Her father is a roving herder of half-tamed pigs and a man of few words. Whether he chooses to live apart or is forced to do so, she can never put her finger on. He is made of stone regarding that.
They have traveled the world a thousand times over, by her reckoning, and she explored what little there was of interest long ago. Once a season they pass a bustling village on the horizon but she has never been allowed to visit there. Her father says she must be more woman than girl, though he will not say how much more or why, nor how such proportions are to be fairly judged in the first place. She asks him if all fathers are so informative. When he does not relent, she says she hates him and that a tree would make a better parent.
She is plenty old enough to take her leave and go befriend the woods, he tells her, if that’s what she prefers. And when she returns, he says, the pigs are sure to be glad of her company. She takes him by his word for spite, thinking he shall promptly come to miss her.
Hurrying ahead while her father ambles slowly with the herd creates an awkward distancing that she fast falls to dislike. When she looks back he waves and smiles, and she finds herself pretending–though she knows it is not true–that this is her father’s ruse to defuse her resolution. Still she hastens on and is soon farther ahead of him than she might otherwise dare.
Surrounded in deep rolling hills, swathed in a colorless fog, father and pigs far behind, her imagination alone advises her footfalls. All around there is silence, not even a bird.
Happening upon a crumbling, mossy well, she mutters a curse that no little girl ought to know. “Is one darn purple-pockmarked penny too much to ask for?” She does not know what a penny is, for her father is extravagantly poor, but that is what all the stories call for when a hapless vagrant–which is precisely the light she applies to herself–chances across a well: toss a penny, make a wish. The rest is foregone.
She raises a cloth purse to her freckled nose. Woven with thread finer than silver hair, the purse is the only thing she owns of true color–all purples and burnt yellows, with green corners and rings of white in the middle. It holds what seeds she has garnered from all the whereabouts of the world as she knows it. She lingers over which to throw.
She can find everything again, eventually: rose… dandelion… moondaisy… apple… onion… checkered pumpkin… parsley… potato…
Decisively, she upturns the purse and sprinkles all the seeds down the well. As her eyes follow their spiraling disappearance into the depths of the abyss, she casts her wish.
After a pause of deep reflection she stands up and strides purposefully away from the well, opposite the direction of her father and the pigs, whistling quietly to herself as she goes.