There was once a girl who could eat people’s sadness away.
That girl was not me. But I knew her—perhaps better than I knew myself, than I knew any other…
She lived where the seas ended, in an oyster-shell conclave, where the walls were lined with years of silk and months of mourning. People from all across the universe would visit her there. Some arrived on foot, their backs bent over with the weight of their sadness. Some came strolling hand in hand with theirs, while others’ sadness was light and airy enough for them to ride on. Sadness packaged, parceled, pickled in jars and shut between the pages of old books and photo albums. There were howling kinds, gentler ones, sadnesses that splintered bone and reduced the living to walking corpses. Hulking sadnesses, sadnesses small enough to fit in a bottle cap, some childlike, some old, some breathing, some dying, some dead.
Sometimes people left their sadnesses outside the girl’s cave, where they played in the sand until the ocean spirits came to fetch them. Sometimes they waited, because their sadness was too heavy, or it did not wish to part. In some cases, the waiting stretched through centuries, while others came back every year as though on annual pilgrimage. But despite their efforts, no one was ever allowed inside to see the girl. It is said that the sadness hung so thick inside her cavern that if you were to breathe it in, it would freeze the time in your lungs. There were those who tried, and they never came out again.
And so, people waited. Waited under the oceanic sun, which never sank nor rose, but hovered in the sky like a huge, bulbous pufferfish. Waited, while war broke out in their homelands. Waited, while around them people died, or left, or fell in love. Under the ever- sunlight’s gaze, the girl’s oyster-shell home glimmered and glowed. Above, the ocean spirits danced, crooning to earth and heaven the names of all things lost to memory. And outside, the pilgrims waited, waited for the girl to come out and eat their sadness away.
When she finally did, they rejoiced. That time of year—although it was never certain what time of what year exactly—became known as Mourningtide. People would place their sadnesses before the girl like sacrificial offerings. They would whisper their names to the ocean spirits, who would then whisper them to her. They would tell her their stories. And she would stoop over their sadnesses, kiss them, cry with them, bundle them into her arms and press them against her cheek.
Then she would eat them all.
#
One day, the King-Pope of a distant land came to see the girl. He arrived in a procession that seemed to never end, in a horseless carriage that was made of gold and gilded in silver. A thousand servants trudged alongside it, through mud and quagmire, bearing flags in red and blue. The ocean spirits chittered in excitement and fear. They had never seen anything like it. The carriage was long and tubular, like a sea cucumber. It had no doors, nor windows, nor wheels that the eye could see, but hovered above the ground, radiating a heat that only grew hotter as it approached the mouth of the girl’s oyster-shell home. A low, persistent humgrowlroar seemed to emanate from deep within its steeltrap bowels. The ocean spirits quivered at the sight of it, but whether it was with fear, anticipation, or uncertainty, we can only guess. Pilgrims carrying their assorted sadnesses rushed out of the way before the King-Pope’s carriage trampled on them.
Some did get trampled on, and the sand wrapped her arms around them, sucking their bodies deep into the earth.
The carriage finally stilled, its head bare inches from meeting the mouth of the girl’s oyster-shell home.
A platform grew out of the carriage’s smooth, unblemished surface and a slimy-looking court officer stepped out of it, stumbling on the soft sand. He cleared his throat, shook open a long scroll, and began to read:
“The Holy Monarch of the Kingdom of Genindy, his Magnificent Highness, has journeyed far to meet this arrival. Mystics and monks have spoken greatly of your presence. Sadness Eater, we demand that you come forth, so that you may be of service to his Esteemed Royalty.” He shook the scroll again. This time, a hovering palanquin rose from within the carriage, carrying atop it what seemed to be a large potato swathed in silk, and wearing a very elaborate headdress.
