STORY: From the Ball's Point of View
A response to HC Andersen's fairy tale "The Top and Ball" (can be read here).
No objectionable content, but may be depressing.
The chest of toys was a little town around them, if one can imagine a town without houses and in perpetual dusk. For the spinning-top and the ball, who did not belong to the largest inhabitants, it was big enough without being dwarfing.
Lately it had seemed to the ball that the top had always ended up next to her when they were put back, perhaps because there was some affinity between them. They were both round, in different ways. The top was smaller than she, but heavier. And as the top liked to say to her when he came with his marriage proposals, “you leap and I dance.”
If there was a similarity, then why didn't she feel anything? The top seemed to think that she should.
“But why don't you want to?” he said one of the times.
The ball cast about for an answer.
“We are too different,” she said, “we have nothing in common. I am white and soft, you are dark and hard. I am sewn from Morocco leather, my parents were two Morocco slippers, and I have Spanish cork in me.”
Near them stood a little mirror with shells in the frame. In it the ball could see how her side pressed against the dark wood of the chest wall so that her white leather wrinkled. The leather had a faint net pattern and had been treated until it was as soft as upholstery fabric.
“That's fancy enough,” the top said, “but I am made of mahogany, and the Mayor himself turned me on his lathe, just for the joy of it.”
Now she had to search for reasons again, and that took a long time.
“It's not possible,” she said at last. “There is another.”
It was the swallow she was thinking of, but to say that he was “another” was an exaggeration. Sometimes he had flown past when she bounced up from the yard and almost all the way into the blue depths. He was beautiful, black and smooth-rounded and so slender that you could understand how he could leap in such arcs across the roofs. She had never seen him land; perhaps he didn't.
A few times when their trajectories had crossed he had chittered at her. She didn't know whether it was a proposal, if that was how swallows proposed, but every time she felt the weightlessness starting to leave her she said “yes” to herself and longed for the next time, when she would have the strength to say it out loud. Perhaps he would grip her and carry her with him towards the edge of the sky. She had to be light enough for him.
“Oh, well then,” said the top.
But it took a moment, and he sounded as if something in him was damaged. Now she needed to look at him to know whether she had hurt him so badly, but she couldn't bring herself to.
“Can't you at least promise that you will have me if he doesn't want you?” he said.
She couldn't, but he sounded so miserable. Instead she mumbled something that had no real words, then she was silent for a while.
“But I do like you,” she said, and her voice grew stronger. “If he takes me away from here, I will never forget you.”
“Much good that will do me,” said the top.
After that he at least stopped trying to propose to her.
He wasn't a bad toy. He had never spoken ill of her, and even she had to admit that he was good-looking enough, with his compact body and the curlicues of red and yellow that shifted up and down when the Boy took him out and let him whirl across the yard. Did she ought to have tried to like him better? She had to assume that the pain she had caused him had passed when he stopped talking about it.
A short time later they were taken out of the chest and the house. The ball looked up as soon as she could see the sky in the door. It was one of the best days: the sky was solid and blue. The swallow used to shuttle in long leaps across the yard on such days, but she didn't see him yet.
The Boy tossed her on the white-dusty gravel. She struck the ground with such a sense-clouding force that her entire body flattened. In the next moment it filled out again, so that she barely had time to feel the anguish before it turned into triumph, and the force of that triumph sent her into the air. She rose as high as the edge of the slop-bin by the corner of the house. Another impact: as high as the deep green world of the lime-tree. She could see something dark moving in there, and it had to be he, but by that time she had started falling and the leafage got in the way. All she could do was wait for the next leap to send her up there again, then maybe he would see her.
She struck the ground and rose, but this time her impact must have been askew. She didn't notice it until she was high up. Now she was of a height with the lime-tree's branches, with its tallest top, but she had travelled so far from it that she could still see the opening in the leafage but not whether the swallow was still in there. The only thing around her was open chill air and she couldn't change her trajectory now.
The weightless moment was over. The world whistled up around her, but something struck her underside long before she should have landed in the yard. It was a slope covered with orange tiles that rippled in straight ridges. She bounced and rolled down it, because there was nothing there to stay her speed, and her speed increased as she went.
