Spinning Silver

on the wedding contract, before me and my parents and the rabbi, and Wanda and Sergey for our witnesses, in silver ink he signed his name.

But I won’t ever tell you what it i

with them and bursting into open flames. The glass wall itself melted into incandescent glowing liquid, ropey strands dripping down over the crack, closing off the opening. Another great chunk broke away, and he fell out of the mountain shrieking, a small wriggling remnant of himself

She lives in New York City with her family and six computers.

I imagined dragon-slaying and immortal quests were meant to be involved, and possibly a war or two. No, thank you.

It took a long time until we came to that big city gate and Panov Mandelstam got down to pay the man at the gate some money, because that city was such a terrible place we had to pay to be let out.

He wasn’t beautiful, he was terrifying; and then he was beautiful, and then he was both, and I couldn’t decide from one moment to the next which it was.

I had never seen any Jew but Miryem’s family before, except the woman on the line and her son. Now I did not see anyone else. It was a strange feeling. I thought that when Miryem had to go to the Staryk kingdom maybe it was like this for her. All of a sudden everyone around you was the same as each other but not like you. And then I thought, but it was like that for Miryem already. It was like that for her all the time, in town. So maybe it hadn’t been so strange.

But he wasn’t a fool, or cruel. And more to the point, I was reasonably certain he wasn’t going to try and devour my soul. My expectations for a husband had lowered.

As if I had stopped existing in the real world at all, as if the Staryk king had ripped me out of it by the roots.