Natalia Antonova

One woman’s husband was a cheater. He did it with the traveling gypsy, the miller’s daughter, the green-eyed spinster down the street, the shepherdess, the milkmaid with a dark braid, the woman that swept the church floor, the wife of the officer, and the son of the shoemaker. The man’s wife both knew and didn’t know about these things. A part of her knew, another one didn’t. Sometimes the former ruled the heart, sometimes the latter.

The man loved his wife. But another part of him became frustrated with her for not being able to contain within her the multitudes of life’s details he had found so interesting: the flecks of individual red hairs in the dark braid of the milkmaid, or the way the son of the shoemaker had a soft-spot for all beggars and petty criminals and wouldn’t admit it. And one part ruled sometimes, but the other part ruled more often.

He didn’t think of it as unfaithfulness. He was only living his life.

But the cheating husband once ran across the wrong kind of woman. She was and wasn’t beautiful, and, even more curiously, she didn’t seem at all interested in him – which made him desire her intensely. The woman was a traveler, passing through, or so she claimed. He had to beg her to do it, and even though she relented, she said, cryptically, that if he didn’t pleasure her exactly the way she wanted, he would come to regret it. He didn’t pay attention to her words, busy as he was undoing his trousers.

He tried with all of his might, but the woman had a strange, insatiable appetite. He had never met such a woman before, and soon found himself completely exhausted. Shortly thereafter, he found himself a goat. The woman wasn’t joking when she had challenged him.

The man had only himself to blame for his troubles, and so he didn’t even protest all that much when he found himself being rounded up by irate goatherds that very same night.

“This one looks like it might be old Limpy,” one said.

“But he doesn’t limp!” The other replied.

“Nobody’s perfect,” the first goatherd winked, and the man’s fate was sealed. Read the rest of this entry ?

There was once an old woman whose only joy in the world was her grandson. The old woman’s sons and daughters had all gone their own way, and only the boy stayed behind. He grew up handsome and good-natured. The old woman worked hard to keep him well-fed and well-clothed, and the two were happy. Sometimes, the old woman ached for something – but what it was, she couldn’t say. She looked, at those moments, to the west (why the west? She wasn’t sure), and sighed with a slight rattle in her throat, and went back to the tasks ahead of her.

There came a time when the old woman noticed that her grandson no longer smiled as he did before. Most of his free time he now spent looking out across the valley of his birth, as if searching for something. Sometime, he cocked his head to the side and listened intently, although to what, the grandmother couldn’t fathom.

When questioned, the boy told his grandmother of a tale being whispered on the wind. The voice made his insides ache as if he had guzzled down a pot of boiling water, but when it quieted down, he ached even more. The old woman tried to soothe her grandson, but he would not be consoled, and, while she slept one night, slipped out of the door and followed the strange call that only he could hear.

Weeping, the old woman went to the village elder – a woman even older than she. The elder smoked a rolled-up leaf and stared at the old woman with her milky, unseeing eyes. The elder opined that the disappearance looked like the work of a witch that lives on a hill surrounded by a swamp. The witch was rumored to feed on human hearts. Read the rest of this entry ?

There lived once, on the outskirts of a kingdom that no longer exists, a girl who lost her parents.

Her mother died while giving birth to her, and as for her father, he was taken by cholera when the girl was twelve.

The girl’s mother had been a gifted seamstress. She left for her child a chest full of dresses – dresses made of gold thread and silver thread and many other threads. The girls’ father had been a carpenter. He left for her the house she lived in, as well as a wooden doll with bright blue eyes.

The father’s sister moved into the little house following the cholera outbreak, and though she claimed she was doing it out of the goodness of her heart, she soon turned the girl into a servant. The girl scrubbed the floors, cooked the meals, repaired clothing, fetched the water, and tended to the garden. The aunt lived off her dead husband’s inheritance, and lived rather well, but rarely could spare food or clothes for the insufferable orphan who didn’t have the good grace to be carried away by cholera or some other illness.

When the girl turned fifteen, the aunt found a new use for her. “Times are lean,” she announced, “and my estate won’t feed us both. You never bothered to learn a trade or get an education [the girl tried to say that she had not been allowed to learn, but the aunt waved her off]. You will earn a living in the only way that’s open to you.” Read the rest of this entry ?