Just before she passed away, a grandchild said to another, “She’s like a planet, don’t you think?”
The other replied, “No, she’s like a sick old lady.”
Each felt pleased by the proof of the other’s foolishness. Each boy, as their grandmother the queen sank away, thought of his own promising future; one because he had a poet’s eye and heart; the other because he was unsentimental and true. Each believed, as their grandmother died, that he’d go far in the world.
As it turned out, both of them were right.
* * *
All the children prospered, after the queen had been put to rest. Her eldest son, who had, at his mother’s insistence, ruled since his father’s death, remained just and benevolent, and the male heir produced so quickly by his wife looked, early on, to be another compassionate king-in-the-making. The castle did not crack or crumble. Every tide brought in new swarms of fish. The sons and daughters of the carpenters made tables and chairs even more marvelous than those their parents had produced; the sons and daughters of the bakers rose early every morning to produce more pies and cakes, more bread and muffins.
There was, in general, peace, though robberies and contract disputes continued; sons and daughters still occasionally ran off, or lost their minds; irritation, long harbored, still festered occasionally into murder.
Nevertheless, overall, there was abundance and grace. There were marriages that lasted lifetimes. There were festivals and funerals, there were artisans and poets. Inventors produced mechanisms that shed clearer light, that uncomplainingly performed the drearier tasks, that captured and held music long thought to exist only as long as the players played and the singers sang. In the forest, the hares and pheasants paused occasionally, with the same surprised interest, at the sound of music, and did not know or care whether the music emanated from living musicians or from musicians long dead. In town, children — all of whom had been born long after the old king and queen were laid side by side in their sarcophagi — discerned, from among the music and the laughter that emanated from cafés, their parents, calling them home. Some went willingly, some went grudgingly, but all of them, every child, returned home, every night.
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Michael Cunningham is the author of seven novels, including A Home at the End of the World, Flesh and Blood, The Hours (winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Pulitzer Prize), Specimen Days, and The Snow Queen, as well as Land’s End: A Walk in Provincetown. He lives in New York City and teaches at Yale University. You can sign up for email updates here.
A NOTE ABOUT THE ILLUSTRATOR
Yuko Shimizu is a Japanese illustrator based in New York whose work has been featured in Time, Newsweek, The New York Times, and The New Yorker. Her self-titled monograph was published by Gestalten in 2011; her drawings appeared in Barbed Wire Baseball, written by Marissa Moss. Shimizu teaches illustration at the School of Visual Arts. You can sign up for email updates here.