A stone wall surrounds my garden, high enough to keep the village dogs and other small animals out and low enough that neighbors can rest their arms on the top stones while they tell me the day's news. Everyone says I have the finest garden in the village. Ethelde says it's because there's magic in me, that the Lady of the Land, She of many names, claims me as a daughter, and any land I work with my own hands becomes fertile ground.

Who am I to argue with the wisewoman, the witch, my mentor?

I sometimes wonder if Gothel thought she was working magic when she left me in that desolate place. Did she think a circle scratched into the ground would hold me in the same way as a tower of stone? Or had affection warred with pride at the very end and was that circle the only way she knew how to set me free without admitting it?

For a long time I neither knew nor cared, but now that strands of silver weave themselves through my golden hair and my eldest daughter swiftly approaches the time when the women in the village will celebrate her first rite of passage between girl and woman, I find myself thinking about all of them: the parents I never knew, Gothel, my handsome young prince.

I don't remember much about the journey from that desolate place to this village. I remember I stayed within that circle the first night, too numb, too frightened to move. And then the sun rose, and some promise carried on the wind sang within me. With my feet planted firmly in the earth, I raised my arms to the sun and wind in an ancient, instinctive greeting.

I stood there for a long time. Then I said to She of many names, "No more towers," and stepped out of the circle. After that, grief and fear clouded my mind and shadowed my thoughts so fiercely the world slipped away from me. Or I slipped away from it.

But I kept following the promise carried on the wind. Eventually it brought me to Ethelde.

For the first few days, I ate the broths and bread she set before me. I slept through the nights and most of the daylight hours as well. I walked in her garden, blind to the glory all around me. I saw the plants as strangers I didn't care to know, so I didn't ask their names, and Ethelde didn't offer to tell me.

But as the weeks passed and my belly swelled, as I watched Ethelde's garden grow and bloom, as my body learned what my mind was not yet ready to embrace, I began to change. I began following Ethelde around the cottage and garden as she went about her work. She welcomed my company but never explained her tasks. She sang while she worked, and the songs always fit the rhythm of the task.

After a while, I began to sing with her.

She just smiled at me and said nothing.

After a while, since my fingers had come to know the feel of every plant in the garden, I no longer saw them as strangers but as friends. So I asked their names. And she told me.

Gothel's words had been a vicious flood that had cut deep into the soul's landscape, leaving destruction in its wake. Ethelde's words were soft rain, quietly sinking in and nourishing parched land.

It wasn't until the day I went into the village with her and listened to the respectful way the men spoke to her and saw the way the women deferred to her that I fully understood that Ethelde was a witch as powerful as Gothel and that the choice I had made when I stepped out of the circle was to become one. I hadn't realized because Ethelde is everything Gothel was, and everything Gothel wasn't.

After the twins were born, the young men in the village began to come courting. The blacksmith's son, the miller's son, and the merchant's son brought little gifts when they invited me out for a walk. They came with charming manners and flowery words of love. But they always wanted to end the walks in one of the quiet hollows where the village girls offered their bodies for love and the young men took their bodies for pleasure. And after the flowery words, there was always the question, "Will you, Rapunzel? Will you?"

Since my answer never changed, they eventually stopped calling.

All except Imre, a simple, hardworking man who had no flowery words, who never invited me for a walk without inviting Ethelde to go with us, who never brought gilt trinkets, and who never failed to do some small chore around the cottage whenever he called. Imre, who, when he finally took me for a private walk and asked, "Will you, Rapunzel?" didn't bring me to one of the hollows but to a fine cottage he'd built with his own hands. It had a separate room for him and his wife and a divided loft that would easily hold two children or more. It had a workroom with its own small hearth. It had a small, private bathing area. It looked out on a large plot of empty, carefully turned land enclosed by a stone wall.

Imre said nothing while I explored each room. He said nothing when I stood in the workroom doorway that opened onto the garden.

Finally he said in his quiet, deep voice, "Will you, Rapunzel?"

Imre had no flowery words, but I felt his love in every stone.

So I said yes.

In all the years since, I've never regretted my answer.

