Eight Wedding Rings from Unhappy Marriages

This week’s story by Molly Tanzer threads a delicate line between reality and fantasy, finding that precise liminal space where the two meet. ~ Julian and Fran, March 17, 2024

This month’s stories are by authors Mary Robinette Kowal, PH Lee, Molly Tanzer, and Zohar Jacobs. The first story of the month is free to read, but it’s our paying subscribers who allow us to keep publishing great stories week after week.

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Eight Wedding Rings from Unhappy Marriages

by Molly Tanzer

My friend Eleni is a ceramicist. A potter, I guess, though to my mind that term doesn’t quite encompass the whimsical nature of her creations—pufferfish with pink-tipped spines; owls with wise faces and cleverly textured wings; a vase covered in crawling centipedes. But perhaps I’m engaging in artificial high/low art delineations here. All I mean to say is, her work is more ornamental than functional.

Eleni would probably call herself a potter.

Eleni is the co-founder of Poudre River Clay. Located in downtown Fort Collins, it has a storefront with items for sale, and in the back is a studio space where they teach classes and host speakers. This past autumn they held a pirate-themed fundraiser called Tipples & Treasures. The twenty-five-dollar ticket price got you in the door to browse a donated collection of one-of-a-kind antiques and two chits for “tropical” cocktails. All proceeds went to the organization.

Eleni wanted me to come. I tried to get out of it. I told her writers had to be home to write. She reminded me that even science fiction writers needed real-life inspiration. And she was right, I hadn’t been going out much—not that an antique jewelry fair hosted by a ceramics studio really counted as “going out,” but it was as close as I’d come on a Friday night in a while. So I said yes.

I was surprised how far they took the pirate theme. There were inflatable palm trees, and the event staff were all in costume, bandanas and puffy shirts. I even spied an eye patch.

“Attendees were invited to dress up too,” said Eleni, looking me up and down. I was wearing jeans and a black sweater a friend had once called my Hello, I am a writer turtleneck. Eleni, on the other hand, looked like an extra in a local production of Peter Pan.

“Once I get a cocktail, I’m sure I’ll seem more . . . yo ho ho,” I said.

“I’ll settle for you looking like you actually want to be here,” said Eleni.

“I want to be here,” I said. “Really.”

“Then let’s get you a daiquiri.”

The daiquiri actually wasn’t bad. It had a little paper parrot in it, which I liked. I sipped on it slowly so I wouldn’t get a brain freeze after Eleni turned me loose to browse.

I didn’t know what I was looking for, or if I was looking for anything at all, but the variety of unusual antiques successfully distracted me from feeling like I should be mucking about with my latest nonstarter of a short story. There were some lovely brooches, vintage pen sets, old coins. I browsed so long, I finished my drink. As I contemplated whether my next cocktail should be a mojito or a mai tai, I saw them: a pile of rings bearing the legend Eight Wedding Rings from Unhappy Marriages.

The rings were nothing special. It was the caption that fascinated me, handwritten in faded fountain pen on a mildewed piece of card stock. I asked the seller about the story behind them. She shrugged. They’d been donated like that, the card already in the box.

They weren’t terribly expensive, individually or as a set. More important, they had the tantalizing suggestion of being “a good story.”

I needed a good story. I hadn’t been able to finish anything in months.

But was their aura of intrigue worth the cost? Short stories aren’t real moneymakers, and while an unhappy marriage theme could carry a realist piece, my stories are all about spaceships and wizards and inscrutable eldritch gods. I wasn’t confident I could write anything at all about these rings, much less earn more than their asking price. But the sale would help out Poudre River Clay, and that was the purpose of this event.

I handed over my credit card.

As I was signing the vendor’s iPad with my finger, I felt someone come up behind me.

“‘Eight wedding rings from unhappy marriages,’” said a male voice. “Not everyone would jump at the chance to buy those.”

I turned around and found myself face-to-face with a man who was also not dressed as a pirate. He wore well-fitting jeans and a blazer with what looked like a vintage band T-shirt underneath, and he was far handsomer than anyone I’d expected to see that night. In fact, I was surprised to see any man at the event who wasn’t a husband dragooned by his wife into putting on a bandana and volunteering.

“What do you plan to do with them?” he asked.

