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Barkin, who’s old now, who’s lost half his teeth, who still flirts with girls even as they recoil in horror. She’d be an adulteress, and no one would blame him for maintaining a determinedly cheerful demeanor in his solitude. He’d be a figure of sympathy. An acquaintance or two might even venture the long-withheld opinion that, as everyone in the village agrees, Mr. White really could have done better. And there are a few youngish local widows who don’t seem like the kind of women who’d object to a man’s smell, or wouldn’t appreciate a rousing, well-told tale.
    It would be easier, it seems, if there were fewer of them on the premises.
    The Whites, all three of them, know exactly where the monkey’s paw resides—on the top shelf of the cupboard, beside the cracked mixing bowl. They know, they always know, all of them know, it has one more wish to grant.

 
    LITTLE MAN
    What if you had a child?
    If you had a child, your job would be more than getting through the various holiday rushes, and wondering exactly how insane Mrs. Witters in Accounts Payable is going to be on any given day. It’d be about procuring tiny shoes and pull-toys and dental checkups; it’d be about paying into a college fund.
    The unextraordinary house to which you return nightly? It’d be someone’s future ur-house. It’d be the place—decades hence—someone will remember forever, a seat of comfort and succor, its rooms rendered larger and grander, exalted, by memory. This sofa, those lamps, purchased in a hurry, deemed good enough for now, then (they seem to be here still, years later): they’d be legendary, to someone.
    Imagine reaching the point at which you want a child more than you can remember wanting anything else.
    *   *   *
    Having a child is not, however, anything like ordering a pizza. All the more so if you’re a malformed, dwarfish man whose occupation, were you forced to name one, would be … What would you call yourself? A goblin? An imp? Adoption agencies are reluctant about doctors and lawyers , if they’re single and over forty. So go ahead. Apply to adopt an infant as a two-hundred-year-old gnome.
    You are driven slightly insane—you try to talk yourself down, it works some nights better than others—by the fact that for so much of the population, children simply … appear. Bing bang boom. A single act of love and, nine months later, this flowering, as mindless and senseless as a crocus bursting out of a bulb.
    It’s one thing to envy wealth and beauty and other gifts that seem to have been granted to others, but not you, by obscure but inarguable givers. It’s another thing entirely to yearn for what’s so readily available to any drunk and barmaid who link up for three minutes in one of the darker corners of any dank and scrofulous pub.
    *   *   *
    You listen carefully, then, when you hear the rumor. Some impoverished miller, a man whose business is going under (the small mill-owners, the ones who grind by hand, are vanishing—their flour and meal cost twice what the corporations can churn out, and the big-brand product is free of the gritty bits that find their way into a sack of flour no matter how careful you are); a man who hasn’t got health insurance or investments, who hasn’t been putting money into a pension (he’s needed every cent just to keep the mill open).

    That man has told the king his daughter can spin straw into gold.
    The miller must have felt driven to it. He must have thought he needed a claim that outrageous if he was going to attract the attention of the king at all.
    You suppose (as an aspiring parent yourself, you prefer to think of other parents as un-deranged) he hopes that if he can get his daughter into the palace, if he can figure out a way for her to meet the king, the king will be so smitten (doesn’t every father believe his