The Furious Spinner

Here's a short story of mine that was originally published in Daughters of Nyx. It is based on the Grimm's fairy tale "The Foundling."

The Foundling

In the time before the dam, on the day his wife died, Richard stumbled into the jungle he hated. He had to get away from his daughter’s whimpering, her cries like those of some unknown bird living in the forest beyond the banks of the Tocantins River. The day they finished the dam could not come soon enough for him: then they would flood the rainforest. The jungle. The place where the beasts played and the cries of children turned into butterfly songs. He had brought his wife here, to to this place he hated, and she had died. Yet he fell into the jungle to flee the cries of his daughter.

The forest blurred through his tears. The noises, smells, and touch of things against his skin startled him. He tried to fall back out again, into the civilization he was trying to build on the banks of that Brazilian river, but he could not find his way out. Suddenly, he heard the cries of another child. Or the screams of a monkey? He followed the sound until he reached a clump of ferns. He leaned over and found a naked baby boy supported just above the ground by the soft green fingers of the ferns.

Without thinking, he took the baby from the ferns and held him up. Bubbles popped from the baby’s lips as he smiled. Off to his side, Richard glimpsed movement. He turned from the boy. Was that woman resting against a nearby tree, her chin on her chest, her hand touching the smooth black tree trunk? Richard blinked. No, only a shadow passing by or the sun trying to find a hole in the canopy.

“Something for my Lena,” he said, holding the boy above his head. “To keep her company.” And then he walked away from the ferns and the shadow woman by the tree and found his way out of the forest and into the house where his wife had died.

Richard put the boy in the crib with his daughter, Lena. She stopped crying and stared at the brown baby next to her. Then she laughed and reached her tiny fingers out to touch his hand. Richard went back to work, away from the forest, to forget his wife, and left Lena with the boy and the woman Katy from Tucurui.

The boy, who was called Cauffee by Richard because he was brown, and the girl, Lena, who was as white as the inside of a coconut, grew together and loved each other very much. When Richard wasn’t looking, they went into the forest together and became shadows. They listened to the sighs of the cats and mimicked the monkeys overhead. Sometimes they slithered across low branches hissing like snakes. They were children of the forest even as Richard helped build the dam to destroy it.

And Richard hardly noticed as his daughter grew taller and more like his dead wife. When the dam was finished, he watched the forest die as the water poured over it. The stench of death filled his wife’s house. The children cried. Richard took them and Katy to the next place along the river, and Lena and Cauffee laughed, quietly, because they had the forest once again. During the day, Richard went to his offices at Eletronorte Brazil to build another dam.

One day, Lena and Cauffee walked along the banks of the river holding hands, and Lena said, “I will never ever leave you.”

“And I will never leave you,” Cauffee said. He leaned down until his lips touched hers.

Lena smiled as the air dried his kiss from her mouth.

Katy saw the kiss and was disturbed. Though she loved both children, she believed Cauffee should live in the forest with his own people. Later she told Richard about the kiss.

“Cauffee cannot live here any longer,” Richard said to Lena. He stood by the mantel where no fireplace had ever been built. He straightened his tie and smiled at his pretty daughter. Someday he would be rid of this jungle and he would take her home where everything was not so close to the earth. Lena sat on the floor. The white dress she wore was pulled up around her legs as she moved the pieces of some game around on the floor.

“What do you mean ‘away’?” Lena asked. “This is his home.”

“He is not one of us,” Richard said. “He should be with his own people.”

“Who are my people?” Cauffee stood in the entrance to the living room.

Richard wondered when Cauffee had gotten so tall. He was no longer a boy.

“You could work on the dam,” Richard said. “I can find you a job. I should have done it long ago. But you’ve always been such a comfort to Lena. You aren’t really children any longer, however. You, Cauffee, are part of the jungle. Lena is not.”

Cauffee and Lena glanced at each other. They spoke to each other without words. It had never bothered Richard before, but it did now. They had created a world of their own, and he had only just noticed he didn’t belong.

And this boy—man?—had kissed his daughter. He had seen him kiss her before. A child kissing a child. It was different now. Cauffee was a man from the jungle. Maybe it was calling to him. The jungle. It had taken Richard’s wife. Given her some kind of fever that modern science could not cure.

Lena looked at her father. “I will never leave him.”

Richard laughed. “You are a child,” he said. “You don’t know what you’ll never do. I said I would never come to this place and I did. Then I said I would never stay, and here I am.” Lena stared at him. “Well,” he said, shrugging. “We will speak of this later.”

He started to leave the house and then stopped and came back to the living room where Cauffee and Lena now sat together on the floor, their heads close, speaking without talking. “I don’t want you in the jungle, Lena. It’s too dangerous.”

After Richard left them, Lena and Cauffee went outside and into the jungle, away from the manicured play town that Eletronorte had created for the workers while the dam was being built. They ran until they reached a patch of moss and there they lay.

“I have loved you since I first saw you,” Lena said. “You are in my heart and mind. I will never leave you.”

“And I have loved you even before your father took me from my mother,” he said. He kissed her lips.

Then, as they often did in the forest, they took off their clothes and let the air and moss stroke their bodies. This time, they pressed their skins against each other. As they twined themselves around one another, the cats breathed in their signs and the monkeys talked quietly in the trees.

Katy had seen Cauffee and Lena go into the forest. She ran after Richard and brought him home. Richard called to several men to follow him and he stepped into the jungle again for the first time since he had brought Cauffee out of it. The shadows slid across his body. They made him dizzy.

Cauffee and Lena heard the men approaching.

“I’ll never forsake you,” Lena said.

