English verbs take inflections for two tenses only—present and past.

In his dotage, the king has become obsessed about what is to come and has taken to consulting soothsayers.

The queen has known for many years the impossibility of changing the future, let alone trying to predict it.

She learned these and many other valuable lessons from a demon she met in her early years. His name was Rumpelstiltskin.

The name, it turns out, is important. Not the name itself—the quaternity of syllables, the clustered consonants, the complex portmanteau of simple English words (rump, stilt, skin). What matters is that the demon was possessed of a name at all, and that he guarded it so closely. The name is powerful.

The realisation made the queen question the composition of the straw he’d famously spun into gold. It could not have been ordinary straw. Perhaps it too, was made of a name, or whatever magic thing names were made of. She undertook a few clandestine experiments with the spinning wheel.

The straw he used had tremendous plasticity. It could be made into anything—almost anything. Gold was one of the simpler projects, surprisingly easy to master. The queen was eager to move on to new challenges.

The king’s current obsession with the future coincides with her own realisation that she can change the past. With her deft fingers on the spinning wheel, she creates any number of alternative histories.

In one her father’s boasts about her spinning skills go unnoticed, and she remains a peasant, blissfully ignorant of the complications of royal life.

In another, sweeter version, she confesses her ineptitude and the prince marries her anyway.  

Once she dares to spin the thread into an unthinkable past, in which she fails to discover the demon’s name and her firstborn is lost to her. She follows Rumpelstiltskin to his underworld lair and consents to be his consort.

Though she keeps her new skill secret, occasionally she’s tempted to tell the king. What she knows might be enough to convince him to sack those charlatan soothsayers. 

There is no need to worry about the future if you know how to change the past.

Perhaps one day she’ll tell him. For now she enjoys her hobby in solitude, and the wisdom that it affords her.

The straw is made of language. What she spins are stories.

Would you like to know more about this story? Watch the video I made about it.