The Palace of Illusions by Kim Addonizio
Author:Kim Addonizio
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781619024199
Publisher: Catapult
Published: 2018-04-27T00:00:00+00:00
THE HAGâS JOURNEY
Once there was a hag who was really a princess, who lived in a storage unit that was really a castle. In summer the unit was very hot, so she kept the corrugated metal door open to catch the breeze and set a fan just outside on the asphalt of her yard. The asphalt was really a beach, the grains of sand fine and white, silken as the hair of a baby, for in fact, the sand really was a baby. Most of the time, it lay very still; it was a good baby, not fussy at all, for inside it was a dewy flower, and flowers are happy unless they are being cut away from the earth and tied with twine or rubber bands to other flowers, then imprisoned in vases, soon to droop and brown and be thrown into a large, foul-smelling plastic bin. There was just such a bin outside the hagâs door. Inside, though it was full of things like shriveled flowers and old tax returns, the bin was empty.
The hag who was really a princess was unhappy in her castle, because what good is a princess with a castle unless there is a prince somewhere, dropping a sweaty T-shirt on the floor or putting together a lounge chair ordered off the Internet or snoring like a house on fire? For a princeâs snores are really, in the end, the smoke of burning things, photo albums and funny gifts and Post-Its on the refrigerator. But there had been no prince for ten thousand years. The hag had looked for one in vain, among the frogs and snails that lived nearby, and especially she had looked for one each time it rained and the little square of grass she had laid as a welcome mat at the entrance to the castle grew sodden, and worms slithered up from the loosened soil and lay there panting from the effort, enjoying the soft caresses of the rain. The worms seemed promising. But when the sun came out again, they disappeared, or dried out and died and turned to brittle twigs.
The hag determined to go on a quest, for it appeared that no prince was going to wander past the storage unit and be struck dumb by her beauty, which anyway was difficult to see unless he had been drugged with the right potion by another hag, and in that case he was likely to be taken already, locked up in that other hagâs storage unit. So she put on her old coat that smelled of mothballs and moldy bread, a coat that wished it were really a magic cloak; but unfortunately for the coat, it was really only a horse blanket, and though it could wish as much as it wanted, nothing would be granted to it, and the horse was wandering the earth elsewhere.
The hag packed a basket filled with objects that might tempt a prince to come to her, if she encountered one and he happened to be shy.
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