#the handless maiden

My mother and father were grateful, too glad for respite, for salvation, to question our reversal in fortune. We did not starve. Far from it. My lettuces leafed so rapidly, it was all I could do to cut them before they bolted. The strawberries were fat with fruit, and put forth runners like weeds. I picked the raspberry canes each morning, and by dusk they were once again filled.

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The apple-tree had once grown only green apples – sparse, puckery fruit, better suited to hard cider than eating – but after my excursion to the well, the new crop had come in full and fat and scarlet.

Winter passed, and spring returned. I planted hedge of wicked briars and a trench of stinging nettles to shield my garden from curious visitors. I sowed the garden beds with nightshade, with henbane and mandrake. With hellebore, with foxglove and monkshood. For all I told myself that it served as both defense and a warning, I knew it for the empty gesture that it was: latching the barn door well after the horse had already bolted.

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A miller fell slowly but surely into poverty, until finally he had nothing more than his mill and a large apple tree which stood behind it. One day he had gone into the forest to gather wood, where he was approached by an old man, whom he had never seen before, and who said, “Why do you torment yourself with chopping wood? I will make you rich if you will promise me that which is standing behind your mill.”

“What can that be but my apple tree?” thought the miller, said yes, and signed it over to the strange man.

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