Post by KitClairvoyance on Nov 7, 2007 17:27:22 GMT -5
Her head is pillowed on my chest, our bodies nestled tightly under the cold silk sheets that slide with the slightest movement. I tilt my head to look at her face, pale with moonlight, watching her lips whisper as she sleeps. “Fetch the golden ball,” they say, “a kiss, I promise.” Her soft words betray her dreams; dreams of the day we met. I’ve had dreams of the same day too, except that mine are nightmares, twisted versions of the dream played in reverse. It is why I can’t sleep at night, for fear of the dream where I am taken away from her; turned into a frog by her kiss, and thrown back down into the well once again. She worries about me, I know. I’ve woken from those dreams to feel her shaking me, her eyes wide and her heart racing. She says I cry out at night when I have that dream. She says it sounds like the cry of a wounded bear.
I still feel dizzy whenever I walk past that well in the courtyard. I can never bring myself to look into it because if I do, I’m afraid that I might fall in. Once, one of her handmaidens found our son injured by the well; he had tripped and split his forehead open on its rough granite wall. I remember my stomach being turned inside out as I ran to him, not because of his injury, but because of the well. The feelings of my muscles contracting, my joints being bent into impossible angles; it was exactly like the time I was first turned into a frog.
Sometimes, I wonder if I’ll ever forget that feeling. I was only ten when it happened to me. Every day, I would play in the court gardens with my brothers; simple games, like tag or hide-and-seek. One day, we were playing a high-stakes game of hide-and-seek, the winner would get half of everyone’s dessert’s that day. I hid myself deep within the back of the garden, where the weeds grew wild and would scratch you all over. As the sun went down, mosquitoes came out and started to bite, but I refused to leave my hiding place, confident that the night’s desserts all belonged to me. Hunger and discomfort soon persuaded me otherwise however, but when I stood up, I found myself quite lost. For a long while, I walked in the direction which seemed most familiar to me, only to find the weeds getting taller and the night getting darker. Tears blurred my vision and left a sticky trail down my cheeks as I was reduced to blind stumbling, when I saw someone in the distance. When I look back, I wonder if it was me that found her, or if she was the one who had found me. She was a short old woman, bent over with a really bad hunchback, and with a cane in her hand. She asked me what I was doing out this late. I told her that I was lost. She told me that I was a naughty boy for staying out this late. I said that I just wanted to go home. For a long while, she stared at me, her glassy eyes fixated on my own before she finally spoke, saying that she would take me home.
I took her hand, it felt like the bark of a tree, and followed her. As she led me, she never once stopped talking about how children shouldn’t stay out late, and that bad children should be punished. I stayed quiet, not wanting to interrupt her. She took me to the well and said that we had arrived. I looked at her, puzzled. This wasn’t home, I said, this was a well. She scolded me, asking me if I had listened to a word of what she had been saying the entire time. I was a bad child, she said, and bad children were to be punished. With a quick snap, she slapped me, sending me headfirst into the damp ground. It was then when I felt that very feeling. It began as a tight knot in the stomach, and spread like a dozen worms through my body. I could hear my joints popping as my limbs found new ways to twist themselves, often sending sparks of pain flying. When it was all over, the old woman picked me up. She didn’t seem so short anymore, and the well looked worryingly big. She told me that this was my punishment for being a bad child and threw me into the well, sending me down in a stomach-lurching plunge deep into the belly of the well.
I had never been away from home at night before then. I spent my first night in the well crying. I felt horribly sick, with my tongue feeling as if it was bundled deep in my throat and my stomach feeling bloated. I could hear the wolves howling and the owls hooting in the distance, and in my mind I could see them circling the well, waiting for the moment when they could pounce on me and tear me up. Needless to say, I didn’t sleep that night.
Daybreak brought with it some measure of comfort. I was still scared and confused, but at least the sky was blue and I could no longer hear the calls of wild animals. It also brought with it a little hope. I spent the day waiting for my brothers to find me, or perhaps for the old woman to come back to take me out of the well. It was also then when I realised what I had become, after seeing my own reflection in the water. At first, I told myself that my brothers would find me and make the old woman turn me back, but day turned back into night again and I was left alone to cry for another night.
