fol rol de ol rol
- katievaldez1614
- Dec 11, 2024
- 7 min read
There is a short story in Neil Gaiman’s fiction collection, Smoke and Mirrors, called “Troll Bridge.” It’s a terrible story—and by terrible, I mean really quite good. It’s a modern interpretation of the Norwegian folk tale “The Three Billy Goats Gruff,” only instead of the beloved billy goat brothers, the story follows one clever boy. The boy crosses the troll bridge three times throughout his life, and upon each visit, he evades the troll’s hunger by promising to return when he is older—more delicious. So, the boy matures. He experiences all the famous landmarks of adulthood, like sex and adultery and divorce. Until one day, he realizes that by living solely for the sake of living, he has forgotten the very meaning of the thing. The narrative closes on a striking image of the boy (who is now a man) returning to the bridge, where he exchanges his human body for the lonely, hungry troll’s.
Among the archive of Neil Gaiman’s parables, “Troll Bridge” stands out to me. Perhaps this is because, as a reader, I’m captivated by Gaiman’s ability to make the nonhuman human. Perhaps it’s because, as a writer, I admire Gaiman’s ability to construct a story in reverse. Or maybe it’s something way less analytical. Something located not in the motif or the meaning, but in the skin of the story itself. Something as simple as a pretty line. Like this one:
Trolls can smell rainbows,
trolls can smell the stars.
For our six month anniversary, my then-boyfriend handed me a star. Not one of those kitschy replicas you’d find in a kid’s bedroom, the kind that glow yellow and waxy in the dark (although, years later, he bought me some of those as well). No, the star he gifted me was genuine: a bona fide ball of gas. He had the certificate to prove it.
“It’s extra bright,” he explained. And surely enough, printed on his very proper, very important slip of parchment paper, were the words:
Extra Bright Star Deed
6467978—Ophiuchus
As of January 15, 2021, known as Katie’s Star.
I never actually believed a human being could own a star, but I was enamored by the idea that someone might love me enough to try. And anyways, having a boyfriend seemed to minimize all other impossibilities. I wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d floated into the room on an abracadabra and plucked the star right from behind my ear.
His gift was thoughtful—by which I mean his gift was all thought. He might as well have offered me a dividend in gravity or a canister of air. That isn’t to say I didn’t appreciate the sentiment. I remember telling him it was the sweetest thing anyone had ever given me, and it was. If anything, as a fiction writer, the fact that he'd given me a mirage made the gift even more special.
So, I hear you asking, what was the problem? Why did you break up?
I would need to redesign this entire blog page to answer that second question, so I’ll tackle the first instead:
The issue with his present—and ultimately, our entire relationship—wasn’t that he’d handed me a star that looked like a piece of paper. It was that he’d handed me a piece of paper, and I’d deluded myself into thinking it was a star.
When I visited Vermont in November, I stayed at an Airbnb cabin built for one. That way, I figured, there would be nothing to remind me of all the things I didn’t have. One pillow, one roll of toilet paper, one mug. The cabin—which I hadn’t planned upon, and ultimately interpreted a sign from God—didn’t include internet access, or even a T.V. So I entertained myself by doing what any wifi-less Gen Z-er in rural Vermont ought to do: I watched, and I waited, and I listened. For three days straight. I spent so much time in my own company that I awoke one night, thinking I’d felt someone tugging on my arm, only to discover it was my own hand.
“It makes you go a little looney, doesn’t it?” said Doug. He was 5 feet, 4 inches tall. He looked like he weighed 120 lbs after a four-course meal. “Being alone for this long?”
Doug owned the cabin I was renting. He lived about thirty feet away, in a much grander, much more spacious house, with his equally petite wife, Cynsie. I wanted to ask Doug what he knew about being alone. I had heard him and Cynsie the night before, waltzing to Frank Sinatra on their balcony and laughing.
Instead, I asked: “Do you ever get couples up here?”
He considered this for a while. “We get the sorta couples—young ones, usually—that read the words Cabin for One and think, ‘well, we’re basically one person, so that works great for us.’ And they’re fine. I’ve never hosted anyone I didn’t like. But I always get the sense that those folks are missing something crucial about the experience. They don’t enjoy the silence. They don’t look at the stars. They just come, and they go, and nothing else really happens.”
Across the lawn, the front door of the main house creaked open. Cynsie bounded down the porch steps, leather satchel in hand. She waved at me before nodding to her husband.
