A Wild Swan Read online

  As it turned out, both of them were right.

  * * *

  All the children prospered, after the queen had been put to rest. Her eldest son, who had, at his mother’s insistence, ruled since his father’s death, remained just and benevolent, and the male heir produced so quickly by his wife looked, early on, to be another compassionate king-in-the-making. The castle did not crack or crumble. Every tide brought in new swarms of fish. The sons and daughters of the carpenters made tables and chairs even more marvelous than those their parents had produced; the sons and daughters of the bakers rose early every morning to produce more pies and cakes, more bread and muffins.

  There was, in general, peace, though robberies and contract disputes continued; sons and daughters still occasionally ran off, or lost their minds; irritation, long harbored, still festered occasionally into murder.

  Nevertheless, overall, there was abundance and grace. There were marriages that lasted lifetimes. There were festivals and funerals, there were artisans and poets. Inventors produced mechanisms that shed clearer light, that uncomplainingly performed the drearier tasks, that captured and held music long thought to exist only as long as the players played and the singers sang. In the forest, the hares and pheasants paused occasionally, with the same surprised interest, at the sound of music, and did not know or care whether the music emanated from living musicians or from musicians long dead. In town, children—all of whom had been born long after the old king and queen were laid side by side in their sarcophagi—discerned, from among the music and the laughter that emanated from cafés, their parents, calling them home. Some went willingly, some went grudgingly, but all of them, every child, returned home, every night.

  A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Michael Cunningham is the author of seven novels, including A Home at the End of the World, Flesh and Blood, The Hours (winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Pulitzer Prize), Specimen Days, and The Snow Queen, as well as Land’s End: A Walk in Provincetown. He lives in New York City and teaches at Yale University. You can sign up for email updates here.

  A NOTE ABOUT THE ILLUSTRATOR

  Yuko Shimizu is a Japanese illustrator based in New York whose work has been featured in Time, Newsweek, The New York Times, and The New Yorker. Her self-titled monograph was published by Gestalten in 2011; her drawings appeared in Barbed Wire Baseball, written by Marissa Moss. Shimizu teaches illustration at the School of Visual Arts. You can sign up for email updates here.

  ALSO BY MICHAEL CUNNINGHAM

  A Home at the End of the World

  Flesh and Blood

  The Hours

  Land’s End: A Walk in Provincetown

  Specimen Days

  Laws for Creations (editor)

  By Nightfall

  The Snow Queen

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  CONTENTS

  TITLE PAGE

  COPYRIGHT NOTICE

  DIS. ENCHANT.

  A WILD SWAN

  CRAZY OLD LADY

  JACKED

  POISONED

  A MONKEY’S PAW

  LITTLE MAN

  STEADFAST; TIN

  BEASTS

  HER HAIR

  EVER/AFTER

  A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR AND ILLUSTRATOR

  ALSO BY MICHAEL CUNNINGHAM

  COPYRIGHT

  Farrar, Straus and Giroux

  18 West 18th Street, New York 10011

  Text copyright © 2015 by Michael Cunningham

  Illustrations copyright © 2015 by Yuko Shimizu

  All rights reserved

  First edition, 2015

  The following stories originally appeared, in slightly different form, in Document: “Crazy Old Lady” (as “Hansel and Gretel”), “A Monkey’s Paw,” and “A Wild Swan.”

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Cunningham, Michael, 1952–

  [Short stories. Selections]

  A wild swan: and other tales / Michael Cunningham; illustrated by Yuko Shimizu.

  pages; cm

  ISBN 978-0-374-29025-2 (hardcover) — ISBN 978-0-374-71260-0 (ebook)

  I. Shimizu, Yuko, 1965– illustrator. II. Title.

  PS3553.U484 A6 2015

  813'.54—dc23

  2015002963

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