There once was a crooked woman who lived her life in shame. She wasn’t crooked by any trespass she committed, but was crooked by happenstance. Children laughed and taunted her as she made her crooked way down the street. Men pretended she wasn’t there, and women whispered their spiteful words veiled as concern and pity.
It hadn’t always been that way. Once the crooked woman had been a spry young lady. She and her sister shared both look and personality. They were happy and as carefree as the world allows any person to be.
When they were young, the sisters had lived through a tragedy together, but had both come out of it with nary a visible scratch. They were still haunted by those days, when they dove into the thoughts and memories. Yet as far as anyone was concerned, they had pulled through marvelously.
One day, the crooked woman’s sister began her fairy tale. She married a handsome young man who was devoted to her in every way. They laughed and loved and spent every day living to please the other. Everything was perfect and white; covered in fairy dust and rose petals.
It wasn’t long before the bubble of the sister’s perfection ripped apart. She and her young man were taking a day together. They planned to frolic in a meadow filled with buttercups and mistletoe. Yet as they danced through the wondrous meadow, the sister fell to the cobbled ground. She became diseased. Her whole body began to swell and turn black. The young man fell to his knees and wept as he saw his love and his future fester and rot in front of him.
His cries of anguish filled the air, scaring the birds who then carried it to the village as they fled from the now desolate meadow. People ran to the noise to see what great happening could be occurring that would cause the young man to make such a noise. They were to feast on his misery.
The crowd stood back, watching in delight as the woman’s time passed before their eyes. A round and rosy-cheeked doctor came forward with the one who would become the crooked woman to peer at the sister.
The doctor placed her hand on the young man’s shoulder and looked at the sister she had walked with whose body began to kink, slope, and jut as the crowd looked on. “There is nothing to do besides remove her from this body. You must cut her out.”
The young man looked up at the round, rosy-cheeked doctor with pleading and horror in his eyes, slightly shaking his head. His lips remained silent.
The crooked woman slowly pulled the knife that was clinking around in her apron pocket, knocking against her jutting knees. Grasping the young man’s hand, she placed it over hers so they were holding the knife together. His eyes trailed up to her, seeing her for the first time. His eyes flared with startled recognition and disgust at her new form.
He stood and put a tentative arm around the now crooked woman and led her over to his bloated wife. Leaning down, they held the knife over her stomach, shaking and dripping with sweat. Slowly and deliberately, the knife was lowered and sank into the decaying flesh that the young man had so recently touched gently with love. A putrid gas floated up and assailed the nostrils of every living thing in the area.
The thing that used to be the sister and a wife, stared up into the faces of her loved ones as two men with black hoods covering their faces meandered up to where she was slowly dying. With gloved hands, they grabbed her and dragged her away. Her eyes were linked with what was her family until the men had disappeared with her into the forest. No one knew or asked how she was disposed of or where she went. Her transition from a human being into a diseased and dying specimen had revoked any right anyone had toward her.
The young man then let go of the now crooked woman. Reaching out his hand, he cupped her cheek. His eyes were full of sorrow as he looked through her.
His hand dropping, his shoulders hunched, the young man slowly made his way to the covering of trees. He disappeared into the blackness of their sanctuary. A blackness that matched the bemoaning in his heart.
The round, rosy-cheeked doctor looked at the crooked woman and studied her. “Yes, you’ll make it.” She answered the question that wasn’t asked. “You will live, but have no life.” And she turned and moved back into the group of people who had started to move back to the village.
The crooked woman stood in the desolate and barren meadow a while longer. She no longer felt as though she existed, yet she had a sense of not being right. There was no joy left. There was nothing. She had become a living un-living thing. A crooked woman who was no longer an asset to society. Who lived but did not live.