At the furthest bottom where the slope ended was a long rounded gully. The ball would almost have been able to get across it, because she flew easily from the slope, but she hit the opposite edge and bounced back into the gutter. It was too deep for her to see anything other than the sky. She stuttered to a roll again, more slowly, so there was an incline. Here there were narrow pools of water, if water could be black and smell as if it had been standing for years. She passed between them, but then she stuck in something wet and dark and couldn't roll any further. At first she thought it was mud, like there had been on the yard floor once when the sky had been low and grey, but it was old leaves. Some had mouldered until only a lace of veins were left. They pressed against her sheath and were cold.
*
What is the point in telling?
The sky above her grew blue and grew grey and darkened, and brightened again. The sun-rays lay warm on her. The mass of leaves dried a little, but she could still feel the cold at its heart. She wasn't moving. Her leather had got a brown stain from the wet, and perhaps more on her underside. The sun dried her, but the dirt remained.
The swallow was going to see her if he flew over the roof. He would be able to swoop down and lift her, and together they would fly across the roofs with their different inclines and shades of colour. She waited for that while the sky brightened many times.
Sometimes it rained. The open space above her that would let the swallow see her also meant that she was exposed to everything that fell from the sky. She soaked up the wet so deep inside her that the sunny days could no longer dry her.
It was day again, the sky was blue. The silhouette of the swallow darted past above her. He was so close, she almost felt the draft from his wings. He must have seen her.
Perhaps she had stopped hoping by then.
She didn't see him again, and one day a yellow lime leaf fell on her. It was the first of the year.
What is the point in telling, when nothing you can do makes a difference?
*
It had been snowing for a long time. Thick bolts of snow had covered her and the entire gutter like a whitework bedspread, but she herself was not white any more.
The snow greyed and became dense with water. One little wait longer, and it melted bubbling around her and she could see the sky again. The water bore her onward in a whirl and loosened the stopper of leaves. It raced ahead so that she sometimes caught glimpses of façade and bare branches over the edge of the gutter, and perhaps she could have gone over. Then there was a black hole in front of her. She slipped into it and fell. She didn't know how long it went on, because it was darker than when she had been lying under the snow.
She struck something soft that gave under her. She wasn't in the yard, because it was dim around her, and there were walls and a lid above. It was larger, she couldn't remember when she had last been somewhere her sides didn't touch the walls. At first it felt big as a room; it was only gradually that she began to understand that she was in a new kind of toy chest.
The soft and wet-glossy substance underneath her was the leaves. They were the cleanest thing here. A matte dark brown slope was coffee grounds that had piled up in one and the same spot. The thing that shone like pale and precious cloth was a bunch of white cabbage leaves. They had been thrown down here because the worms had got in them, and the worms must still be somewhere in the refuse underneath her.
Knives of sunlight came through between the horizontal planks in the walls. Not far off lay something rounded. She thought it was a ball like she, but it was an apple. It looked so puffy and smooth because the rot had worked all the way out to the peel and made it brown, like her own sheath.
*
One day - she assumed it was a day - she heard a new sound, something on the lid that didn't sound like rain or cat-claws, a tinny spinning. It wandered this way and that across the lid and made no difference. When it ended the ball didn't care where it had gone, but instead something small and hard thudded into the soft refuse. It must have gone through the hole beneath the gutter, because it landed next to her.
It was a spinning-top, the first toy she had seen here that wasn't so broken it couldn't talk.
“I have to get out of here!” he exclaimed with a voice that was light with panic. “I can't be in here!”
The ball ought to have said something, perhaps just an “it's not that bad,” but she no longer had the strength she had had up in the clean and sunlit world. She looked at him, because he reminded her of when she had lain in the dry chest. He looked like her old admirer in size and shape, but he was made of brass-shiny metal, unusual for a spinning-top.
“At least now I have someone to talk to,” she said at last.
It sounded horrific, as if she'd wished for him to fall here. It was perhaps not as bad for him. Metal always seemed sunny and dry.
She couldn't bear to look at herself, but she had to explain:
“I am actually made of Morocco leather and sewn by maidens' hands, and I have Spanish cork in me. I ended up in the eaves-gutter... that is why...”
