin, says Half of Rumpelstiltskin. I'm just not all of him.

***

[...] something living is more important to him than all the treasures in the world. The baby gurgles, her legs poking through the bars of the shopping cart, and pulls to her stomach a round of Gouda cheese the size of her hand. He would never have imagined, not for a heartbeat, that children were so easily come by. Had he known you could buy them at the supermarket, his life might not have become the mess it is today.

***

People who grin, he has always thought, look squirrelly and eccentric, sometimes barking mad, and, on occasion, dangerous and inconsonant—as if they're trying to hide something from the world, something virulent and bitter on the surface of their tongues.

***

The people on the television seem lost. Somewhere, at some point, they forgot who they were or how to be happy. They found themselves wandering around behind the haze of their fear and desire. They stumbled into his television. The lucky ones will walk off with each other, out of his television and onto some beach beneath a soft and falling sun, heady with the confidence that they've found somebody—another voice, a pair of arms—to be happy with. Half of Rumpelstiltskin wishes them the best, but he knows something they don't—which perhaps they never will—something that may not even be true for them. He knows that it happens in this world that you can change in such a way as to never again be complete, that you can lose parts of who you once were—and sometimes you'll get better, but sometimes you'll never be anything more than fractional: than who you once were, a few parts hollow. He knows that sometimes what's missing isn't somebody else.

***

Time goes by. The children don't turn up. Did she ever have children? The performance artist considers adoption. She reads from the information packet: “Fees may be significantly lower for foolish and lazy youngest sons, children thumb-sized and smaller, those with the heads of hedgehogs or the ears of donkeys. Many so-called special needs, given proper care, will not significantly impact the future health and happiness of your child.” She schedules a home study. “So they can determine whether I am likely to eat my children, I guess. When it should be obvious that I am responsible to a fault. But I do have doubts. My brothers, for example: I lost them. Who was it who said, 'to lose one brother may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose six looks like carelessness'?”

***

“Who's John C. Reilly?”

[...] “Just a person who's in movies. Grown-up movies.” Kate's favorite is the one where he plays the tall, sad policeman: he was so lovable in that. Talking to himself, driving around all day in the rain. You just wanted to hand him a towel and give him a hug. And though something about that movie was off [...] John C. Reilly was not himself at fault. He was just doing his job. Playing the part. Even those squirmy scenes were shot through with his goodness. His homely radiance! The bumpy overhang of his brow. His big head packed full of good thoughts and goofy jokes.

***

“Let me go and I'll tell you how to make the purse work,” said the witch. “I know you're a bottomless pit and you know, too, you fool. You've known it your whole life. Now let me go.”

***

“He had a pretty big trauma when he was a baby,” my wife reminded her mom a few weeks ago. They didn't realize I was at the kitchen window. “A couple of traumas, actually.” She said it like she understood that it was going to be a perennial on her To Do list.

So for the last two months I've gone around the house like a demolition expert who's already wired the entire thing to blow and keeps rechecking the charges and connections.

***

Occasionally something different occurred. One girl pasted a diadem of gold star stickers to her forehead and wandered from her stoop to get closer to where one of the boys stood bent slightly forward, his hands on his knees, waiting for another boy to hit the ball. This waiting boy was Eddie, who lived at the opposite end of the street from Mary, the girl with the diadem; their bond was exquisite, meaning it would never let go, though they were too young, really, to understand the implications. Once she fell roller-skating and skinned her knee and he stood spellbound, staring at the place on the sidewalk where he could see her blood. “I shouldn't have let it happen,” he told her, even though he'd been at the dentist having a cavity filled at the time.

***

The teacher was pretty and seemed no older than most of the students' parents, but in fact she was very old, old as a breastplate of hammered bronze, a virus.

***

No one was surprised when her gaze fell on Eddie—everyone knew it had been headed there all along, which was also why no one except Eddie found her description of the egg disturbing, since he was the only one who had been listening. Eddie and Mary were a pair; they had been formed that way—everyone knew that.

***

She would take the pain that had always been with him, the great ache of loneliness at the center of his life, into her hands, like a trembling bird; she would sing to it, and caress it, and then with one gesture fling it into the sky. A flutter of wings and it would rise away from him forever. (hide spoiler)]