What if you had a child?

If you had a child, your life would be about 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 that someone would remember, decades hence, as 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 (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 ever wanting anything else.

Having a child is not, however, anything like ordering a pizza. Even less 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 to you, by obscure but undeniable 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 a dark corner 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 as much as the big-brand products, which are free of the gritty bits that can find their way into a sack of flour no matter how careful you are), a man who has no health insurance or investments or pension plan (he’s needed every cent just to keep the mill open)—that man has told the King that 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 to attract the attention of the King.

You suppose (as an aspiring parent yourself, you prefer to think of other parents as un-deranged) he is hoping that if he can get his daughter into the palace, if he can figure out a way for her to meet the King, for the King to see the pale grace of the girl’s neck and her shy smile, and hear the sweet clarinet tone of her soft but surprisingly sonorous voice, the King will be so smitten (doesn’t every father believe his daughter to be irresistible?) that he’ll forget about the absurd straw-into-gold story.

The miller is apparently unable to imagine all the pale-necked, shyly smiling girls the King has met already. Like most fathers, he finds it inconceivable that his daughter may not be singular; that she may be lovely and funny and smart but not so exceptionally so as to obliterate all the other contending girls.

The miller, poor, foolish, doting father that he is, never expected his daughter to be locked into a room full of straw and commanded to spin it all into gold by morning, any more than most fathers expect their daughters to be unsought after by boys, or rejected by colleges, or abused by the men they eventually marry. Such notions rarely appear on the spectrum of paternal possibility.

It gets worse.

The King, who really hates being duped, announces, from the doorway of the cellar room filled with straw, that if the girl hasn’t spun it all into gold by morning he’ll have her executed.

What? Wait a minute . . . .

The miller starts to confess, to beg forgiveness. He was joking; no, he was sinfully proud. He wanted his daughter to meet the King. He was worried about her future. I mean, Your Majesty, you can’t be thinking of killing her. . . .

The King gives the miller a glacial look, has a guard escort him away, and withdraws, locking the door behind him.

Here’s where you come in.

You’re descended from a long line of minor wizards. Your people have, for generations, been able to summon rain, exorcise poltergeists, find lost wedding rings.

No one in the family, not in the past few centuries, at any rate, has thought of making a living at it. It’s not . . . respectable. It smells of desperation. And—as is the way with spells and conjurings—it’s not a hundred per cent reliable. It’s an art, not a science. Who wants to refund a farmer’s money as he stands destitute in his still parched fields? Who wants to say, “I’m sorry, it works most of the time,” to the elderly couple who still hear cackles of laughter coming from under their mattress, whose cutlery still jumps up from the dinner table and flies around the room?

When you hear the story about the girl who can supposedly spin straw into gold (it’s the talk of the kingdom), you don’t immediately think, This might be a way for me to get a child. That would be too many steps down the line for most people, and you, though you have a potent heart and ferocity of intention, are not a particularly serious thinker. You work more from instinct. It’s instinct, then, that tells you, Help this girl and good may come of it. Maybe simply because you, and you alone, have something to offer her. You who’ve never before had much to offer any of the girls who passed by, leaving traces of perfume in their wake, a quickening of the air they so recently occupied.