That first spring, Ethelde helped me plant my garden. "Don't try to fill all the land all at once," she told me as we planted the herb, vegetable, and flower beds. "I'll harvest more than I can use and you're welcome to it. Leave yourself room to grow."

That first summer, Imre teased me when he saw the vegetable bed. "You've planted enough of your namesake to feed the village." When he saw the look in Ethelde's eyes and the way she nodded her head in understanding, he didn't tease me about it again. By the end of that summer, he, too, understood the truth of his words.

At first the men came to me directly, but as the years have passed and they've come to realize that, when Ethelde finally returns to the land, I will stand in her place, they've become a little shy with me. The women will come to me and ask, but if the men have to come, they'll wait until evening when Imre is home. They'll come up to him while he's leaning against the stone wall, smoking his pipe, and murmur their request. He'll bring me the net bag they gave him and say with a solemn voice and twinkling eyes, "Master so-and-so's wife has a bit of a craving." I'll fill the bag with fresh, green leaves from my rapunzel, and together we'll return to the stone wall and our anxious neighbor.

"A gift," I tell them every time because, sometimes, they aren't sure if they should offer something.

They would never understand what I get in return.

In the summer, after the children are asleep, Imre and I sit outside on the bench he built for me. I sit with my feet on the end of the bench and my knees up. He straddles the bench and sits behind me, his strong arms holding me close. Most of the time we talk about small things when we choose to talk at all. But sometimes Imre will press his face against my neck and say, "Are you content, Rapunzel?"

I always tell him, "I'm content. More than content." Which is true.

He always goes in first to give me some quiet time alone to listen to the wind's music, to listen to the earth's wisdom. Some nights, when I finally come to bed, he just holds me, his big, callused hands stroking the silvered gold hair that I never allow to grow past my breasts. On other nights, we give each other another kind of pleasure.

I think about them sometimes, when I'm sitting alone: the parents I never knew, Gothel, my handsome young prince. I think about the twins who look like him and the son and daughter Imre and I made together. I think about Imre and the difference between the fire of a boy's passion and the strength of a man's love.

I chose well, and my life is rich because of it.

I think about them, and I'll tell you this. My daughters will never crave what belongs to another because they'll know they can have what they want most if they give it their hearts and their hands. And my sons will never be so blinded by passion that they cannot see the other textures of love because they'll know that love, too, has its seasons. They'll know these things because Imre and I will show them.

Sometimes my neighbors talk about misery or desolation, but they don't understand what they're really talking about. No one, not even Ethelde, understands misery and desolation as well as I.

Misery is a heart that can never be content with what it has and, by always craving something more, brings about its own destruction. And desolation is a heart so fearful of losing what it hoards that it never knows the richness that comes from being able to give.

In her anger, Gothel wished me a miserable, desolate life.

But having learned the lessons well, mine is the stronger magic.

GREGORY FROST.

Gregory Frost lives in the suburbs of Philadelphia and is the author of four novels. His first three-Lyrec, Tain, and Remscela-are fantasies; the fourth, A Pure Cold Light, is a work of science fiction set in a dystopic alternate Philadelphia. His short stories have appeared in most of the major genre magazines and in various anthologies including Intersections: The Sycamore Hill Workshop Anthology and Snow White, Blood Red. He reviews for The Washington Post and The Philadelphia Inquirer and has taught story writing at Temple University and the University of Pennsylvania. He is currently researching a nonfiction book about spiritualism, and a science program for the Learning Channel.

Although it's got the usual cast of characters (an ugly witch, a brave soldier, a beautiful princess, and those wonderful huge-eyed dogs), Frost transforms "The Tinder Box" by Hans Christian Andersen into a contemporary treat.

SPARKS.

by Gregory Frost.

You never know what's going to sweep you up. You make plans, choose the direction, cover what you think is every detail. There will still be a million things you didn't predict. See, everything turns on what you can't prepare for. It can be as big as a war. As tiny as a flame.

Paney and I opened an office together after the big one, WWII. We didn't see much action together. Still, I think if we hadn't served two years side by side on the Endymion-hadn't been cooped up watertight inside and out-we wouldn't have been able to stand each other. War made us buddies. Nothing else. I couldn't even tell you whose idea the partnership was in the first place. We probably weren't sober at the time.