He was trim, with slender wrists and delicate fingers. His hair was a glossy near-black, though he’d gone gray—white, really—just at the temples, like an older man in a comic book. His nose was sharp without being beaky. I liked the look of him. And I liked him paying attention to me.

I didn’t want to tell him I was a writer, didn’t want to answer those questions. Not yet. “I’ll probably just give them away.”

“To friends with significant others you hate?”

I laughed. It wasn’t just his nose that was sharp. “To anyone who wants them.” On impulse I offered him the box. “See anything you like?”

He raised his eyebrows. “In here, you mean? Hmm, let’s see . . .” He rifled around with his long fingers and pulled out a yellow gold band studded with diamond chips. “I like this one best.”

“Keep it,” I said.

“That’s not a very romantic proposal.”

I wasn’t usually much of a flirt, but I was already doing a few things that night that were unusual for me. I took a deep breath. “That’s because it’s a proposition,” I said.

He put the ring in his pocket. “Well then,” he said. “I accept.”

#

Magpies always descend upon my backyard in late summer, to feast on the crab apples that grow so prolifically on the big tree just inside my fence. I look forward to their arrival every year. Black-billed magpies are magnificent birds, large and social, with extraordinary black and white and iridescent blue plumage. They have a large vocal range, corvid squawks and trills, a distinctive conversational chatter. I like the way they always seem to be having a better time than everybody else.

I’d saved one a few weeks before Tipples & Treasures. The poor thing had some silver Mylar ribbon twisted around its foot, and it had gotten stuck in a bit of old chain-link fence I’d upcycled into a garden trellis. I thought about calling animal control, but the bird was so distressed, I decided to try to help it. If I could just cut that ribbon, it would be able to get away fine.

I retrieved a pillowcase and my kitchen scissors and eased open the back door. As I walked toward the magpie, I told it my intentions, explaining I wanted to help. I spoke to it in the kind of voice I imagined an animal would interpret as trustworthy, low and casually conversational. That sounds totally insane now that I’ve written it down, but it worked. The magpie quieted and chirped at me inquisitively.

“Just trust me,” I said—and threw the pillowcase over the bird. When I got hold of its body, taking care not to squeeze, it was both bigger and smaller than it had seemed from afar. It didn’t struggle much, to my surprise. I had my scissors ready and snipped away the ribbon as quickly as I could. Since the bird was fairly calm, I cut through a few other tangles in the hopes it would fall away completely.

It kicked its feet enthusiastically, showing spirit for the first time. Only then did I experience a moment of panic. I was unsure what to do with the bird now that I was done. I settled on placing it on the ground, pillowcase and all, and stepping away.

It found its footing quickly and poked its black beak out from underneath the fabric. Then it hopped free and flapped its way up into the crab apple tree. It regarded me for a moment with its bright eyes before flying away.

I thought about that magpie the first time I went to bed with Hadley. That might also seem like an insane thing to say, but when I pulled off his shirt, his chest hair reminded me of a magpie’s wing, white fading to black. When his pants came off, he had a thin silver anklet on the same leg that had snared the bird.

Like many science fiction writers, I was very into world folklore as a kid; I still am, and draw on it frequently in my work. And like many writers of all sorts, I’m never wholly present in any moment. My mind is always busy. I’m working through a sticky bit of a story, or coming up with a clever turn of phrase to describe something as it happens, in the hopes of later lending my fiction the illusion of truth. I’ve always felt like I exist a little outside the world, like I’m observing rather than experiencing my life. Of course, that isn’t true—I’m just neurotic and anxious—but neuroses and anxiety can be useful to people in my line of work. Sometimes. Anyway, all this to say, as Hadley peeled off my panties, I was already thinking about a new story, a retelling of the famous Japanese folktale “The Crane’s Return of a Favor,” but about a magpie man rather than a crane wife. I moaned when he slid his fingers inside me, but I was also contemplating how to get those wedding bands into the story. It came to me when I came, as he fucked me into the mattress so hard my eyes rolled back in my head—Hadley had picked the shiniest of my eight rings for himself, hadn’t he? That worked!

Another future detail for my magpie man: Hadley chattered incessantly. He was in town visiting his sister, a student at Poudre River Clay—thus his presence at the fundraiser. He lived in the Bay Area, where he was a part owner in a psychedelic tea startup and worked as a developer for a new dating app targeting sapiosexuals. He was a gourmet who admired Stanley Tucci—because of his attitude toward food, not his movies. He read a lot of nonfiction about “the mind.” He also enjoyed opera, and was a member of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.

