Read Online Tales of Wonder by Jane Yolen - Free Book Online Page B

pair.
    Boris pulled the hands on quickly, glancing only briefly at the label. S URGEON’S H ANDS . They were supple-fingered and moved nervously in the air as if searching for something to do. Finally they hovered over Baba Yaga’s forehead. Boris felt as if he had eyes in his fingertips, and suddenly saw the old woman’s skin as a map stretched taut across a landscape of muscle and bone. He could sense the subtle traceries of veins and read the directions of the bloodlines. His right hand moved down the bridge of her nose, turned left at the cheek, and descended to her chin. The second finger tapped her wen, and he could hear the faint echo of his knock.
    â€œI could remove that easily,” he found himself saying.
    The witch pulled the surgeon’s hands from him herself. “Leave me my wen. Leave me my own face,” she said angrily. “It is the stage setting for my magic. Surgeon’s hands indeed.”
    Remembering the clowns in their makeup, the wire-walkers in their sequined leotards, the ringmaster in his tie and tails—costumes that had not changed over the centuries of circus—Boris had to agree. He looked down again at his own hands. He moved the fingers. The right were still laggards. But for the first time he heard and saw how they moved. He dropped his hands to his sides and beat a tattoo on his outer thighs. Three against two went the rhythm, the left hitting the faster beat. He increased it to seven against five, and smiled. The right would always be slower, he knew that now.
    â€œIt’s not in the hands,” he said.
    Baba Yaga looked at him quizzically. Running a hand through her bird’s-nest hair and fluffing up her eyebrows, she spoke. But it was Uncle Misha’s voice that emerged between her crooked teeth: “Hands are the daughters of the eye and ear.”
    â€œHow do you do that?” Boris asked.
    â€œMagic,” she answered, smiling. She moved her fingers mysteriously, then turned and closed the cupboard doors.
    Boris smiled at her back, and moved his own fingers in imitation. Then he went out the door of the house and fell down the steps.
    â€œMaybe you’d like a new pair of feet,” the witch called after him. “I have Fred Astaire’s. I have John Travolta’s. I have Mohammed Ali’s.” She came out of the house, caught up with Boris, and pulled him to a standing position.
    â€œWere they jugglers?” asked Boris.
    â€œNo,” Baba Yaga said, shaking her head. “No. But they had soul.”
    Boris didn’t answer. Instead he climbed into the mug and gazed fondly at his hands as the mug took off and headed toward the horizon and home.

In the Hall of Grief
    I was thirteen summers, the last turning of childhood, when Great-grandmother became ill. She was exiled upstairs, to the windowless room under the thatch, to practice lying in darkness. So it is with the very old, whose lives are spent in dusk just as newborns must learn to live in the dawn.
    It was not Great-grandmother’s illness that made me eligible to enter the Hall of Grief, but my own signs of adulthood: the small breasts just beginning to bud, the fine curlings of hair in the cave places of my body, the rush of fresh blood from the untested nest of my womb.
    I was ready. Had I not spent many childhood hours playing at the Hall game? Alone or with my brothers I had built my own Halls of willow branch and alder snappings. We had decked the tables, made signs, drawn pictures. Always, always my table was best, though I was the youngest of us all. It had more than just an innocent beauty, decked in ribbons and bordered by wildflowers: red trillium for life, blue-black elderberry for death, and the twinings of green boughs for the passage between. No, my tables had a character that was both mine and the grieven one’s. It had substance and imagination and daring, even from the time I was quite young. Everyone remarked on it. The