As the days went by, I became accustomed to my new form and new home, but that didn’t mean I liked either. The first few days were spent in denial, I fought back the urge to eat the insects that ventured down into the well, instead I scraped by with just drinking the water that surrounded me. Days were spent looking upwards, watching the clouds as they drifted by my circular view port. As it became apparent that nobody was going to find me, denial soon turned into a reluctant acceptance as survival became more important than humanity. I forced myself to take in the salty-bitter taste of the large blowflies, and to satiate myself with the rancid-milk taste of the water-skimmers who shared my home. To be fair, the well wasn’t too bad a home. I was sheltered from the worst of the weather, and had a constant supply of food an water. It was enough for me to survive, but just only survive. The few remaining delights that I had in life were few and quickly disappearing. I tried many times to escape my watery prison, but the walls of the well proved too slick to climb, and the water level never reached high enough for me to escape. The only joy I had came during winter, when snow would fall into the well, providing me with something to play with, at the very least.
The monotony of life in the well carried on for, I don’t know, too long. Time was an unimportant detail down there. I tried keeping track of the years by counting the winters, but they soon enough became too numerous and to similar to remember. I wasn’t even sure when winter began anymore, the seasons not having any clear boundaries in the well. Some years it snowed, some years it didn’t. There was one year then the water in the well partially froze, I wondered then if I should just allow myself to freeze with the water. At least then, I would be free of the slow trundling cycle of life in the well. I never got a chance to make that decision though, the water had melted again the next day.
Living in the well had one good side to it though, I had a lot of time to myself. That was perhaps what kept me from turning into a frog completely, being able to think like a human. Often, I would lie on my back and float atop the water and allow my mind to wander. I would remember with some pain the days before being thrown into the well, when I would play with my brothers in the garden. I wondered how they were doing, if they missed me. I couldn’t see their faces in my memory, it was tough to admit it, but I couldn’t remember how they looked like anymore. I couldn’t even remember how I looked like. I wished that at least they would remember how I looked like. It was during those times when I would practice speaking, not wanting to lose my only form of communication with other humans. It felt like trying to learn a new language, training my new vocal chords to make sounds they weren’t accustomed to. The result wasn’t the most pleasant form of speech by far, it was croaky and some letters like “s” and “l” proved impossible to form, but it was still speech.
It was during one of those speech practice sessions when the golden ball dropped into the well. It made a small glooping sound as it plunged into the water next to me, before sinking leisurely down to the bottom of the well. I swam over and was about to descend down to see what had nearly hit me when I heard voices, human voices echoing down the well. It fell in, one of them said. I’ll get a bucket and fish it out, said another. I tried to croak something out in vain, the resulting echoes drowned out any meaning my words carried. Hurry up, I think the well might be haunted, the first voice came. Realising what was to come after, I pressed my body close to the side of the well just as the loud crash of a wooden bucket shook the water. I watched in half-amusement as the bucket floundered on the surface of the water, there was no way it was going to reach the ball like that. After a minute of pointless floundering, the bucket straightened up and rose back to the mouth of the well. It’s not there, let’s try again, the second voice came. Again, the bucket came crashing down and resumed its floundering. Perhaps it was a wish for escape that made me clamber into the bucket, looking up eagerly as I was drawn closer to the opening that I had tried in vain to reach so many times. As I hopped out onto the rim of the bucket, I found myself looking at a pair of rosy-faced maidens, their cheeks quickly draining of colour as they saw me.
“A frog!” one of them shouted, prompting the other one to start screaming as if she hadn’t known what I was before her partner shouted it out. I tried to cobble together a sentence, but it got lost in the high-pitched screams. I must have made a really ugly frog. It was between dodging the poorly aimed stones when I saw her for the first time. She ran over to the maiden that was screaming and calmed her down. An accusing finger was jabbed my way as the screams died down to sobs. Seizing the moment of silence, I forced out a sentence, offering my help to get the ball. All three of them looked at me, each of them taking the same half step back, unsure of what to make of my offer, or of the fact that I spoke.
“You can fetch my golden ball from the well for me?” she finally asked, to which I nodded. “Go on then,” she replied to my nod, “fetch the golden ball.”
