The Handless Maiden

Once there was a man who was married to the most beautiful woman in the world. Each time he touched her, her beauty vibrated through him like a bell. She bore to him a daughter, but with the birth came his wife’s lifeblood, and yet she was beautiful even in death. The man mourned her deeply and resolved that he would not love again, not until he met a woman whose beauty could rival that of his wife.

Largely he ignored his daughter, for she reminded him of what he had lost. Years passed and with them the girl’s childhood. When her father looked at her at last, he saw not his daughter but a woman whose beauty did indeed match his lost wife’s.

And so he approached her and took her by the hand and led her to his bed. But the girl was horrified that her own father could wish to touch her in such a way, and she fled.

He followed her deep into the forest and caressed her hair, speaking lover’s words instead of a father’s. Again the girl refused, and this time the man brought forth a knife. If he could not enter her flesh one way, he would enter it another. So that she might never embrace another man, just as he would never again embrace her mother, he used that knife to slice off first her left hand and then her right.

Leaving her alone and bleeding on the forest floor, the man returned home. The girl, most certainly, could never walk that path again. Instead, she pushed forward, her wrists weeping blood, and she stumbled through the dark, frightened by everything, but pushing on just the same.

That first dark night in the forest was full of sounds—the cries and calls of animals, the rustle of wind through trees, and far off the rush of a river she could not see. But though fresh blood flowed from her twin wounds, no predators came to feast on her flesh.

In time, dawn streaked the sky red and pink, and the girl looked down to find that her bleeding had ceased. And though all through the long night she had willed herself to die, she found in the light of the new day that hunger stirred inside of her the same as it had the day before, that her body thirsted still, that her bowels and her bladder called her to move her body through its functions.

She struggled to do the things that before had been natural to her, so easy that she had never considered them tasks, at all. From the trees, birds gathered to watch her wrestle with her skirts; from the river, fish burbled to the surface to see her attempt to drink.

And the animals took pity on her, birds dropping fruit that she had no hands to pick, fish splashing with their tails water she feared to drink herself, lest she slip into the river and drown.

On and on she wandered, until at last she came to the far edge of the forest, and there she found a castle on a hill. She stumbled toward it until she was spied by its guards, who took her inside the castle walls and presented her to the king.

He found beauty in her face and, in spite of her mangled arms, he wished to take her as his bride. Waiting women bathed her and wrapped her stumps in fine, soft muslin and dressed her in a wedding gown, yards and yards of white draped silk that she could not lift herself.

Maybe she wished to marry him. Maybe she did not. Perhaps, having denied the advances of one man and finding herself deprived of her arms, she did not wish to risk denying another.

But they were wed.

This is where the story should end—the girl saved, wedded, and bedded. But this is not its ending.

After a time the king went away to war. In his absence, his mother tended to the girl, but she resented his son’s bride and looked with contempt at the stumps of her arms. Conniving, she contrived to break the couple apart and wrote a letter to the girl as if from her son, saying that he wished her gone from the castle by the time he returned, as he tired of his armless wife and wished to take a new bride.

Did the girl believe the letter? Did she mistake the feminine handwriting for that of her husband? Or did she recognize the artifice and decide to leave just the same, yearning to return to the thick, deep forest?

With the help of a serving girl, she cut short the skirt of her dress so she would not trip upon it, and she slipped into men’s boots, which the maid tied with double knots. She had her hair shorn close to keep it from falling into her eyes, and she shouldered a pack that did not lace, full of provisions for her journey.

And this time, when she entered the forest, it was not with the intention of walking through it but rather of making it her home.

Some say that when the birds saw her return, they passed their wings across her arms and her hands regrew as if by magic. Others like to think that the fat orange fish splashed healing water on her stumps and by a miracle she once again had hands.

And some stories tell us that once her hands—her lovely white hands—had been restored, so too was her love with her husband-king, and they lived together ever after in the castle.

But it may be that the handless maiden wandered in that forest for the rest of her days. Perhaps she learned to be clever with her stumps and her teeth and her toes. It could be that she and the other forest creatures formed an understanding, that the magpie brought her pretty things and that the friendly fish splashed water in her mouth to sustain her and that though she was not restored to what she once had been, perhaps she at last found a home of her own.