That was all she could manage. The top was silent for a long time, but now she had recognised him. The metal was only a coating, as if someone had known that he was going to fall down here where everything was wet and rotting.
He was looking at her, too.
“So this is where you ended up,” he said.
There were barely any feelings there, only surprise. She lay in the gloom and didn't look at anything, waiting for him to say something more. Somewhere water dripped, a bright little sound.
“All that time I dreamt that you would return,” he went on. “Not once did I come out in the yard without trying to look for you, in case you had fallen somewhere. And now you look like that apple, all bloated and rotten on the inside.”
She didn't notice him any more, so perhaps he didn't speak again. Time must have passed even after that. Water pooled around her. So much had seeped into her that she could hold no more, and now it was seeping out again.
The top was shining, that was something new. Soon she saw that the chink of light had widened. The sunlight fell in and showed much that was more horrible than what she had been able to see in the dusk.
“Why, here's the top!”
A pork-firm arm with a rolled-up sleeve came down. It took the top. He had been lying so close to her that she rolled a little into the dent. From there she saw him sail upwards, flashing every time he passed a strip of light. She started screaming.
The lid creaked shut, almost completely. She thought she heard voices outside, like a dry thundering, and then the lid opened and the arm came down again. It grabbed the ball. The fingers slid on her, and for a moment she already felt the disorientation of falling. Perhaps she was slippery, but when she thought about it later, it might just have been that the fingers had shied from touching her.
She saw sky again, and the dry stucco walls and open space of the yard. Then came a long stretch of lying to dry in the laundry. Unlike in the eaves, there was no sky, so it was not possible to see how time passed. They cut her open and sewed her into a new sheath. She wasn't white Morocco leather any more. If anyone saw her, they would see someone else, and perhaps she was.
The sheath had belonged to an armchair. It was red and gold, and it was admittedly beautiful. When they dropped her into the toy chest, she didn't think the top would recognise her, but he must have known from her size that it was she.
So she became his fiancé. He didn't even need to ask again. After all, he had saved her - something the swallow had never done during so many days. Now he spent most of the time sitting on a varnished sideboard out in the dusty light of the room, far from her. As time went by, she was uncertain whether what she felt was love or just the hope from when the slop-bin lid had opened again.
THE END
No objectionable content, but may be depressing.
The chest of toys was a little town around them, if one can imagine a town without houses and in perpetual dusk. For the spinning-top and the ball, who did not belong to the largest inhabitants, it was big enough without being dwarfing.
Lately it had seemed to the ball that the top had always ended up next to her when they were put back, perhaps because there was some affinity between them. They were both round, in different ways. The top was smaller than she, but heavier. And as the top liked to say to her when he came with his marriage proposals, “you leap and I dance.”
If there was a similarity, then why didn't she feel anything? The top seemed to think that she should.
“But why don't you want to?” he said one of the times.
The ball cast about for an answer.
“We are too different,” she said, “we have nothing in common. I am white and soft, you are dark and hard. I am sewn from Morocco leather, my parents were two Morocco slippers, and I have Spanish cork in me.”
Near them stood a little mirror with shells in the frame. In it the ball could see how her side pressed against the dark wood of the chest wall so that her white leather wrinkled. The leather had a faint net pattern and had been treated until it was as soft as upholstery fabric.
“That's fancy enough,” the top said, “but I am made of mahogany, and the Mayor himself turned me on his lathe, just for the joy of it.”
Now she had to search for reasons again, and that took a long time.
“It's not possible,” she said at last. “There is another.”
It was the swallow she was thinking of, but to say that he was “another” was an exaggeration. Sometimes he had flown past when she bounced up from the yard and almost all the way into the blue depths. He was beautiful, black and smooth-rounded and so slender that you could understand how he could leap in such arcs across the roofs. She had never seen him land; perhaps he didn't.
A few times when their trajectories had crossed he had chittered at her. She didn't know whether it was a proposal, if that was how swallows proposed, but every time she felt the weightlessness starting to leave her she said “yes” to herself and longed for the next time, when she would have the strength to say it out loud. Perhaps he would grip her and carry her with him towards the edge of the sky. She had to be light enough for him.
“Oh, well then,” said the top.
But it took a moment, and he sounded as if something in him was damaged. Now she needed to look at him to know whether she had hurt him so badly, but she couldn't bring herself to.
