In a Glass Grimmly (19 page)

As the boy finished his tale, a terrible scream rose from the top of the hill, and three barrels started tumbling down the steep slope.

The barrels bounced and bounded over rocks and gullies, and with each bounce the screams grew more bloodcurdling and horrible. And then, about two-thirds of the way down the hill, the screaming stopped altogether, and the barrels tumbled onward in eerie silence.

When they finally came to rest at the bottom of the hill, the crowd surged forward to pry open the barrels and inspect the bodies inside.

But Jack and Jill turned away. “They must have been very con-fused indeed,” muttered Jill. Jack nodded.

And they left.

Jack and Jill had a new home. It was a small clearing, behind a tiny village on the outskirts of the kingdom of Märchen. They had no roof over their heads, nor even a natural canopy, for it was the dying days of winter, and no tree had leaves. When it rained, the children were soaked to the bone, and they huddled together and shivered. Rain at night was the worst. As they held each other against the freezing needles, the frog would sigh and say, “Even my well is better than this.” But he stayed with them anyway.

During the day, Jack and Jill collected fallen sticks in the forest and laid them out in the center of their clearing to dry. Then they would bundle them up and take them into the village, going door-to-door, selling them as kindling, hoping for a penny for the whole bunch.

Most people refused them. “Ugh!” they would cry upon seeing the children on their doorstep. “It’s those filthy orphans!” And they would slam the door in their faces.

Which was understandable. Jack and Jill did look pretty disgusting. They had not washed themselves for weeks now, and their skin was scabbing from the blisters, and their hair was matted, and their clothes stank.

Occasionally, someone would buy a fardel of twigs for their fireplace and pay the children a penny, and then Jack and Jill would trade that penny for a loaf of bread or a small round of cheese, and they would take their food back to the clearing and eat it hungrily. But most days, the children would just sit in the driving rain, huddled together on the muddy ground, the bare branches lashing against one another, wailing in the wind. Jack’s arms would be around Jill, or hers around him, and the frog would curl up between them, and they would be pummeled by the rain or the sleet or the hail. And there was nothing at all they could do about it.

From time to time, they would take out the Seeing Glass. They would stare at it and think of all the mistakes that had brought them to this place. Foremost of which was going out to look for this stupid, useless mirror.

And then, as the days became weeks, and the weeks became months, things started to change.

The weather turned from late winter to early spring. Little buds appeared on the branches above where the children slept at night, and then the buds burst into white blossoms.

After collecting twigs for the day and laying them out in the sun to dry, Jack and Jill would play. Jack, you will remember, had the most incredible imagination. He would create fantastical scenarios and narrate them to Jill, and they would act them out—meeting dragons and speaking invented languages and finding buried treasures. Jill was the funny one. She would make these jokes that were so dry, Jack wouldn’t recognize them as jokes, until the frog started laughing, and then Jack would start laughing, too, and keep laughing until his sides hurt.

The people of the village still shouted at them, and children would see them playing and tease them, even throw stones at them.

But the strangest thing was happening. Jack and Jill began not to care. They would run deeper into the woods, pretending they had been chased by giant, man-eating unicorns, or something equally ridiculous. Later, they would climb trees and leap from their branches. They would run headlong into a swollen, muddy stream and make balls of mud and hurl them at one another, and the frog would scream and they would keel over laughing. And then at night, they would lie under the stars, and the night was not as cold as it had once been, and Jack would think,
I had fun today.
And Jill would think,
I was happy with what I did.

It was a strange sensation.

Do you know what is happening to Jack and Jill right now?

I’m not sure. But I think it is something like this:

There is this weird thing that happens, when you stop worrying so much about what other people think of you. When you are no longer—to use the ravens’ word—con-fused.

At that moment, you suddenly start seeing what
you
think of you.

For the first time in their short lives, Jack and Jill felt free enough to see what they thought of themselves. And they were shocked to discover something very surprising indeed.

They were shocked to discover that they actually
liked themselves
.