“Nor I you,” Cauffee said. And they moved closer together.

“Then you must become a snake and I the butterfly on your forehead,” Lena said.

Richard called out to his daughter, and the jungle answered him. The snake slipped up a tree while a white butterfly rested on his back. Some beast roared from within the forest. Richard felt his heart race. His blood pound. What was Cauffee doing with his daughter? How could he have been so stupid to bring the beast out of the jungle? Into his home.

Richard turned from the snake and butterfly and followed the men out of the jungle. He waited for the pair at his house. When the men had gone, Cauffee moved inside Lena, and she in him, touching his heart with her butterfly wings.

Lena’s father made Cauffee move to the village. Cauffee did not understand the people there, and he cried for Lena. She whimpered, too, reminding Richard of the day his wife died. He looked out into the night and listened to the jungle noises. Soon the forest would be gone. Then he and Lena would leave.

“Daddy?” Lena stood in the doorway, her eyes wet with tears. She looked so much like his wife. Her voice. Skin. His wife had had skin so white. Like linen that has never been worn. Touched. Then the jungle had touched her. Killed her.

Lena picked a leaf out of her hair and said, “I thought he was like a son to you.”

“He cannot be my son any longer,” Lena,” Richard said. “You are a child still. You don’t understand. He is different from us.”

“Being away from him is like having my heart torn in half, Daddy,” she said. “I love you, but I cannot live without my heart.”

Richard thought of Cauffee’s hand on Lena’s white skin. He looked out at the dark. “I hate it here,” he said. “I don’t know why I stayed.” He looked back at his daughter. “He cannot have you.”

Lena went to her room again and listened to Cauffee’s cries brought to her by the other forest animals. In the morning, after Richard had gone to work, Lena dropped a white powder into Katy’s coffee and waited for the woman to fall to sleep. Then she ran into the jungle. She ran until one of the shadows moved away from the trees to run with her.

“I will never forsake you,” Lena said.

Cauffee stopped and took her into his arms, kissed her forehead, and said, “Nor I you.”

They walked until they tired, and then the trees closed about them while they slept and opened when they made love. The birds dropped berries into their laps for them to eat. Near nightfall, they heard the sound of men. Lena’s father called for her. He was crying. No, the forest had changed the sound. He was screaming.

“We will never forsake each other,” Lena said. “You must become like a bush, and I will become your flower.”

The shadows slipped around them, and it was almost dark when Richard came upon the bush with one pink flower growing from it like a beacon.

“My God,” he said. “It’s dark and I’m going to be here alone in this jungle.” He sat next to the bush and began to cry. “I will be left alone, without my wife or daughter. Both taken by the jungle.” The two men with him pointed into the grayness.

“There’s a place just beyond where we can stay,” one said. “We won’t be alone.”

Richard shook his head, they didn’t understand, and then he stood and left the bush and flower behind as he followed the men further into the jungle.

He slept apart form the others, the jungle noises in his ears, creeping into his blood, and he dreamed of Lena, her skin like the feathers on a swan, her dress falling from her until she was standing naked, holding her arms out to him.

He awakened to blackness and cursed the jungle for his dream. He would find his daughter and take her from this place. When he slept again, he dreams of the snake and the butterfly. The shadows slipped away until the snake became the bush and the butterfly the pink flower.

As dawn came and her father slept, Lena lay next to Cauffee and felt him stir against her, coming alive, awake, moving into her, kissing her face and breast. She laughed and the forest echoed her laugh and stroked her bare back.

“I will never forsake you,” she said.

“Nor I you,” he said.

Richard awakened suddenly. The bush and the flower. He moved quickly through the forest, knowing it now as he had not known it before. He thought of his dead wife and the shadow woman who had slept while he took her child. Or had the woman been a part of his imagination? Maybe Cauffee was part of his imagination, too. Perhaps all of the jungle—the world, this day—was part of his imagination.

They heard him coming.

Richard stopped where he knew the bush had been. In its place was a small pond with a tiny white bird swimming on it.

He knelt by the edge of the pond. “You can’t have her,” he said. “I will quench my thirst with you.” He put his lips on the water. The bird flew up and away and then Cauffee was next to Richard, his hands on his hips, his legs spread apart.

“You will destroy your own daughter,” Cauffee said.

Richard wiped his hand across his lips and drops of water fell into the pond. “I only want her back,” he said.

“We will never leave each other,” Cauffee said, “or this jungle.

“But I will drown it,” Richard said, “and you will die if you stay.”

“We will find another place,” Cauffee answered.

“You cannot have her,” Richard said, and he looked within himself, where the jungle beat, where it had always been, and he found the brightly colored shadows of himself. He dove toward the pond, a small silver fish now, his gills shining like rainbows in the dappled sunlight.

A dragonfly kissed the surface of the water that became Lena again. She smiled and took Cauffee’s hand. Where the pond had been, the fish twitched on the wet dirt.

“He doesn’t know how to come back,” Cauffee said.

Lena picked up the fish and began running, flying across the canopy with the monkeys and insects. The birds carried her part way, the butterflies the rest of the way. The fish flapped against Lena’s skin. Then, before her father died, Lena reached the dam of her childhood and dropped him into the reservoir. The fish slipped through the scum, became a flash of light in Lena’s eyes, and then was gone.

“I will never forsake, you, “Lena said when she was by Cauffee’s side again.

“Nor I you,” Cauffee said.

They held hands and walked deep into the forest. There they lived happily together for many years, becoming shadows and whispers other people mistook for snakes or butterflies or the sighs of cats. 0 comments

Saturday, October 23, 2004

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