Hours passed. They waited. The King’s bald head began to sweat beneath his headdress, which was encrusted, by the way, in jewels the names of which no one had ever heard, and layered over with gauze and silk and so many different things that it appeared as misshapen a mass as his kingly highness. The girl did not appear. The string of announcements calling for her soon devolved into threats; and by sundown, a battalion of soldiers with iron wands disembarked from the carriage. They escorted her out—although it would be kinder to say that they dragged her out by her heels, as she kicked and gnawed at their ankles with her teeth. Then they lifted her up, brushed the sand from her hair, and stood her in front of the King.
The King demanded, first, that the Sadness Eater sing a hymn for him. She refused. Then he demanded that she beckon the ocean spirits to dance, in honor of the King-Pope’s visitation, for such a performance would most certainly invoke a Holy Blessing. She refused again, spine straight and body held so still that one could be tricked into believing that her limbs had stiffened from rigor mortis. Frustrated, the King finally relented, and waved instead at his sentinels to bring something in. They wheeled in a wagon, encrusted—by the way—with almost as many jewels as there were on the King’s head, but not quite as much. A magnificent ornate box, as large as a baby whale, teetered ominously on top of this wagon.
“I have brought to you,” the King-Pope said, “this receptacle containing my sadness, which is of a most intense and grievous quality—such intensity and aggrievedness as this continent has never seen. But it is natural, of course, for a king to bear the burden of his people. By Heaven’s command. You will agree?”
The Sadness Eater said nothing.
“Open the receptacle,” the King-Pope commanded his men. And they began to open it. I say began, because within the ornate box was another one, and another one, and another one, and endlessly on and on, until only a small, velvety box remained. The King-Pope shirked from it, but ushered for the Sadness Eater to open it. And so she did.
The King-Pope’s sadness was the size of a thimble. No—in fact, it was smaller than a thimble, so much so that you would have to strain your eyes to see it. The King-Pope gazed at the Sadness Eater expectantly, but she shook her head. She put the box back, within, and within, and within.
The King-Pope was outraged.
“The very gall of you,” he said. His nostrils flared and flapped. “I had not ventured this far only to return with my sadness intact. Are you a fake? A fraud? Why do all these people wait for you, if not for you to eat their sadness away? I command you—eat it.”
The Sadness Eater refused. It was the first time, I think, that she had given an offering such a blunt refusal. The King-Pope’s sadness was far too ugly to fathom, of a kind that she had never seen before, or at least not in the last thousand years. It was foul, and filthy, and spoke of things that are so awful and bloodcurdling that they are perhaps better left unsaid.
But the King-Pope would have none of it. If the Sadness Eater would not willingly eat his sadness, he proclaimed, he would force her to. The ocean spirits reared violently at this announcement, splishing and splashing and forming a protective circle around the girl. But all for naught. They were escorted away by the King-Pope’s men—‘escorted’, I say, although it would be kinder to admit that they were dragged to the top of the girl’s ocean-conclave home and shot.
Forty-four times through the head, forty-four times through their mouths when they screamed. Forty-four times … until the last pair of knees rattled to the ground, and all was still and silent.
The King-Pope took the Sadness Eater away. His carriage rammed into the oyster-shell conclave as he left, burying all that had been, in the land of forever sun.
#
The Sadness Eater was given a fine room in the King-Pope’s castle, at the top of a tall, spindly tower made entirely of steel. The King-Pope gifted her a bed built of the finest oak, a mattress stuffed with partridge feathers, and had all the walls plastered in seashells picked from the land she had come from. The carpet was blue, and soft, like sea foam. The ceiling was hung with a lantern that never went out. The wardrobes were stocked with clothes so excessively that she would never run out, even if she wore a different gown every day for ten years. For seven days, the Sadness Eater was attended to with the utmost care—although it would be kinder, perhaps, to admit that she was sedated, and threatened, and whipped when she made to run. She then received visitations from tutors and physicians and intellectuals, since the King-Pope deemed it vital that she be educated in custom before her existence be revealed to the public eye. Her hair was cut and curled into stiff spirals, her bare feet forced into shoes that stung her toes, and her sea-ornaments taken away and placed in boxes—for safekeeping, the King-Pope assured her, although they were kept so safely and so securely that she never chanced to see them again.
