The Wood Wife by Terri Windling (the false prince TXT) 📕

asked me what these creatures are, and I must admit, I do not know. Spirits, phantastes, fairies, ghosts … no single word seems adequate. They are not supernatural beings, they are as natural as the land itself. I believe them to be an essence, a rhythm, a language, a color beyond the spectrum of our sight. They appear in the shapes we clothe them with—and at first I thought it was only Anna who had the power to do this, but now I’ve seen creatures from my own recent poems, flickering like moths in the mesquite groves. Perhaps it is art that gives them these shapes, or belief, or our own expectations. You once told me that art is a mirror, reflecting each new face that we wear. So are these creatures. Right now the faces that they show me are of my loneliness.

I am pathetically grateful for your words about the new poems I am writing. My agent hates them, the idiot. He says if I want to write fairy tales I should stick to children’s books. Pat at Scribner’s is telling anyone who’ll listen that I drink too much, I’ve lost my edge, I’ll never write another Exile Songs. He is right of course—but that doesn’t mean the poems I’m writing now are no good. Pat will publish them regardless of his doubts—the Pulitzer has earned me that at least, even if I still have a readership that can be counted on the fingers of one hand. The hell with Pat, and Frank, and the critics. The hell with the entire literary world. I am writing down the language of this land as I hear it, and what poet can do more?

So how is Hugo’s film coming? Your own new story is enchanting and strange and I am disgusted you can’t find a publisher. If my name counted for anything these days I would tell you to go ahead and use it—but then your own name would be tarred with the same sour brush that Pat uses on mine. The critical avant-garde insists that there are no boundaries that the artist may not cross, yet it seems the mythic world is as taboo to our colleagues as the sexual world is to the censors. Look at how Richard St. Johns savaged Anna in his last review, as though she were some idiot savant painting ‘an unfortunate choice of subject’ (I quote), ‘albeit with consummate skill.’

Outside, the coyotes are howling in the hills. I shall finish this bottle and howl myself. I hope you will send The Trickster soon. And one more favor: this is between you and me, this is not for the damn diary.

Yours as ever,

Cooper

Chapter Eight ❋

The Drowned Girl leaves wet footprints,

plaits her hair with pond weed, fingers

white as milk, as death, as loneliness,

upon root, wood, black stone…

—The Wood Wife, Davis Cooper

When Maggie awoke she was alone in the bed. But she did not for a moment think that she had merely dreamed. The girl, the creature, whatever she was, had left the room not long before. The featherbed still held the indentation where she had lay sleeping, curled against the back of Maggie’s knees the way her cat once had.

Maggie dressed, made herself toast and coffee and eagerly got back to work, sitting in the little studio with her feet propped on Anna’s table. There were references to a Jackrabbit Girl in Cooper’s notes, she remembered. She flipped through the computer files, cross-checking. Yes. He had used the image seven different times in the rough drafts of the Saguaro Forest poems. And once even in the Wood Wife poems; a rabbit-child. She’d forgotten about that. Maggie looked it up.

… curled in a twist of root,

the face of a girl, the long limbs pelted,

the rabbit-child lies dead

or sleeping

dreaming this day into nonexistence.

Maggie sat back and sipped her coffee, thinking about the night, about Thumper’s pointed face, those wide eyes dark against the soft fur of her pelt. As supernatural visitations go, it had been about as frightening as taking in a stray pussycat; and like a cat, Thumper had left fleas behind her when she went. Maggie would have to do something about that. She’d been scratching ever since she got up.

It was curious to her that it didn’t alarm her more to have her vision of reality so abruptly expanded to include the surreal, the supernatural—although it now seemed the most natural thing of all. But it was the only thing that made sense of it all, the notes, the poems, the packet of letters from Anna to Maisie Tippetts. Thumper. Crow. There were probably more of them, out there on the mountainside.

She found that it neither frightened nor unnerved her to think of Cooper’s images walking the hills. Anna’s images, she corrected herself. Perhaps because she’d lived with those images for years—ever since she’d been at university in England, reading The Wood Wife and walking in the Devon woods for the first time. Such was the power of Cooper’s language that his world was already real to her; she’d always half-expected to glimpse it in the mossy hollows of Dartmoor. It was not hard now to abandon more rational solutions to the puzzle of Cooper’s life in favor of the mythic, the surrealism that had tinged his life, and his later work, with the colors of Anna Naverra’s palette.

She felt a rush of excitement as she finished her coffee and got back to work. At last she felt she was getting somewhere with the thorny mystery of Cooper—even if the path that had opened before her was not one she would have predicted. She smiled to herself, thinking about Nigel and his film sales and his six-figure deals. Nobody was going to publish this story, unless she gave herself a Brazilian name and called it magical realist fiction. It didn’t matter. It wasn’t pursuit of a big book deal that had brought her up here. It