This was all tantalizingly cosmopolitan to me. I live in an area of the country where liking double IPAs and having thoughts on Arc’teryx versus Patagonia hiking gear is considered enough of a personality for a man. IPA guys aren’t typically known for their sparkling conversation, so it was honestly pretty pleasant to let Hadley whitter on.

When I told him I was a writer, he said he found me and my career “interesting,” which made me feel good, even if his interest was largely hypothetical. He didn’t ask me anything about my writing; in fact, he always seemed a little impatient every time I said more than a sentence or two at a time. And it was obvious he never looked me up online in between the handful of dates we managed during his trip.

“You should come visit me sometime. We can check out the de Young and the Legion of Honor,” he said, when I mentioned my own membership at the Denver Art Museum.

“I’d love to,” I said, pleased to be invited, pleased he wanted to see me again. Pleased, too, that I could write such a trip off my taxes as research; a quick google when he got out of bed to fetch a glass of water told me the Legion of Honor currently had an exhibit called Metamorphoses: From Human to Animal and Back Again. It was closing in a few weeks. Perfect.

#

There are many versions of the crane wife story. In most of them, a poor young man frees a crane caught in a trap. Soon afterward he encounters a mysterious woman. They marry, and the woman then performs a valuable service for her husband, usually weaving a glorious fabric he can sell for a high price. She does this in secret, using her own feathers, cautioning him never to look at her while she’s working. But the husband succumbs to his curiosity, and when he discovers his wife’s true identity, she flies away, never to be seen again.

I planned to riff on this, with the setup for the story ripped from the headlines of my life: the rescue of a magpie, a fundraiser where my protagonist would meet a man with winglike chest hair and an anklet on the same leg. But instead of being grateful, the man would steal something from his rescuer, as a magpie would.

At first, I thought he’d abscond with one or all of those eight wedding rings from unhappy marriages. But the more I thought about it, the less I liked that. Why would that hurt my protagonist so grievously? The rings were trinkets she’d bought on a whim. Their loss would be something less than heartbreaking. So, I considered whether the magpie man might instead steal her own wedding ring from her own unhappy marriage. Maybe their liaison could be an affair . . . but that didn’t feel right either. Nor did making her a widow, the ring a treasured keepsake. That was also terrible.

The crane wife’s true nature was only revealed when her husband broke his promise to her. What promise would the woman make? Would she betray the magpie? Or would I need to invert that too? I couldn’t make anything work. And on top of all that, magpies don’t really steal. That’s just a slanderous myth with its origins in some moldy old nineteenth-century play, as I learned after spending about thirty seconds on the internet. It’s such a pervasive legend that animal behavioral specialists have actually studied it, only to discover that magpies tend to shy away from shiny things.

Basically, my story idea had been garbage from the get-go.

I’d hoped a trip to see that exhibit in San Francisco would help, but it never happened. Hadley told me to keep in touch, but he didn’t mean it. The day after he left was foggy—unusual for Colorado—so I texted him a picture and said, Hey, I think you left your weather here! He didn’t write me back. I didn’t hear from him at all until the exhibit had already ended. When he finally shot me a text, it was to let me know he’d had the ring appraised for a surprising amount, and that his sister had sent him some black garlic salt from a local Fort Collins store. He didn’t even ask if I’d heard of the place.

I tried to observe my feelings as I deleted his number from my phone, but my usual detachment eluded me. I wasn’t quite sure how to describe the mix of emotions I was experiencing.

Honestly, I still don’t.

When I told Eleni about the whole thing, she felt guilty. I told her not to be silly, it obviously wasn’t her fault. Just the same, when she offered to take me out for a beer to commiserate, I didn’t say no.

She proposed a trip to the Forge Publick House. After checking to make sure there’d be no live music that night, I agreed. It was a favorite spot of ours, with its big fireplace, but the bands that played there were always too loud.

She told me to come and park at Poudre River Clay and we’d walk down together after her evening class. I got there just as the students were leaving. Eleni was in the back, cleaning up.

“Oh good, you’re here,” she said, waving me over to the rack where the finished pieces were stored. “I have something for you.”