The Sadness Eater did not know then, but she was soon to become the Holy Kingdom’s biggest sensation. Once she was sufficiently educated (a kinder word would perhaps be ‘reformed’), a grand parade was held in her honor, a festival that lasted three days and two nights. It ended with a ceremony where the Sadness Eater was bestowed with an official saintly title, baptized, and given citizenship. Then, as an ultimate honor, the Sadness Eater ate the King-Pope’s sadness away.
The public rejoiced. That time of year, henceforth, the second new moon of the seventh month of the Holy Calendar, was called Blissentium.
Once more, the Sadness Eater received sadnesses in all shapes and forms, requests stacked so high that they had to build a warehouse to hold them in—then two, then three, and on and on, until an entire district in the Holy City was dubbed ‘The Griefhold’. Sadnesses were ordered by type, numbered and prioritized, selected carefully and wheeled out to the Sadness Eater every day. The Eatings were public, starting at dawn and sometimes bleeding late into the night. People traveled from all over the land, just to watch the Sadness Eater eat their sadnesses—mostly raw, with little conversation, arranged for her on the finest silver by epicures and artists alike.
On the fourteenth day of each month, the Eating was substituted by a Performance, which consisted of Hymnsong leading up to a live demonstration by the Sadness Eater on how best to stew several sadnesses together. A huge, bubbling iron pot was mounted in the city square for this purpose. She tossed sage into the pot, and told the cityfolk to guide the sadness safely to wherever it went. Rosemary for remembrance. Snakeroot for preservation. Cottonwood, copal, sweetgrass; she whispered their names, kissed them, and wept. It was during this time of the month that light finally entered the girl’s dim-black crustacean eyes, maybe because—and this could just be me guessing—but it was the only thing she had that remained of home. She was now the Sadness Eater through and through, and all of Genindy relished in it. No other nation had a cultural icon, or could boast claim over an artifact from a world where, it was said, all seas ended, and the oceanic sun never stopped shining. But Genindy would soon be the new light of the changing world. (And this is just between you and me, but no one really remembers where the seas ended anymore, or if such a place even exists. Though I think it does. But you can believe as you like, however it suits you.)
Meanwhile, now unhindered by his sadness, the King-Pope steadily expanded the borders of his holy land. Things began to change, as things are wont to do. But this change was perhaps a little too fast—a little too bizarre. Soon, Genindy stretched across half the continent, and scholars and travelers and merchants all came to the Holy City. Mass reparations occurred, monuments were rebuilt and tiled and painted. The result was so magnificent that some evenings, when the sun hit just right, the entire city would look as though it was a cradle of molten gold. Now the richest city in the world, Genindy took to manufacturing steel carriages and opening centers encouraging research and scholarship.
The Eatings continued, and the Sadness Eater remained an important cultural spectacle, but a new movement was ballooning in the background, one which considered such stuff as saintliness and holiness and magic to be bygone. Now people wanted to know how things worked, to explain and record as fact that they Knew Things Better. Some nights, the Sadness Eater would be escorted to the research facilities downtown for dinner, and afterwards the scholars would measure such things as the lobes of her ears and the slant and curve of her zygomatic bone, to see if it receded differently than others did. The Sadness Eater was not of the loquacious variety, so they concluded that she must be constructed so as to engender an intellect of a less-keen kind—although it would be kinder, perhaps, to admit that the scholars just considered her plain stupid.
At first, these forays into the research facility were relatively harmless. But as time went by, and the King-Pope expanded his borders, and more interesting things were brought from his expeditions—the Sadness Eater grew less iconic, more … out of fashion. What was in fashion, however, was a bizarre entity that everyone called the COWAG. The COWAG, I have heard people say, was thought to be a mystical tree that had bloomed in the far west, a tree that processed and granted wishes. A new age tree, one filled with wonderment and magic of a kind that the staleness of the Sadness Eater could not compare to. And, anyway, she was sick. Perhaps it was age, the public said, although no one was very certain how old the Sadness Eater really was. And so it was that the King-Pope ordered for the Sadness Eater to be confined to the iron tower, so that she may rest for all the life that remained in her.