I turned and hopped towards the well, hesitating at its rim. A quiver of fear tugged at my stomach as I looked down, reluctant to go back in. After all those years, I had finally found my freedom from the prison of the well, only to find myself considering jumping back in. I didn’t want to go back in there, I wanted to be taken home. Turning around, I looked at her before croaking my request. “Take me home?”
“Yes, I’ll take you home. I promise.” Trusting in those words, I leaped back down into the mouth of the well, landing in a splash back into the same old stale water which I had been living in. It wasn’t hard for me to find the ball, but it took some effort to drag the ball to the surface of the water. I croaked out, saying that I had the ball. For a moment too long, nothing happened. My heart froze for a moment, releasing itself only when I saw the bucket being tossed into the well. Relieved, I rolled the ball and clambered into the bucket with it.
That evening, she carried me back to the palace where she lived, hiding me in the long sleeves of her dress before leaving me on the dresser-table of her room. That night, we talked for a long time. I told her how I became a frog, how I missed my family. She told me about her being a king’s only daughter, how her father wanted her to get married like every other good princess did. She told me that in the morning, she would take me to see the court wizard, to ask him if he could undo the spell that bound me in the form of a frog. I slept that night on a spare pillow placed on the floor under her bed. Warm and comfortable, it was the first time in a long time that I had a good night’s rest.
I awoke to the prodding of a metallic instrument, looking up to see a giant eye peering through a magnifying glass at me. Quite right, the wizard said, that’s a very tight spell put on him. She asked the wizard if there was anything to be done about it. To kiss him, was the wizard’s reply. Confused, she asked the wizard how a kiss would do anything more than leave a coating of slime on her lips, and give my lips a coating of lipstick. The wizard just shrugged and said that magic works in weird ways, very much like love. Shyly, she picked me up and looked into my eyes as she lifted me up to her face. Wait a moment, the wizard said and wrapped a large towel around me, can’t have a naked prince in her arms. Not while she wasn’t married. Cheeks pink with embarrassment she placed her lips on mine, with me still half asleep and confused.
A jagged key of pain tore my lips and ripped my skin open. I felt myself stretching rapidly, with my joints popping again back to what they used to be as a human. It was painful, yes, but it was also exhilarating. I knew the spell was leaving me once and for all. Once all the pain subsided, I found myself being hugged in her arms, my cheeks flaring with heat. I remember the wizard smirking to himself, possibly wondering how we were going to explain this to her parents.
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Thanks to Goosh for proofreading. ^__^
I still feel dizzy whenever I walk past that well in the courtyard. I can never bring myself to look into it because if I do, I’m afraid that I might fall in. Once, one of her handmaidens found our son injured by the well; he had tripped and split his forehead open on its rough granite wall. I remember my stomach being turned inside out as I ran to him, not because of his injury, but because of the well. The feelings of my muscles contracting, my joints being bent into impossible angles; it was exactly like the time I was first turned into a frog.
Sometimes, I wonder if I’ll ever forget that feeling. I was only ten when it happened to me. Every day, I would play in the court gardens with my brothers; simple games, like tag or hide-and-seek. One day, we were playing a high-stakes game of hide-and-seek, the winner would get half of everyone’s dessert’s that day. I hid myself deep within the back of the garden, where the weeds grew wild and would scratch you all over. As the sun went down, mosquitoes came out and started to bite, but I refused to leave my hiding place, confident that the night’s desserts all belonged to me. Hunger and discomfort soon persuaded me otherwise however, but when I stood up, I found myself quite lost. For a long while, I walked in the direction which seemed most familiar to me, only to find the weeds getting taller and the night getting darker. Tears blurred my vision and left a sticky trail down my cheeks as I was reduced to blind stumbling, when I saw someone in the distance. When I look back, I wonder if it was me that found her, or if she was the one who had found me. She was a short old woman, bent over with a really bad hunchback, and with a cane in her hand. She asked me what I was doing out this late. I told her that I was lost. She told me that I was a naughty boy for staying out this late. I said that I just wanted to go home. For a long while, she stared at me, her glassy eyes fixated on my own before she finally spoke, saying that she would take me home.
