An Arrangement of Skin by Anna Journey

Author:Anna Journey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General Fiction
Publisher: Counterpoint
Published: 2017-03-08T05:00:00+00:00

In the fairy tale “The Old Man Made Young Again,” recounted in the early nineteenth century by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, Jesus and St. Peter stop at a blacksmith’s house one evening for food and lodging. Later that night, a disfigured old man arrives at the same house, ill and begging for alms. St. Peter pities the elder and asks Jesus to perform a miracle so that the beggar might be restored to youth and able to earn money to buy his own bread. Jesus asks the blacksmith for help:

“Smith, lend Me thy forge, and put on some coals for Me, and then I will make this ailing old man young again.” The smith was quite willing, and St. Peter blew the bellows, and when the coal fire sparkled up large and high our Lord took the little old man, pushed him into the forge in the midst of the red-hot fire, so that he glowed like a rose bush, and praised God with a loud voice. After the Lord went to the quenching tub, put the glowing little man into it so that the water closed over him, and after He had carefully cooled him, gave him His blessing, when behold! the little man sprang nimbly out, looking fresh, straight, healthy, and as if he were but twenty.

The blacksmith, impressed by the beggar’s miraculous transformation, decides to make his crooked old mother-in-law young again. After all, it was his own blacksmith’s forge and bellow that the Lord had used to work the miracle, and who was in a better position to wield those tools than an expert? The next day, Jesus and St. Peter depart, unaware of the blacksmith’s plan. The latter asks his aged mother-in-law if she’d like to be turned into a girl of eighteen. “‘With all my heart,’” she answers, “‘as the youth has come out so well.’” “So the smith made a great fire,” the Brothers Grimm write:

and thrust the old woman into it, and she writhed about this way and that, and uttered terrible cries of murder. “Sit still; why art thou screaming and jumping about so?” cried he, and as he spoke he blew the bellows again until all her rags were burnt. The old woman cried without ceasing, and the smith thought to himself, “I have not quite the right art,” and took her out and threw her into the cooling tub. Then she screamed so loudly that the smith’s wife upstairs and her daughter-in-law heard, and they both ran downstairs, and saw the old woman lying in a heap in the quenching-tub, howling and screaming, with her face wrinkled and shriveled and all out of shape.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.