She was no longer the Sadness Eater. She was only a girl.
#
One night, when the stars were full and lonely, the girl climbed to the top of the iron cliff. The moon-sliver glowed down on her like a diadem, like a dying dream. She sat there in silence. Her head was at once full and empty. She thought of all those things she had been, and how she had nothing she wanted to be anymore, and how if she put her life to music it would be a crescendo stuck in forever-pause. It hurt to think then, so she stopped. The sadness swirled inside her digestive system. It was a sadness more deep and painful than anything she had ever felt.
Terrible, awful, guilt-ridden and confusing. Her guts tumbled into one another. The sky was watery. Her arms trembled.
Finally, she threw up. She threw all of it up. All of the excess that had welled within her, all the foul and ugly things that had wrapped themselves around her intestines and clotted into her heart and gut and brain. All of it. Then she keeled over and panted, and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand.
The pool of vomit stared back at her. And it grew—as if bidden to, by some strange kind of magic, into a Thing with several dripping appendages and two sets of saucer like eyes.
I will call it the Sadness Thing.
The Sadness Thing looked at the girl. It opened its mouth, but there was no tongue inside.
The girl stared at it. Then she slipped down the iron cliff and into her prison, where she ripped the ribbon out of an old nightdress with her teeth, and clambered up the steel pipes back to the rooftop. The thing bent over for her, opened its mouth wide, and she tied the ribbon to a stump deep inside its stomach.
The Sadness Thing waved its new tongue around.
“Find me—” it said, then heaved, and burbled incoherently. “A zister.” “A zis … a sister?” The girl had not spoken in several years.
“Find me a sister, a sinister whisper. A triumphant opposite in a land where the wind grows.”
The girl blinked. “You have a sister?”
The Sadness Thing nodded emphatically. “I must.”
The girl considered. She knew she had nothing left, nowhere to go. She did not know where anywhere was, and the land beneath her was no longer that which it had been, once upon a time. So she agreed.
The girl curled up inside the Sadness Thing’s stomach, which was warm and gurgled gently. She tied its tongue tightly around her waist, pressed her head snug into the Sadness
Thing’s innerbelly. The walls inside were lined with years of silk, and months of mourning. She touched them gently. She kissed them goodnight.
#
“Ready?”
The Sadness Thing tore through the silken night air like a sharp needle. Below them, nation unraveled into land, into nation, and again and again, although I would reckon it would be quite impossible to tell the difference from that up high, when the earth was a huge ball of fabric tangling up and over itself. As they flew, the girl could feel her limbs uncurling. She felt lighter than she had in years.
For forty-four days and nights, they flew just like that. Sometimes, the Sadness Thing would grow tired, and so they would walk instead. There is not much I can say about this time, since I know little myself, but from what I have heard, the girl and the Sadness Thing had many an adventure together. Together, they walked through swamps and burnt fields, through broken village streets and hidden towns. They met people who were strange, and people who were kind, people who broke their bread with them, shared their worries, and their joy. No one asked the girl to eat their sadnesses away anymore. Perhaps they did not know who she had been, or perhaps they thought it did not matter. Life surged into her again and she found—to her surprise—that she had learned how to smile.
But as they walked, and flew, and walked again, the Sadness Thing only grew heavier and heavier. It was as though numerous loose sadnesses had been looking for a home and had found their way to it. These sadnesses tucked themselves into the Sadness Thing’s skin, until its appendages dripped and drooped and dragged wherever it went. It did not help that no one seemed to have ever heard of the Sadness Thing’s sister, or could make sense of the riddles in which the Sadness Thing spoke. Still, they pitied the poor thing, and told them whatever they could about the world, all the beautiful, untrue, wild things, and where to find them.
It was at this point that the girl came to hear about a place where the heads of man touched cloud, a place—she was told—where people went to receive joy.