They were funny and silly and imaginative, and very, very loving.

They’d never realized it before. But actually, they liked themselves quite a lot.

And then something even stranger happened. It was on a warm spring day. Jack and Jill were wading in the stream, lobbing mud balls at each other and laughing at the top of their lungs, when a small girl appeared in the trees at the edge of the stream.

Jill saw her and decided to ignore her. The girl was probably waiting to throw a rock at them.

But Jack saw her and stopped. When he did, one of Jill’s lobbed mud balls hit him directly in the head. He stumbled. He looked up. The little girl, who had stringy orange hair that hung to her shoulders, put her hand up in front of her mouth. She was hiding a smile. Jack wiped the mud from his face and smiled back.

Jill hit him in the head with another ball of mud.

“Hey!” he shouted at her. Jill cackled. Jack turned back to the girl. “Do you want something?”

She continued to stare at them, shrugged, and then she said, “Can I play with you?”

Jack’s mouth fell open. So did Jill’s.

“Um . . .” said Jack. And then he said, “Uh . . . sure.”

The little girl waded directly into the stream, leaned down and buried her hands in the muddy riverbed, collected a large ball of mud, and pelted Jack in the face with it.

“Hey!” he cried again. Jill squealed and threw another at him. He bellowed, “Retreat! Retreat!” And the two girls went chasing him through the river, hurling mud balls after him.

The next day, the little girl—whose name was Elsie—was at the stream again. She had brought her little sister, who had the same orange hair and spatter of freckles. Jack and Jill were in a tree this time, inventing stories for each other.

“Can I come up?” Elsie asked. Jack gestured for her to join them.

“Can I?” echoed her little sister in a thin voice.

“Sure,” said Jill. And she slid over on the branch to make room for the girls.

Over the course of the next week, a small group of children formed in the forest. Each day, in the warmth of the late afternoon, they would gather and play with Jack and Jill. And no one said anything about their skin or their clothes or where they lived. They just did not seem to care.

Soon, it was a regular ritual. Every day, after Jack and Jill had sold the last of their sticks, they would be greeted by a small group of boys and girls at their clearing in the wood. It felt good. It felt like home.

From time to time, Jack and Jill still took out the Glass. They peered into it, marveling at its perplexing uselessness.

“How did the goblins find it so valuable?” Jack wondered.

“Dunno,” Jill shrugged. They studied it for a while longer. “Guess the whole quest was a waste,” she concluded, tossing it aside.

“Yeah,” Jack agreed.

But neither child felt that way. Not anymore. Not at all.

And then, one day, the frog poked his head out of the hollow log in the clearing. “Hey, guys! I figured something out!”

Jack lifted him out of the log.

“Get the Glass, too,” the frog instructed Jill.

She looked at him oddly, and then reached down and withdrew the Glass from its hiding place in the log.

“Hold it up,” the frog directed Jill. She held the Glass in front of him.

“Still looks like a fat old frog,” said Jack.

The frog ignored him. “I think I know what it says.”

Jack looked at the frog’s reflection. “You know what
what
says?”

“The inscription, dummy!” cried the frog.

Suddenly, the children’s expressions grew serious. Jill said, “It says,
‘Fo timb hat da jeek, bok no father.’
”

“Great wisdom,” added Jack.

“Maybe it’s in goblin . . .” Jill wondered.

“No, stop, listen for a second,” the frog insisted. “It’s not,
‘Fo timb hat da jeek, bok no father.’
That first letter isn’t an
f ,
it’s a
t.
”

“To?” Jill said slowly.

“And in the next word, it’s not a
t
, it’s an
f.
”

Jack and Jill leaned more closely over the Glass.

“And an
n
, not an
m
, and, I guess, a weird looking
d.
”

“How much time have you been spending on this?” Jack asked.

“A lot,” said the frog. “And that’s a
w
, not a decorative squiggle.”

Jack leaned over, his finger on his lips, peering at the letters. “Oh . . .” he murmured.