“Can't you at least promise that you will have me if he doesn't want you?” he said.
She couldn't, but he sounded so miserable. Instead she mumbled something that had no real words, then she was silent for a while.
“But I do like you,” she said, and her voice grew stronger. “If he takes me away from here, I will never forget you.”
“Much good that will do me,” said the top.
After that he at least stopped trying to propose to her.
He wasn't a bad toy. He had never spoken ill of her, and even she had to admit that he was good-looking enough, with his compact body and the curlicues of red and yellow that shifted up and down when the Boy took him out and let him whirl across the yard. Did she ought to have tried to like him better? She had to assume that the pain she had caused him had passed when he stopped talking about it.
A short time later they were taken out of the chest and the house. The ball looked up as soon as she could see the sky in the door. It was one of the best days: the sky was solid and blue. The swallow used to shuttle in long leaps across the yard on such days, but she didn't see him yet.
The Boy tossed her on the white-dusty gravel. She struck the ground with such a sense-clouding force that her entire body flattened. In the next moment it filled out again, so that she barely had time to feel the anguish before it turned into triumph, and the force of that triumph sent her into the air. She rose as high as the edge of the slop-bin by the corner of the house. Another impact: as high as the deep green world of the lime-tree. She could see something dark moving in there, and it had to be he, but by that time she had started falling and the leafage got in the way. All she could do was wait for the next leap to send her up there again, then maybe he would see her.
She struck the ground and rose, but this time her impact must have been askew. She didn't notice it until she was high up. Now she was of a height with the lime-tree's branches, with its tallest top, but she had travelled so far from it that she could still see the opening in the leafage but not whether the swallow was still in there. The only thing around her was open chill air and she couldn't change her trajectory now.
The weightless moment was over. The world whistled up around her, but something struck her underside long before she should have landed in the yard. It was a slope covered with orange tiles that rippled in straight ridges. She bounced and rolled down it, because there was nothing there to stay her speed, and her speed increased as she went.
At the furthest bottom where the slope ended was a long rounded gully. The ball would almost have been able to get across it, because she flew easily from the slope, but she hit the opposite edge and bounced back into the gutter. It was too deep for her to see anything other than the sky. She stuttered to a roll again, more slowly, so there was an incline. Here there were narrow pools of water, if water could be black and smell as if it had been standing for years. She passed between them, but then she stuck in something wet and dark and couldn't roll any further. At first she thought it was mud, like there had been on the yard floor once when the sky had been low and grey, but it was old leaves. Some had mouldered until only a lace of veins were left. They pressed against her sheath and were cold.
*
What is the point in telling?
The sky above her grew blue and grew grey and darkened, and brightened again. The sun-rays lay warm on her. The mass of leaves dried a little, but she could still feel the cold at its heart. She wasn't moving. Her leather had got a brown stain from the wet, and perhaps more on her underside. The sun dried her, but the dirt remained.
The swallow was going to see her if he flew over the roof. He would be able to swoop down and lift her, and together they would fly across the roofs with their different inclines and shades of colour. She waited for that while the sky brightened many times.
Sometimes it rained. The open space above her that would let the swallow see her also meant that she was exposed to everything that fell from the sky. She soaked up the wet so deep inside her that the sunny days could no longer dry her.
It was day again, the sky was blue. The silhouette of the swallow darted past above her. He was so close, she almost felt the draft from his wings. He must have seen her.
Perhaps she had stopped hoping by then.
She didn't see him again, and one day a yellow lime leaf fell on her. It was the first of the year.
What is the point in telling, when nothing you can do makes a difference?
*
It had been snowing for a long time. Thick bolts of snow had covered her and the entire gutter like a whitework bedspread, but she herself was not white any more.
The snow greyed and became dense with water. One little wait longer, and it melted bubbling around her and she could see the sky again. The water bore her onward in a whirl and loosened the stopper of leaves. It raced ahead so that she sometimes caught glimpses of façade and bare branches over the edge of the gutter, and perhaps she could have gone over. Then there was a black hole in front of her. She slipped into it and fell. She didn't know how long it went on, because it was darker than when she had been lying under the snow.