The routine we settled into kept each of us out of the other's hair. I did some security work-bodyguarding starlets who didn't need one. Chased down a missing wife, an errant son. Things like that. Eventually I started seeing a cigarette girl named Sally from the Belvedere Beach Club. Funny thing about her was she didn't smoke.

A few years later I went off to Korea with the Seventh Fleet, and Paney stayed homeside. They call that one the forgotten war, and I guess I'm proof of it: When I came back, Paney'd planted a new partner in my place and even managed to get Sally to say yes to him. I don't want to say he conned her. Maybe I didn't write enough letters.

Thirty years old, I came back to . . . well, I still had the license, and there was enough government pay to open a little hole-in-the-wall off Ladera Ave. I hoped to make enough to get along.

They invited me over to the house, you know, for old times' sake-"No hard feelings and come look at the kids" kinda thing. I always had something else to do.

Not work, though. I wasn't getting scratch. It was as if every boy who'd jumped ship after Korea set up an office while I was changing clothes. Even the negro kid, Elroy, who shined shoes in the lobby, was probably better set up than I was. He sure kept more of my money than I did. I started thinking pretty seriously about heading out to the East Coast. Maybe they needed shamuses out there.

The old woman showed up one afternoon while I was on the phone to Mapes at the bank about letting me slide a little on the loan for the Packard.

She was a knobby creature, I guessed Italian or Greek. Nose like a hawk and eyes as hard as pinballs; dressed in early Puritan. She carried a black leather handbag on her arm not much bigger than a steamer trunk. I gave her a smiling apology while Mapes droned on about finance charges. Finally he drew a breath, and I jumped in fast: "Gotta go, bud-duty calls." Even as I hooked the receiver, I could hear him shouting.

The old lady had time to scan the office while I was stuck; she stared at the wall plaque with my medals like butterflies pinned under glass. I cleared my throat and waited. She finally tore herself away from the medals and hauled the only other chair, as big as she was, across the floor to the opposite side of the desk and sat down to point those pinballs at me. Could have been the Evil Eye for all I knew. I wondered if I would break out in a rash or maybe keel over the next time I crossed Pico and Sepulveda.

"What can I do for you, ma'am?" I asked.

"You work for hire." Her accent was thick enough I found myself leaning forward to get everything, and thinking of Peter Lorre in drag. But the accent was decidedly Spanish. I'd only been off by the width of the Atlantic Ocean.

"Yeah, I'm for hire. As long as I don't have to dig with a shovel or read consecutive Burma Shave signs all the way to Baker, I'm for hire."

"I hire you."

"All right, fine. What do you want me to do?"

"I lose something. I want you to find it. I pay you lots of money. Some now." And with that she hauled an envelope out of her bag, licked her thumb, and started flipping through a crisp salad of fifties. I got five of them. "Much more later. You'll get rich from this, young man."

"Really?" I slid the money under my palm and looked it over. It seemed the genuine article. "Rich from finding what?"

She gave me a big grin. Her teeth would have pleased a horse trader. "My lighter," she said.

I considered offering her a book of matches, but changed my mind because I liked the five fifties too much to be that stupid. I stuck the cash in the bottom drawer and stood up. "Okay. Let's go."

We walked to the door. I scooped up my hat on the way.

She pointed at the medals. "You a soldier, right? Decorated."

"Sure." I didn't mention that I'd probably been within a week of pawning them before she walked in the door. I thought about my pistol in its holster in the desk drawer, told myself I had to be kidding, and locked the door behind me. Unless she'd lost her lighter in the La Brea Tar Pits, I figured this was going to be the fastest money I'd ever made.

I had no idea.

The house was way up in the hills, far enough from the city to consider itself countryside. A thick grove of trees surrounded the place, mostly mountain pine and laurel. From the road you'd never have known it was there. You couldn't see it 'til you were halfway up the drive.

It was a gingerbread kind of place-a cabin-style design with lots of screened-in porch and those little semicircles in a horizontal line below the eaves, between some of the slats on the side, a Norwegian timberman's notion of decorative trim maybe.

