She was back in the present, fighting to save her children — losing the fight to save her children. The little pig was gone — she had put it in the wicker basket at the side of the sleigh and fastened the straps when the soldiers were getting drunk inside her house. She had gone back to the barn to get the children, to flee with them under cover of darkness to what she hoped would be the relative safety of her parents’ village. Someone must have seen her put the piglet in the basket, someone cruel enough to take the time to do up the straps after sentencing her children to death in the wolf-infested forest.
The little pig was gone and another sacrifice was needed in its place to protect the horse. The woman prepared to jump out of the sleigh. She turned to Irena and shouted, “Give Vitek to Kasia!” Irena stared at her mother blankly. “Give your brother to Kasia!” The woman’s voice rose to a hysterical pitch. Four-year-old Kasia clung onto her two-year-old sister, and Irena began to cry, clutching her brother even tighter. “Give him to her!” screamed the woman, “I need you to hold the reins!” But even as she said it, she knew that the six-year-old would never be able to control the terrified horse. Her own hands were a bloody ruin and she wondered how she was able to hang on as the frantic animal fought its way forward.
“Irena! Give Vitek to Kasia — now!” But Irena saw something in her mother’s eyes that scared her more than the dark and the shaking sleigh and even the wolves. She clutched her brother to her chest and shook her head, fresh tears rolling down her face and freezing to her cheeks.
A large silver wolf clamped its jaws onto the horse’s left hind leg. The horse stumbled, but managed to right itself and the wolf let go, unable to keep up with the horse in the deep snow — but not for long. As the chestnut reeled, the sleigh lurched and the woman panicked. She had to act now or lose all her children. She could not give her life for them because they would never make it to safety without her. But a sacrifice had to be made. If she could not die to save her children, then one of them would have to die to save the others. She would not lose them all. One of them would have to die and she would have to choose. The delicate fabric of the woman’s sanity was finally stretched to its limits and gave way. She threw back her head and howled her anguish into the night. All around her the night howled back.
The woman turned and looked into the faces of her children. A sharp intake of breath — like that taken by one about to drown. She took the reins in one hand, and with the other she reached out for her beloved son — her husband’s greatest joy; the frailest of her children, half-frozen despite his sister’s efforts to keep him warm, too exhausted even to cry, and the least likely to survive the journey.
“Give him to me!” she screamed at Irena. The girl struggled with her mother. The woman wrenched her baby out of her daughter’s grasp and held him to her, gazing for a moment into his eyes. The woman smiled through her tears at her son. Snow was falling on the baby’s upturned face, the frost had tinged his lips a pale blue, but in the woman’s fevered mind, her baby smiled back at her.
Two of the wolves had closed in on the horse and were trying to bring it down. The woman screamed and threw Vitek as far from the sleigh as she could. There was a moment’s silence, then a triumphant yelping as the wolves turned their attention away from the horse, and rushed away into the night. Irena cried out, and her little sisters stared uncomprehendingly at their mother, who screamed and screamed as she grabbed the reins in both hands and whipped the horse on into the dark.
As the first light of dawn broke across the horizon, an eerie sight greeted the sleepy village. The sleigh rolled in slowly, as the exhausted horse made it within sight of the first farmhouse. It stood for a moment, head drooping, blood seeping from its nostrils, its mouth, from open wounds along its flanks. Then it dropped silently to the ground and lay still. In the sleigh sat a wild-eyed woman, staring but unseeing, her black hair streaked with white, reins clenched tightly in her bloody hands. Behind her were three little girls. Two were slumped together, asleep. The third girl, the eldest of the three, was awake — she sat very still, eyes wide, silent as her mother.
“Irena?” Piotr reached the old lady and touched her arm. “I’m Piotr.” He bent down and picked up what was left of Irena’s glasses. “I’m sorry about your glasses,” he told her, handing the crushed frames back to her.
“No need to be sorry,” said Irena. “It’s just a little pig.”
Piotr was taken aback. It was bad enough taking care of Krystyna’s relatives, but she had never said that her grandmother was senile.
Irena read Piotr like an open book.
“A little pig,” she explained, “a small sacrifice to make sure nothing really terrible happens… during my visit.”
“I understand,” said Piotr. He did not understand, but at least there was some method in the old lady’s madness, and that was good enough for him. He paid the parking fee at the ticket machine, and they left the building: a tall young man pushing a trolley and a little old lady clutching a pair of broken glasses.
THE BALLAD OF BALLARD AND SANDRINE
Peter Straub
1997
“So, do we get lunch again today?” Ballard asked. They had reached the steaming, humid end of November.
“We got fucking lunch yesterday,” replied the naked woman splayed on the long table: knees bent, one hip elevated, one boneless-looking arm draped along the curves of her body, which despite its hidden scars appeared to be at least a decade younger than her face. “Why should today be different?”
After an outwardly privileged childhood polluted by parental misconduct, a superior education, and two failed marriages, Sandrine Loy had evolved into a rebellious, still-exploratory woman of forty. At present, her voice had a well-honed edge, as if she were explaining something to a person of questionable intelligence.
Two days before joining Sandrine on this river journey, Ballard had celebrated his sixty-fifth birthday at a dinner in Hong Kong, one of the cities where he conducted his odd business. Sandrine had not been invited to the dinner and would not have attended if she had. The formal, ceremonious side of Ballard’s life, which he found so satisfying, interested her not at all.
Without in any way adjusting the facts of the extraordinary body she had put on display, Sandrine lowered her eyes from the ceiling and examined him with a glance brimming with false curiosity and false innocence. The glance also contained a flicker of genuine irritation.
Abruptly and with vivid recall, Ballard found himself remembering the late afternoon in 1969 when, nine floors above Park Avenue, upon a carpet of almost unutterable richness in a room hung with paintings by Winslow Homer and Albert Pinkham Ryder, he had stood with a rich scapegrace and client named Lauritzen Loy, his host, to greet Loy’s daughter on her return from another grueling day at Dalton School, then observed the sidelong, graceful, slightly miffed entrance of a fifteen-year-old girl in pigtails and a Jackson Brown sweatshirt two sizes too large, met her gray-green eyes, and felt the very shape of his universe alter in some drastic way, either expanding a thousand times or contracting to a pinpoint, he could not tell. The second their eyes met, the girl blushed, violently.