“It’s down west,” a chubby, doorknob-nosed bicycle boy told them, when they asked. “It’s like a giant tree, I’ve heard you have to pick the fruit off it when it ripens or something, and when you eat it, it’ll make all your wishes come true. Oh and and and—and I’ve heard the tree talks.”
This could very well be the Sadness Thing’s sister, thought the girl. She murmured a word of thanks to the boy and slipped a broken seashell into his palm. The Sadness Thing handed him an old boot. The boy looked confused, then gave the odd duo a huge smile and bicycled away.
On the forty-fifth day, they reached the bank of a huge river. A pair of gleaming gold gates stood in the middle. The currents hacked at them violently, but they seemed to be anchored so deeply into the ground that no amount of force caused them to budge. I am told this gate marks something special, but I can’t be sure what— And neither was the girl, I think, seeing as it was not the gates that made her cry out in joy, but what was beyond them.
A huge, treelike structure loomed in the distance. It was shrouded in a very thick fog and it was impossible to tell what exactly it looked like, so the word ‘treelike’ as a descriptor seems enough. Anyway, it appeared that very few travelers used this path. There were no boats with which to make the crossing, not as far as the eye could see, nor a bridge, or even a magic raft hidden in the reeds. If they walked along the river for long enough, the girl was sure they could find a way to cross it. But that would take even longer, and the Sadness Thing would grow ever- heavier. And besides, I am inclined to think that the girl was far too impatient, just like I would be, were I in her place.
She looked back. The Sadness Thing was, by now, too large and heavy to cross the river. It was, in all probability, as large as a beluga whale. But it seemed as eager to cross over as the girl was. Large, globlike tears welled up in its eyes. It let out a shrill, piteous whistle, and the girl patted its massive head.
“I will have to drag you across,” she told it, “by your tongue.” The Sadness Thing groaned. “If you must.”
And so, the girl dragged the Sadness Thing across the river, its ribbon-tongue pulled taut across her shoulder. She tugged and pulled and gasped for breath as the waves pummeled into her, but she did not stop. On and on, until her muscles and lungs and heart were on fire. She swam through the gate, calling for the spirits of the river to lend a hand. They buffeted her forwards and the girl laughed, with joy and delight. She had never laughed like this before. She had had no reason to.
“We’ll make it!” she yelled back at the Sadness Thing. It moaned in reply.
But as the girl rushed and raced across the river, something strange began to happen. Her steps, somehow, seemed so much lighter, and her limbs so much stronger, and as she got closer and closer to the opposite bank of the river, the weight only seemed that much lighter. Her stomach fluttered—what was that emotion? Excitement? Worry? Fear? All she knew (and so this is all I can tell you) is that something was wrong. Dismally so. But she did not have time to stop and think about it.
“Almost there!” she shouted. “Almost!”
Her knees finally hit land. She turned around, laughing with relief, and delight, and all sorts of bizarre rushing feelings. But there was no one there.
The Sadness Thing was gone, nowhere to be seen.
All that remained of it was the tattered old ribbon she had given it. The girl looked down at it. A strange ache settled inside her chest, but she did not want to think about it. She sat, instead, and stared out across the river for the longest time. Then she got up, wound the ribbon around her arm, and walked on—away from the bank, towards the treelike thing in the distance.
It was time to find the Sadness Thing’s sister.
#
The Sadness Thing’s sister was huge and treelike, but only treelike in that it had steel beams jutting out of its head like branches. It loomed over the girl, dead and dismal and silent. From within it echoed a persistent humgrowlroar, and its head scraped into the sun. A huge signboard on the front spelled out its name in large red letters: COWAG, Centre of Wonderment, Alleviation, and Gaiety. It sounded familiar to the girl, but she could not remember why. (Although you might, since I have mentioned it before.) Anyway, the COWAG had no windows, only a single set of doors at the front through which a steady stream of people trickled in and out. The girl squared her shoulders and joined them.