I took her hand, it felt like the bark of a tree, and followed her. As she led me, she never once stopped talking about how children shouldn’t stay out late, and that bad children should be punished. I stayed quiet, not wanting to interrupt her. She took me to the well and said that we had arrived. I looked at her, puzzled. This wasn’t home, I said, this was a well. She scolded me, asking me if I had listened to a word of what she had been saying the entire time. I was a bad child, she said, and bad children were to be punished. With a quick snap, she slapped me, sending me headfirst into the damp ground. It was then when I felt that very feeling. It began as a tight knot in the stomach, and spread like a dozen worms through my body. I could hear my joints popping as my limbs found new ways to twist themselves, often sending sparks of pain flying. When it was all over, the old woman picked me up. She didn’t seem so short anymore, and the well looked worryingly big. She told me that this was my punishment for being a bad child and threw me into the well, sending me down in a stomach-lurching plunge deep into the belly of the well.
I had never been away from home at night before then. I spent my first night in the well crying. I felt horribly sick, with my tongue feeling as if it was bundled deep in my throat and my stomach feeling bloated. I could hear the wolves howling and the owls hooting in the distance, and in my mind I could see them circling the well, waiting for the moment when they could pounce on me and tear me up. Needless to say, I didn’t sleep that night.
Daybreak brought with it some measure of comfort. I was still scared and confused, but at least the sky was blue and I could no longer hear the calls of wild animals. It also brought with it a little hope. I spent the day waiting for my brothers to find me, or perhaps for the old woman to come back to take me out of the well. It was also then when I realised what I had become, after seeing my own reflection in the water. At first, I told myself that my brothers would find me and make the old woman turn me back, but day turned back into night again and I was left alone to cry for another night.
As the days went by, I became accustomed to my new form and new home, but that didn’t mean I liked either. The first few days were spent in denial, I fought back the urge to eat the insects that ventured down into the well, instead I scraped by with just drinking the water that surrounded me. Days were spent looking upwards, watching the clouds as they drifted by my circular view port. As it became apparent that nobody was going to find me, denial soon turned into a reluctant acceptance as survival became more important than humanity. I forced myself to take in the salty-bitter taste of the large blowflies, and to satiate myself with the rancid-milk taste of the water-skimmers who shared my home. To be fair, the well wasn’t too bad a home. I was sheltered from the worst of the weather, and had a constant supply of food an water. It was enough for me to survive, but just only survive. The few remaining delights that I had in life were few and quickly disappearing. I tried many times to escape my watery prison, but the walls of the well proved too slick to climb, and the water level never reached high enough for me to escape. The only joy I had came during winter, when snow would fall into the well, providing me with something to play with, at the very least.
The monotony of life in the well carried on for, I don’t know, too long. Time was an unimportant detail down there. I tried keeping track of the years by counting the winters, but they soon enough became too numerous and to similar to remember. I wasn’t even sure when winter began anymore, the seasons not having any clear boundaries in the well. Some years it snowed, some years it didn’t. There was one year then the water in the well partially froze, I wondered then if I should just allow myself to freeze with the water. At least then, I would be free of the slow trundling cycle of life in the well. I never got a chance to make that decision though, the water had melted again the next day.
Living in the well had one good side to it though, I had a lot of time to myself. That was perhaps what kept me from turning into a frog completely, being able to think like a human. Often, I would lie on my back and float atop the water and allow my mind to wander. I would remember with some pain the days before being thrown into the well, when I would play with my brothers in the garden. I wondered how they were doing, if they missed me. I couldn’t see their faces in my memory, it was tough to admit it, but I couldn’t remember how they looked like anymore. I couldn’t even remember how I looked like. I wished that at least they would remember how I looked like. It was during those times when I would practice speaking, not wanting to lose my only form of communication with other humans. It felt like trying to learn a new language, training my new vocal chords to make sounds they weren’t accustomed to. The result wasn’t the most pleasant form of speech by far, it was croaky and some letters like “s” and “l” proved impossible to form, but it was still speech.
