According to H. V. Patterson today’s flash fiction draws from ‘the Bluebeard fairy tale and its variants, as well as stories where giants/ogres/etc. have a prisoner (usually a princess) doing their housework’. In ‘Osedax’, Patterson questions the ambiguity of being married to a terrible man who is a good husband. What happens when a captive is a willing accomplice, happy to dedicate herself to home and hearth? It might not be what you expect.
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The ogre’s current wife polishes her predecessors’ bones. Radius and ulna, carpals and metacarpals—she’s learned their secret names from anatomy books in her husband’s vast library. As she admires the gleam of ivory-yellow, she considers the bones in her own body and the velvet-lined coffin which will one day cradle them. The coffin is made of the finest black walnut. She chose it herself, and she polishes it to a shine every four months. She thinks it’s an opulent resting place, far superior to what the ogre’s previous wives chose—especially the princess who came just before her.
The princess’s nobility hadn’t suited her for homemaking or gifted her with taste. The ogre’s current wife dispensed of much gaudy furniture after she arrived in the ogre’s windswept castle. As the beautiful daughter of a successful merchant, she is simply more skilled with the procurement and maintenance of lovely things than an impoverished princess whose weak, blue blood barely lasted three winters of the ogre’s tender ministrations.
The clock chimes five. Her husband will return at seven. She leaves the ossuary and retreats to the kitchen to start dinner.
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