I mentioned on Bluesky that I was grateful to find my short “Little Musgrave” on the Wigleaf longlist; however, this story first appeared in the wonderful and dearly departed Ligeia magazine. So to resurrect the tale, I’m placing it here. It was inspired by the very old folk tune “Little Musgrave,” aka “Matty Groves.”
Little Musgrave
She sang about a man, and he appeared in the audience. Light flowed like stiff skirts through the stained-glass windows, so beautiful it made her feel she’d sinned.
After the concert, she followed him. He walked fast, surefooted on the slippery cobblestone. Each time she almost reached him, someone got in the way. One man who’d been at the concert complimented her music, while another man complained about the echoes in the church. Someone selling apples tripped her by accident. She had performed in the church before, but only twice, and she didn’t know the city well.
“Stop!” she shouted in the man’s direction. Since he kept walking, she bought an apple to throw at the back of his head. He looked around for the offending blow, and she caught up with him.
Up close, his eyes were blue like corpse lips.
“Since I made you, I have to name you,” she said.
He turned away like he wanted to leave again, but she grabbed his shoulder and kept him in place. Someone so new to the world couldn’t have anywhere to go.
“I’ll call you Little Musgrave,” she said.
“Why would you do that?” His voice had a fiddle lilt. His scent was sweet cantaloupes.
“That is the song I sang to make you, about the tryst of Little Musgrave and Lady Barnard, and how Lord Barnard slaughtered them for their affair.”
“What has that got to do with me?”
“It’s how you got here,” she said, getting impatient. The song had also made her fall in love with him.
His smile revealed a mouth full of sacred teeth. “You’ve got it wrong. I’m not real.”
“I know that,” she said, though she hadn’t known. “But what do you mean?”
“Lions wait at the gate between the real and unreal. I passed through while you were singing. I have to leave now, or else the lions will find us, and they won’t be kind.”
It was her fault. It had been her idea to sing about the past, to ask the sextons to hang posters of old tapestries around the sanctuary. She had invited this mishap. The blame was hers.
“Come home with me,” she said.
“I can’t,” he said. He must have found her realness funny. Each of his teeth was carved like the face of a medallion. One had a carving of an owl. One of a bear. One of a fish. One of a cloud.
“I was real since I was very young,” she said. “I didn’t have any choice. I think the lions will allow me one dalliance.”
So he went home with her. The birds saw them together, and they told the lions.
You can’t be real and unreal. You can’t stand in the gate, clutching at shadows, without becoming a shadow.
Once the lions killed her, the singer was buried with her song. Little Musgrove never lived or died, but still, he felt guilty about it.
This is soooooo good, Ivy!!!