“What is it?” I asked, as I picked my way through the studio, taking care not to brush up against any tables lest I get dust on my jeans.

“I couldn’t resist,” she said, and handed me a small item about the size of my hand.

When I saw what it was, I almost dropped it. It was an impossibly perfect ceramic magpie, the electric blue and deep black of its wings bright against the white of its breast. It held a shining coin in its beak, and its eyes were so bright, it appeared almost alive. I looked up at Eleni to find her grinning.

“It’s your friend the thief! Look, I even put the ribbon around its ankle,” she said, pointing out a flash of silver brushed onto the bird’s leg. “The metallic glaze came out really nice, I think. I wasn’t sure; it was an experimental recipe.”

Of course—it was the magpie I’d rescued, not Hadley. I hadn’t told Eleni about his chest hair, his anklet, the story I couldn’t make work. I’d been going to, but there was no way I could now.

Nor would I tell her that magpies don’t really steal.

“It’s amazing,” I said. “Thank you so much.”

I put it in my car for safekeeping. After, as we walked down to the Forge, Eleni tore Hadley apart. I nodded, but didn’t join in. My writer-brain was too busy chewing over the entire affair, the ending of which was now strangely punctuated by my friend’s gift.

Often in science fiction and fantasy, the protagonist of a story is hampered by their pedestrian sensibilities. They aren’t open to seeing the truth of a situation. The reader, in on the fact that it’s a story, rails at the character to just open their eyes and see what’s in front of them.

But that wasn’t the case here, of course. This gift, kindly meant, wasn’t a story beat. Eleni would have made it for me even if I hadn’t met Hadley at Tipples & Treasures and bought those eight wedding rings from unhappy marriages.

I still have them, by the way: the hammered silver band, the ridged gold ring, the thin silver one, the one with a Celtic braid, the chunky gold ring, the plain white-gold piece I thought the loveliest, and a platinum one with Tiffany & Co. stamped inside, surely worth more than all the rest combined. And if what Hadley got for his ring is any indication, I’ll more than make back my investment, even if I can’t sell this, the story I wrote about them.

#

People disagree about the moral of “The Crane’s Return of a Favor.”

Some say it’s about the importance of trust. When the young man acts on his doubt, he loses both his wife and the source of his newfound wealth.

To my mind, that interpretation ignores the crane’s role in the tragedy. She loves her young man, but her secret dooms them. So perhaps the tale is telling us that love cannot be built on lies.

Modern feminists have used the crane wife as an allegory about the unseen labor of women in relationships. Weaving her feathers into cloth takes a terrible toll on the crane. With each bolt of fabric, she grows thinner, but her husband still asks her to make more.

Or it might be none of these things. Not every folktale is a sermon. The first person to dream up the crane wife might have had no intention of imparting any wisdom. Perhaps they simply wished to capture some truth about two very human experiences: joy and dissatisfaction. All the best stories feel true in some way, even when they’re about shape-shifters—a struggle familiar to science fiction writers like me.

I think the crane wife haunts us because, like the young husband, all we’re left with are questions.

Maybe that’s why I couldn’t make my retelling coalesce. Maybe without realizing it, I was trying to work in a lesson, one of the deadliest impulses for a writer, as lessons are never true. Thus, I must ask myself the same question as I look over what I’ve written here. Did I introduce some artificial moral component? I don’t think so; hell, I still don’t know if I think Hadley’s a jerk. He’s certainly not a magpie man, even if I ended up feeling like a trinket he briefly picked up, then discarded. Neither of us made or broke any promises to the other.

No, this was just something that happened to me, an episode of my life containing joy and dissatisfaction, which I have tried to capture here as truthfully as I can. It was never even really a story, though I seem to have made it into one, the irresistible impulse of people like me, who exist a little outside ourselves, observing the world as we experience it.

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Thank you for joining our journey this week.

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Molly Tanzer is the award-winning author of five novels and many works of short fiction. Follow her on Instagram @molly_tanzer, on BlueSky @mollytanzer.bsky.social, or on Twitter as @wickedmilkhotel. She lives outside of Boulder, CO with her many houseplants.”

“Eight Wedding Rings From Unhappy Marriages,” © Molly Tanzer, 2024.

The Sunday Morning Transport: Selected Stories 2022 is now available at Weightless Books!