The Crane Wife by Patrick Ness Page A

do taste of sorrow.’
    ‘I am hungry,’ she says. ‘I have yet to eat anything at all.’
    ‘Come over to the fire, my lady,’ the fisherman says. ‘I will feed you your fill of grief.’ He tosses the golden-scaled fish into his basket, its gills gasping fruitlessly in the air. ‘And perhaps after,’ he says, almost shyly, but only almost, ‘you will lie with me to show your gratitude.’
    He smiles at her. It is full of ugly hope.
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    She bows her head in reply and flies to him, her fingers delicately skating across the surface of the lake, pulling two long watery arrowheads behind her. She lands next to the fisherman and places her hands on the sides of his head, kissing him gently on the lips.
    It is a new sensation. Wetter than she expects.
    ‘You wish to trap me,’ she says to him. ‘Your thoughts are clear. You will take the spear you have lying next to your basket of fish, and if I do not agree to lie with you, you will use it to force me. You are perhaps not even a bad man, perhaps just one twisted by loneliness. I could not say. But what I do know is that you do not really ask for my body. You ask for my forgiveness.’
    The man’s face has become a curl of sadness. He begins to weep. ‘Yes, my lady. I am sorry, my lady.’
    ‘I believe you,’ she says. ‘You have my forgiveness.’
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    Quickly, mercifully, she bites out both of the fisherman’s eyes and plunges two sharp fingers through his heart. He slumps to the muddy shore.
    ‘You have killed me, my lady,’ he says, regarding his body, squelching in the mud between them. ‘You have set me free.’
    ‘This I do gladly,’ she says.
    ‘I thank you, my lady,’ says the fisherman. ‘I thank you.’
    A wind whirls around them, scattering the fisherman’s spirit, which thanks her until it can thank her no more.
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    She feeds on his basket of fish. They do taste of sorrow, which is bitter but not unpleasantly so. After she has sated her appetite, she takes the fish that remain and places them back in the water, holding them between her hands until they wriggle back into life and swim off. When this is finished, she rolls the body of the fisherman into the lake, too, bidding him farewell when he catches the current, making his final journey as the angry water hurls him out into the space between the islands.
    She looks at her hands, turns them this way and that, as if in curiosity of what she has done with them. She washes them in the river and dries them on the material of her dress.
    Then, once again, she takes flight.

II.

‘I want to ask her to move in with me.’
    ‘Yeah, and I meant to see if you could take JP on Saturday again? I’ve got queue counting to do in Romford, if you can believe it. On a
Saturday.
Some kind of sporting event, I don’t know–’
    ‘Did you hear what I said?’
    ‘Yes. Hiring a cleaner. Blah blah blah. I’d have to drop him off criminally early, like before six, but he’ll easily sleep till eight, so really, it’s just–’
    ‘Did you hear the
reason
I’m hiring a cleaner?’
    ‘The reason? I don’t know. To have a clean house? What kind of question–?
    ‘I think I’m going to ask Kumiko to move in with me.’
    ‘. . .’
    ‘. . .’
    ‘Move
in
with you?’
    ‘Well. I want to.’
    ‘MOVE IN WITH YOU!?’
    ‘I know it’s a bit sudden.’
    ‘
A BIT SUDDEN
? You’ve known her for
two weeks
! If that! What are you, mayflies?’
    ‘Amanda–’
    ‘Dad, you’re talking crazy. You barely know her.’
    ‘That’s the thing. I
want
to know her. I almost feel greedy about it.’
    ‘And this is how you want to find out? Look, you’re smitten, and I’m happy about you being smitten, but it also makes me worry, George. You break. You love and it’s too big and they can never love you back enough and you clearly can’t ask her to move in with you now, she’ll run a mile. And why wouldn’t she? Any woman would.’
    ‘She’s not just any woman.’
    ‘That’s as maybe,