But when she was finally inside, she wished she hadn’t. It was chaos. It was destruction. It was delight.
The inside of the COWAG’s body was wire-and-steel. Its intestines were pipes that carried hot liquid throughout its several levels, and its heart was a huge orb that chugged and churned and spun incessantly at its core. People walked in straight lines, carrying empty baskets that were soon filled with all sorts of objects. The girl did not know what the objects were, but they seemed to elicit joy within the people, who moved on in a droning mass, being stamped and styled and treated in all sorts of different ways. Perhaps it would be kinder not to say ‘treated’, but ‘processed’, although that really is a matter of debate I suppose. Stairs and doors and platforms all zip-zipped up and down and across the inside of the COWAG, like steeltrap wings. At the pit of the COWAG’s stomach—I believe they called it a mezzanine—was a large room, where people were assigned numbers and told to wait, and were fed odd trinketlike pills while they did. Smiles were plastered to their faces. Buzz buzz, yelp, screech and sizzle. It made the girl want to scream.
The crowd tugged her forward, through the COWAG’s bizarre digestion system. Needles were pricked into the girl’s skin, her hair was tugged, her clothes exchanged for new ones.
Spinning and spinning and spinning, she watched as people found their joys, but felt only dismay. Their sadnesses had not left them, she could tell, but floated loose and merciless around them. They clung to the Sadness Eater as she passed, gripping her by the ankles and forming mounds around her shoulders. She dragged them all out with them, out of the chaos and the frenzy and the liquefied laughter—away,
away,
away.
Somehow, the girl managed to drag herself back to the riverbank. The sun was now high in the sky. It did not seem to belong there. The loose sadnesses that had come with her settled themselves around her, watching as she keeled over the water. She retched. Her sadness burned in her chest. It hurt so much that for the first time in her life, she buried her face in her arms and wept bitterly. Not out of empathy, or civility, or performance, but just because it hurt. She had never cried for herself before—no. This sadness was hers, and hers alone. It was heavy, and leaden, and it hurt so much—so much, in a way that she had never hurt before. Or perhaps she had just never taken notice of it, never given it a name?
The river stretched out in the distance before her. She got to her feet. The sadnesses stood up with her, and followed her as she waded back into the river. She piled them all into a mound and climbed up its edge. Then she called for them. For all of the spirits of the river, and the sky, and the earth begged them to tell her their names. They listened, and they came, and they whispered to her soft comforting words.
She began to change. The mound of sadnesses was now fixed around her feet. She sunk deeper into it, resolute. Deeper and deeper and deeper until she became it. Her ribbon-tongue clicked into place. Her saucerlike eyes floated in her head. She could see the river stretch out into the horizon from here, curving into the land like an endless umbilical cord. She let out a cry and dissolved into foam—gently, gently, until the rapids kissed her goodnight.
#
Now I will tell you this much: these are all things I have heard, only stories, baked in brick kilns and in the shadowy silence of after-dinner dastarkhwaan. I cannot vouch for their being true, although I am inclined to believe that they are.
I have heard people say that the river the Sadness Eater dissolved in was blessed ever since. Drinking its water, some pilgrims said, could cure disease and heartrot. Dipping one’s toes into it would remind people of things they held dear, and things the world had forgotten. And sometimes on misty mornings, you would see the loose sadnesses that still lurked there, pining for someone to eat them away. Sadnesses great and heavy, big and small, corpse-sadnesses and ghost-sadnesses and sadnesses without a name. Even sitting by it is supposed to have been an experience unlike any other. But I do not know—I have never seen the river. It dried up centuries ago, and a railroad was built across it instead.
I go there some nights, when the stars are lonely and full. I sit on a bench by the platform, and think about things that are tyrannical, and things that are lovely, and things that are sad and joyous or both. I wonder where the seas end, if time still freezes in places where the sun never sets. I think about all these things—these lovely wonderful awful lost things. And then I stop, because it hurts to grieve for things I do not remember, and walk myself the long way home.