“And that’s a
y
, not a
d
. And an
e
, not an
a
.”

“Where did you learn to read?” Jill asked suddenly.

But Jack said, “Frog, you’re a genius . . .”

The frog grinned and went on. “Then there’s an
s
, not a
j
, and that’s two
o
’s after an
l
, not a
b
and an
o
.”

Jill nodded wonderingly.

“Finally,” said the frog, “that’s not an
a
. It’s a
u
and an
r
.”

Jack and Jill studied the mirror.

Their eyes traveled down the silvered pane.

They stared at their reflections.

And Jack and Jill, staring into the Glass, suddenly realized what their quest had actually been for, and what they had really been seeking all this time. And at that very moment, they found it.

Wait!

What?

What just happened?

What had they been looking for? What did they find?

Is the mirror magic? What did it show them?

Look, kid. I’m just telling this story. I don’t have all the answers. You gotta figure it out yourself.

“Um,” said a voice. “Excuse me, but did that frog just talk?”

Jack and Jill and the frog all spun around. Elsie and her little sister stood at the edge of their clearing, staring at them.

“Oh, boy . . .” muttered the frog.

“Well . . .” said Jack, “yes.”

“How?” said Elsie.

“Can I see?” asked her sister.

Jack looked at Jill. Jill looked at the frog. The frog shrugged.

“Come over here,” Jill said. She patted a spot on the log beside her. “Meet our friend Frog. He can talk.”

“Hello,” said the frog.

“Hi,” said both redheaded girls at once.

“You’re amazing . . .” said Elsie’s little sister.

The frog beamed.

“How do you talk?” Elsie asked.

“It’s a long story,” said the frog.

And both little girls, at the very same moment, said, “Okay.”

The frog sighed.

The sun was setting, and the sky was red and yellow and pink and blue as the frog finished his story.

“That was wonderful . . .” Elsie said with a sigh.

“Can you tell it again?” asked Elsie’s little sister.

Jack and Jill laughed.

“I mean, tomorrow,” the little girl said. “I want to bring my friends.”

The smiles slid off of Jack’s and Jill’s faces.

“Yeah,” said Elsie. “All the kids will want to meet the frog now!”

“And hear the story!” her sister agreed.

Jack and Jill both looked at the frog. “What do you think?” said Jill.

The frog turned his head coyly to one side. “They’ll
all
want to meet me?” he asked.

“Oh, yes!”

“
And
hear the story?”

“Definitely!”

“Well,” the frog replied. “If you
insist
.”

The next afternoon, all the children who had ever come to clearing to play with Jack and Jill were gathered before the hollow log. The frog sat between Jack and Jill. And once the children had gotten over their hysterical excitement about meeting a talking frog, he told them all his story.

He finished when the sky was dark, and the stars were twinkling overhead.

The children all instantly clamored for more: “What happened next? How did you meet Jack and Jill? Can we meet the salamanders?”

“No,” the frog replied, “you can
not
meet the salamanders. And as for how I met Jack and Jill? That’s another very long story.”

And all the children, all at once, said, “Okay.”

Jack and Jill laughed. And then Jill said, “Why don’t we tell you tomorrow?”

The next day, an even larger group of children had assembled. Even some boys from Jack’s village were there. Not Marie, of course. But some of the quieter ones.

Jill told them all about her mother and the silk merchant and the terrible royal procession.

The children adored it. They ate up every word. A little boy in the back named Hans Christian laughed and gaped and clapped his hands straight the way through.

The day after, Jack told them about having to sell Milky and about the snake oil salesman. The boys from Jack’s village laughed when Jack sang the Little Lamb song, and told the other children that it was all true—that there really was a rickety old cart, and Jack did trade his cow for a bean. And then Jack and Jill and the frog told them about the creepy old lady with the pale eyes and the beanstalk. The children were mesmerized. Especially a little boy sitting in the front named Joseph, but whom everyone called J.J.

After the story, as the stars were spinning in the dark sky, Elsie and her little sister pulled some of the boys from the village aside.