“I’m going,” she said, abruptly. Then she got into her car, reversed out of the driveway, turned onto Haven Hill road, and was gone.
I glanced at Doug, expecting to find him gazing down the street with longing, or with some kind of apparent resentment. Surely, he’d be wondering where she went, why she left so suddenly, who, if anyone, she was planning to meet. But he just smiled. He stretched his arms above his head, all casual-like, and said to me, “Make sure to get a good look at the stars tonight.”
That’s when I realized these Vermonters were different creatures than I was. They were trolls—dwelling beneath their respective bridges, noses tilted toward the sky—and, even while married, they understood so many things about loneliness that I did not.
My then-boyfriend used to boast that, in our entire four-year relationship, we’d never gotten into a fight. Other, less severe terms might apply. Disputes were acceptable. Spats were commonplace. And complications—well, those were only natural.
But we’d never, not once, had a fight, and I didn’t want to ruin our reputation by arguing with him about it.
Secretly, I thought it might be nice to fight. I wanted to believe in something so fiercely that I could shout nonsense, or slam a door, or storm out of his house only to realize that I had left my keys on the dining room table. And when I returned, indignant and slightly ashamed, he would be there, twirling my keychain in his hand as if turning over an idea, and waiting. He would look up, his big brown eyes like bowls of soup, and say something rational like “I’m sorry.” I would stick out my tongue and say something obnoxious like “I know.” Then we’d embrace, the magnets of our bodies clicking together, and our life together would carry on a little more harmoniously.
That’s how it happened in my imagination, anyhow.
Instead, I harbored my grievances stoically—in noble silence—even as I cried myself to sleep and touched myself to thoughts of other people.
My boyfriend and I refused to talk about the things that hurt us, I think, because we were afraid that doing so would make them real. We were paralyzed by the changing times, and by our changing selves. It was much easier—not to mention, less painful—to play pretend. We were like emperors at the fall of our once-great civilization, gazing out at the rubble of our relationship and referring to it as Rome.
I couldn’t tell you exactly when my boyfriend’s unhappiness began. For my own comfort, I choose to believe that it started long before he’d care to admit. But there were several years where I felt like I was in love with an abstraction. Or maybe I had lost so much of myself while loving him that I had become the abstraction. I’m not sure. All I knew was that I wasn’t human anymore. And when I looked up at the cosmos, I could see nothing except the star he had supposedly given me. Everything else was dead, or dying, or had faded into the void.
When we did eventually break up, I kept expecting to find my star hurtling across the night sky, smearing the darkness with space matter, but it didn’t. The star carried on as it always had—luminous and lonely. The only difference was that it had stopped being mine.
The stars in Vermont smelled like moss, charred matches, and storm clouds on the horizon. They smelled like wildflower pistils, pine needles, and a horse’s derriere. They smelled…well, they just smelled. Like nothing. Like everything. Like stars.
Mostly, I smelled them at night, when there was little else to do except bask in their snowy, celestial light, and I’d sit on the front porch of my miniature cabin, shivering in an oversized sweatshirt and eavesdropping on the woods when they thought no one was around to listen.
But I also smelled them at dawn, soft and unspoken, their scent wafting through the windows like steam off a hot cup of coffee. I smelled them in pepper-spotted egg whites, in turning book pages, between the fibers of the loosely woven rug. I smelled them on my morning walks, as I pedaled down Haven Hill Road and back again, counting the model-looking houses and wondering what kind of people lived there, if they would like me.
I smelled them in the afternoon, when the local farm stands announced their last calls, and I hastened to buy various goods I hadn’t known I’d needed, like apple cider donuts and fudge bars in the shape of bobcats. Ten minutes later, I smelled them in the shopkeeper’s warning: “We don’t take Apple Pay here.”
I smelled them at dusk, too, when the stars shimmied out of their silk chiffons, exposing their pale bodies, one after another, until the entire sky was littered with them like veins in a cut of black marble, and I could spot the silhouette of the milky-way in the distance.
After so many days of this, I began to smell them on myself. The stars were tangled in my unwashed hair. They were lodged beneath my fingernails. They were soaked into the armpit stains of my clothes. And sure, I could keep on listing scents. I could write that they smelled like roadkill, or spilled wine, or cigarettes after sex, but I’m tired of imagery, so I will simply tell you that the stars smelled the way they always did:
Like freedom.
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