Through the steam which painted the kitchen window, Karin watched her father carry a wildly fluttering hen by the feet. The other chickens gathered around Rowan, escorting him and the upsidedown hen to the chopping block. They were rewarded when Rowan raised his axe and severed the hen's head from her body. A small black rooster and an orange laying hen began squabbling over the blinking and gaping head.
Rowan reached down and grabbed the pre-occupied rooster. He left the ground with a startled squawk truncated by the chunk of the axe hitting the block. The orange hen, pursued by the fifteen remaining chickens, made off with her trophy.
The rooster's head lay forgotten on the ground and Rowan stepped on it as he turned from the block with the twitching birds. He tracked blood and chicken brains the whole way back to the house, and then he bellowed for Karin who had just brought out the pot of boiling water.
Karin made her way over to him, took the chickens to the back step, dipped them in the water, and began plucking them. Feathers soon collected in leaning heaps, black heaps from the rooster, and white from the hen.
"Ya got them chickens plucked yet?"
Her father's voice startled her, and she pulled feathers even more quickly. "Karin?"
"Yes," she answered as she yanked the last pin-feather from the hen.
"Good," he grunted. "Now clean 'em quick so's ya can make me supper."
She started the gutting first with the rooster. He was the easier of the two. Cleaning the hen was a messier and more interesting affair--she accidentally tore a hole in the egg-sac, and broken eggs rolled around inside the chicken, mixing with its blood and bile.
Karin put a finger in the mess and began swirling it around. The yellow of the yolk and bile and the red of the blood intermingled into a clotted reddish-orange mixture. She stared at this palette, wondering, but froze when she felt a hand on her shoulder.
She twisted to look at her father. "Clean it," he said smiling. She turned away from him and scooped out the chicken's innards. "Good, good," he murmered, and stroked her short dark hair before leaving.
Karin allowed herself to shake just once when he had left, and then she scooped the feathers and guts into the compost heap by the chicken coop. She went back to the house and put the cleaned chickens into the oven to roast, then went back outdoors and pulled some carrots and dug some potatoes from the garden. When she went back into the kitchen, he was waiting for her. She ignored him and set about peeling and chopping the vegetables to be boiled.
He watched her while he held a bottle of gin to his mouth. As he sipped from it he stepped closer to her, and shifted his weight so that one hip jutted out. "It's time," he said, and he left the room knowing he would be followed.
When he was finished Karin did as she always did. She walked the distance from the house over the hill to the forest's edge where the scrub and the desert began. The desert was the same colour as her breakfast, she thought--all yellowish and beige just like oatmeal.
She stood in the shade of a huge jack pine tree, clenching and unclenching her bare toes in the prickly-soft needles and jigsaw-shaped pieces of bark which decorated the dusty soil. This was the spot where she had been waiting for the last five years, ever since she was six years old and she knew that he would come.
Sometimes the wait felt like it had lasted and would last forever. She looked out at the egg-yolk sun and remembered the visiting peddlar who had talked to her so long ago. He had stopped by to fill his canteen with the alkaline water from the iron pump beside the house. He was very friendly, and he had told her a wonderful story.
"Once upon a time, a long long time ago, a lonely girl named Tanaquil lived by the ocean," he had said.
"What's an ocean?" Karin asked.
"It's like a lake, only it's so big you can't see the other side of it. The water is salty tasting, too. Anyway, Tanaquil lived in a little cabin with her wicked stepfather who made her do all the work while he did nothing but sleep all day long. And if she hadn't done all of the work by the end of the night, he would beat her until she couldn't even cry, and then he wouldn't let her sleep at all that night. She had to sweep and scrub the floor of the little hut three times a day, and she had to scour all of the pots and pans every day, whether they needed it or not. She worked so hard that she had huge calluses and blisters on her hands and her knees. And her step-father was so mean that he gave her only parsnip tops and sour milk to eat."
Karin had looked at the peddlar in horror, glad that her father allowed her to eat good food with him.
"Tanaquil was very lonely, and every night, if she had done all of her work, she would go and stand on the cliff that overlooked the sea."
Karin interjected again. "What's a sea?"
"The same as an ocean."
Nodding her understanding, Karin let the peddlar continue. The story fascinated her.
"Tanaquil would stand on the cliff and watch the black waves moving to and fro below, knowing that they contained her destiny."