It was during one of those speech practice sessions when the golden ball dropped into the well. It made a small glooping sound as it plunged into the water next to me, before sinking leisurely down to the bottom of the well. I swam over and was about to descend down to see what had nearly hit me when I heard voices, human voices echoing down the well. It fell in, one of them said. I’ll get a bucket and fish it out, said another. I tried to croak something out in vain, the resulting echoes drowned out any meaning my words carried. Hurry up, I think the well might be haunted, the first voice came. Realising what was to come after, I pressed my body close to the side of the well just as the loud crash of a wooden bucket shook the water. I watched in half-amusement as the bucket floundered on the surface of the water, there was no way it was going to reach the ball like that. After a minute of pointless floundering, the bucket straightened up and rose back to the mouth of the well. It’s not there, let’s try again, the second voice came. Again, the bucket came crashing down and resumed its floundering. Perhaps it was a wish for escape that made me clamber into the bucket, looking up eagerly as I was drawn closer to the opening that I had tried in vain to reach so many times. As I hopped out onto the rim of the bucket, I found myself looking at a pair of rosy-faced maidens, their cheeks quickly draining of colour as they saw me.
“A frog!” one of them shouted, prompting the other one to start screaming as if she hadn’t known what I was before her partner shouted it out. I tried to cobble together a sentence, but it got lost in the high-pitched screams. I must have made a really ugly frog. It was between dodging the poorly aimed stones when I saw her for the first time. She ran over to the maiden that was screaming and calmed her down. An accusing finger was jabbed my way as the screams died down to sobs. Seizing the moment of silence, I forced out a sentence, offering my help to get the ball. All three of them looked at me, each of them taking the same half step back, unsure of what to make of my offer, or of the fact that I spoke.
“You can fetch my golden ball from the well for me?” she finally asked, to which I nodded. “Go on then,” she replied to my nod, “fetch the golden ball.”
I turned and hopped towards the well, hesitating at its rim. A quiver of fear tugged at my stomach as I looked down, reluctant to go back in. After all those years, I had finally found my freedom from the prison of the well, only to find myself considering jumping back in. I didn’t want to go back in there, I wanted to be taken home. Turning around, I looked at her before croaking my request. “Take me home?”
“Yes, I’ll take you home. I promise.” Trusting in those words, I leaped back down into the mouth of the well, landing in a splash back into the same old stale water which I had been living in. It wasn’t hard for me to find the ball, but it took some effort to drag the ball to the surface of the water. I croaked out, saying that I had the ball. For a moment too long, nothing happened. My heart froze for a moment, releasing itself only when I saw the bucket being tossed into the well. Relieved, I rolled the ball and clambered into the bucket with it.
That evening, she carried me back to the palace where she lived, hiding me in the long sleeves of her dress before leaving me on the dresser-table of her room. That night, we talked for a long time. I told her how I became a frog, how I missed my family. She told me about her being a king’s only daughter, how her father wanted her to get married like every other good princess did. She told me that in the morning, she would take me to see the court wizard, to ask him if he could undo the spell that bound me in the form of a frog. I slept that night on a spare pillow placed on the floor under her bed. Warm and comfortable, it was the first time in a long time that I had a good night’s rest.
I awoke to the prodding of a metallic instrument, looking up to see a giant eye peering through a magnifying glass at me. Quite right, the wizard said, that’s a very tight spell put on him. She asked the wizard if there was anything to be done about it. To kiss him, was the wizard’s reply. Confused, she asked the wizard how a kiss would do anything more than leave a coating of slime on her lips, and give my lips a coating of lipstick. The wizard just shrugged and said that magic works in weird ways, very much like love. Shyly, she picked me up and looked into my eyes as she lifted me up to her face. Wait a moment, the wizard said and wrapped a large towel around me, can’t have a naked prince in her arms. Not while she wasn’t married. Cheeks pink with embarrassment she placed her lips on mine, with me still half asleep and confused.
A jagged key of pain tore my lips and ripped my skin open. I felt myself stretching rapidly, with my joints popping again back to what they used to be as a human. It was painful, yes, but it was also exhilarating. I knew the spell was leaving me once and for all. Once all the pain subsided, I found myself being hugged in her arms, my cheeks flaring with heat. I remember the wizard smirking to himself, possibly wondering how we were going to explain this to her parents.
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Thanks to Goosh for proofreading. ^__^