There was a car parked beside the house. We got out of mine, and she led me across the lawn, which was patchy from the dense shade, and into the trees. I kept an eye out for somebody else: Cars generally don't drive themselves.

We threaded through the trees for what seemed like an hour. I didn't think there was this much gently rising ground between her place and the steeper slope, but I hadn't been paying much attention. Soon, I noticed that our feet crushing needles and leaves was the only sound. I'd heard the kik-kik of a woodpecker at first, but that had dried up. So had all the other bird cries. It was like we were walking in between the seconds.

Our destination was a strange, shadowy little clearing that would have been perfect for Druids on the solstice. In the center of it stood a single, blasted great black oak. Lightning had split the trunk almost to the ground. It must have continued to thrive awhile after, the result being a queasy, unnatural kind of flow, as though the tree had vulcanized as it laid its dead, snaking branches down.

She stepped over them and came to a stop beside the wide trunk. From the huge black bag she hauled out a large spooled rope. It must have taken up the whole bag. "Here," she proclaimed. "I lost it here."

I looked around on the ground. "What are we talking about? What kind of lighter?"

She made a buzzing noise like a sewing machine motor as she thought about it.

"Zippo," she replied finally.

"No kidding?" I could just imagine this old dame flicking back the top of a Zippo and lighting up a panatella. Sure. "Where, exactly, do you think it went?"

She pointed. "Down this tree."

I'd already figured out what came next. "You want me to climb in there."

"Si." She held up the rope. "You must tie this around your waist. I'll lower you in."

This tree was split to about four feet above the ground. If I jumped, I wouldn't disappear above the armpits, but she wanted to put a line on me. "Lady, you are too much." I looked closely at the dead tree, the splintered wood sharp as knives. The bole did appear to be hollow. "Why am I going to jump into the middle of a tree?"

"For ten thousand dollars." She said it as calmly as that, and the moment I heard it I wished I'd packed the gun. Whatever was lost in this tree, it wasn't a Zippo, not unless I'd come up here with Norma Desmond. Still, maybe that was exactly who I had here, and it was her money. I had too many debts not to be persuaded by the figure.

"You got a flashlight?"

She hauled a big one out of her handbag. The cash, the rope, the light-this was starting to look like a magic trick. I figured I could have asked for Krazy Kat and she would have dragged him out, brick-beaned and all.

I took off my coat and hung it on one of the dead branches. Adjusted my suspenders, rolled up my sleeves. Then I accepted the end of the rope and tied it into place. I put one foot in the notch of the tree and pulled myself up, looking down into the bole. It was plenty wide for a person. In that ungainly position I couldn't use the light, and I didn't see the ground. I glanced back at her. "Ten thousand dollars?"

"And fourteen cents," she added.

"Well, hell, in that case . . . Geronimo." I stepped into the tree.

Your body gets crazy when you're all set to land and your feet don't make contact with anything. It's instant panic. You scrabble for anything to break your fall. I was inside a shaft the size of a coal chute and smooth as the neck of a whiskey bottle. My palms squealed against it.

Then the rope snapped tight.

The air whipped out of me. I almost lost the light. I was hanging folded up around the lasso, staring into the darkness beneath me, listening to the creaking hemp. Nutsy ideas rattled around my head like BBs: This was a leftover bunker from WWII, when we thought the Japs were going to invade Hollywood. A mine shaft from the gold rush. A shortcut to Mongolia.

The old woman's voice called down, calm as a drill sergeant. "Turn on you light, soldier."

I responded to the order. It shone down the rest of the shaft to a dark surface not far below. The rope began to lower then. I thought of that frail little grandmother playing out the line with my weight on the end of it. How could she do that? There had to be someone else up there with her.

I touched down in the black dirt and shined the light all around. Now I knew I'd fallen asleep at my desk listening to Mapes, and this was just part of my dream.

Ahead of me were three big doors made of vertical slats of oak, each one set in the side of a solid rock wall.

I took a few steps 'til the rope stopped me. I untied it and let it drop. If the woman was worried about losing me, she never made a sound.