"One day Tanaquil was not feeling well and she overslept, and she only had enough time to scrub the floor once and she didn't get a chance to scour the pots and pans. When her step-father woke up that evening, he was furious, and he vowed to teach her a lesson that she would never forget. He grabbed a stick and started to beat her. Tanaquil was very frightened because she had never seen her step-father so cruel, and in her fear she ran to the cliff by the sea. Her step-father followed her, an d when she was at the very edge of the cliff, he held back the stick, getting ready to hit her one last time."
"In desperation, Tanaquil looked down into the water and saw a dark handsome merman beckoning. . ."
"Merman?"
"He's shaped like a fish from the waist down. She saw a handsome merman beckoning to her from the waves. Before her step-father had a chance to hit her, Tanaquil jumped off the cliff and plunged into the black water far below, listening to her step-father's terrible laughter as she fell."
"But Tanaquil wasn't afraid anymore. As the water closed over her head she felt the handsome merman grab her in his strong arms. He passed a hand across her face and she was suddenly able to breathe the water. He smiled at her and rubbed her hands and knees. The calluses and blisters disappeared miraculously and her legs in feet turned into a beautiful fish tail."
"Like a rainbow trout's?"
"Even prettier. So then he kissed her tenderly, and led her down to his castle on the ocean's floor and made her his queen, and they lived happily ever after."
Karin wrinkled her forehead. "Did she hafta do all the work anymore?"
"No, because she was too busy ruling over the sea kingdom with her husband, the king." The peddlar stood up from his stool and stretched, then paused to scratch long and hard at a particularly itchy spot on his right buttock.
"Did they love each other?"
"Oh, very much."
"What happened to the evil stepfather?"
"A passerby saw him when Tanaquil jumped off the cliff and thought that he had pushed her. The evil stepfather went to prison, and he ended up scrubbing floors and pots and pans for the rest of his life." The peddlar put on his beat-up leather travelling cap and tucked an errant shirttail into his pants.
"Can you tell me more?" Karin wanted to know so much more about Tanaquil, but the peddlar shook his head no.
"I'd love to, but I really have to go now." He grabbed his worn canvas pack and slung it over his shoulder easily. "See ya later, kid," he said as he had walked out the door.
And later that day, when Karin had returned to her favourite spot under the tree by the desert's edge, she knew what shape her yearning would take. For one fluid moment the desert rippled before her, making waves in the air. Maybe a mer-king would come from the waves for her. Maybe he would love her and make her his queen.
A faint wind stirred at the pine needles underfoot and they tickled her feet, bringing her back to the present and making her smile. She looked out at the desert, forgetting the peddlar's tale in favour of the desert's wicked beauty. The sand and the dusty hills seemed to go on forever, or at least as far as the distant line that separated them from the sky. The view rarely changed. There was always the sand, the sagebrush and tumbleweeds, the clumps of grass, and the occasional snake roping its way across the dust and between the jumping cactus. Sometimes, if it was springtime, the odd peddlar, like the one she had talked to five years ago, might be seen stumbling towards the woods over the uneven footing of sandstone gullies and sagebrush roots. However, it was mid-summer now, and the only life that stirred was a dull breeze.
But the breeze died and the air became a solid wall of heat pressing down on her, relentless in its attack on the ground. Soon, though, the heat would be leaving to regroup for tomorrow's attack, for the night was approaching with the speed of a resurfacing memory. The nights were always cold. She watched as the sun began to set and an orange glow settled across the horizon.
Soon, she thought, and turned around to walk home.
The house was dark when she got home, and her father was asleep on the couch with his bottle beside him. She considered waking him up to make him go to bed, but changed her mind. He was always in a foul mood whenever he had been drinking. Instead, she went and got the quilt from their bed and covered him with it. Then she went back to the bedroom to get some sleep.
She would be sleeping alone and cold tonight, but she didn't mind. She settled down on the bed, and the light from the moon shone in through the window. A bat flew by, a fluttering animated shadow, but though she watched for an hour or so, she didn't see it again.
Is this great, or does it suck big-time? Write me! By the way, this story is copyright 1994-1998. Read it, show it to your friends and your enemies, but do not claim it as your own, or I shall be forced to let my pet chinchillas loose in your computer room. Trust me. You don't want that.