She struck something soft that gave under her. She wasn't in the yard, because it was dim around her, and there were walls and a lid above. It was larger, she couldn't remember when she had last been somewhere her sides didn't touch the walls. At first it felt big as a room; it was only gradually that she began to understand that she was in a new kind of toy chest.
The soft and wet-glossy substance underneath her was the leaves. They were the cleanest thing here. A matte dark brown slope was coffee grounds that had piled up in one and the same spot. The thing that shone like pale and precious cloth was a bunch of white cabbage leaves. They had been thrown down here because the worms had got in them, and the worms must still be somewhere in the refuse underneath her.
Knives of sunlight came through between the horizontal planks in the walls. Not far off lay something rounded. She thought it was a ball like she, but it was an apple. It looked so puffy and smooth because the rot had worked all the way out to the peel and made it brown, like her own sheath.
*
One day - she assumed it was a day - she heard a new sound, something on the lid that didn't sound like rain or cat-claws, a tinny spinning. It wandered this way and that across the lid and made no difference. When it ended the ball didn't care where it had gone, but instead something small and hard thudded into the soft refuse. It must have gone through the hole beneath the gutter, because it landed next to her.
It was a spinning-top, the first toy she had seen here that wasn't so broken it couldn't talk.
“I have to get out of here!” he exclaimed with a voice that was light with panic. “I can't be in here!”
The ball ought to have said something, perhaps just an “it's not that bad,” but she no longer had the strength she had had up in the clean and sunlit world. She looked at him, because he reminded her of when she had lain in the dry chest. He looked like her old admirer in size and shape, but he was made of brass-shiny metal, unusual for a spinning-top.
“At least now I have someone to talk to,” she said at last.
It sounded horrific, as if she'd wished for him to fall here. It was perhaps not as bad for him. Metal always seemed sunny and dry.
She couldn't bear to look at herself, but she had to explain:
“I am actually made of Morocco leather and sewn by maidens' hands, and I have Spanish cork in me. I ended up in the eaves-gutter... that is why...”
That was all she could manage. The top was silent for a long time, but now she had recognised him. The metal was only a coating, as if someone had known that he was going to fall down here where everything was wet and rotting.
He was looking at her, too.
“So this is where you ended up,” he said.
There were barely any feelings there, only surprise. She lay in the gloom and didn't look at anything, waiting for him to say something more. Somewhere water dripped, a bright little sound.
“All that time I dreamt that you would return,” he went on. “Not once did I come out in the yard without trying to look for you, in case you had fallen somewhere. And now you look like that apple, all bloated and rotten on the inside.”
She didn't notice him any more, so perhaps he didn't speak again. Time must have passed even after that. Water pooled around her. So much had seeped into her that she could hold no more, and now it was seeping out again.
The top was shining, that was something new. Soon she saw that the chink of light had widened. The sunlight fell in and showed much that was more horrible than what she had been able to see in the dusk.
“Why, here's the top!”
A pork-firm arm with a rolled-up sleeve came down. It took the top. He had been lying so close to her that she rolled a little into the dent. From there she saw him sail upwards, flashing every time he passed a strip of light. She started screaming.
The lid creaked shut, almost completely. She thought she heard voices outside, like a dry thundering, and then the lid opened and the arm came down again. It grabbed the ball. The fingers slid on her, and for a moment she already felt the disorientation of falling. Perhaps she was slippery, but when she thought about it later, it might just have been that the fingers had shied from touching her.
She saw sky again, and the dry stucco walls and open space of the yard. Then came a long stretch of lying to dry in the laundry. Unlike in the eaves, there was no sky, so it was not possible to see how time passed. They cut her open and sewed her into a new sheath. She wasn't white Morocco leather any more. If anyone saw her, they would see someone else, and perhaps she was.
The sheath had belonged to an armchair. It was red and gold, and it was admittedly beautiful. When they dropped her into the toy chest, she didn't think the top would recognise her, but he must have known from her size that it was she.
So she became his fiancé. He didn't even need to ask again. After all, he had saved her - something the swallow had never done during so many days. Now he spent most of the time sitting on a varnished sideboard out in the dusty light of the room, far from her. As time went by, she was uncertain whether what she felt was love or just the hope from when the slop-bin lid had opened again.
THE END