(Courtesy of Neil Gaiman's Sandman)
There was a man who loved the ladies. He was always carrying on with one pretty face after another. Loved 'em, and forgot 'em and loved 'em and forgot 'em as he went from town to town.
So one day he spied a gal washing herself in the river, mother-naked and all in her birthday suit. Naturally (for him i guess), he hides her clothes, and when she comes out of the river, she sees him.
He says he'll give her back her clothes if she'll be his lady-love, but she won't be his lady unless he swears to make her his wife ~ and in the first church they come to, at that.
"I swear if I set foot in a church, it'll be to marry you," he said ("and the devil he'd step into a church again" he swore under his breath)
"And what'll you swear," she asks,"if you break the vow?"
"If I don't marry you," he said, "may that worms shall eat me (for they'll do that anyway, he thought, when my time's over and up), and if I don't marry you, I wish our children might grow wings and fly away (and no great matter if they do, he thought)."
So they kissed then and there, and did other things besides, and when they were all done, he gave her her clothes back, and she followed him down the road. They passed the first church.
"Let's get married here," she says. "Oh," he says, "we can't get married here, for the vicar's a sick man, and besides, he's off a-hunting."
She said nothing but she looked at him as if her heart would break.
When they came to the next church, her belly was already beginning to swell.
"Let's be married here," she says.
"I'm not going into that church," he says, "for the vicar's a drunkard, and no better than he should be, and the sexton's no particular friend of mine, neither."
"But you SWORE," she cries. I'm not going in the church, he tells her, and he knocks her down. Her face is bleeding when she gets up. "So THAT'S how it is," she says.
"That's how it is," he tells her.
"Well," she says, "my belly's big with child. And I want to stop for a while. I can't keep on the road. Isn't there a place where I can rest?"
So he stops her there and sit, at the side of the road, and he goes on ahead.
He gets to a cottage and goes in, for the door's just on the latch, unlocked, and in the cottage he sees an old woman fast asleep on the bed. She was old and weak, and he held her mouth shut, and held his fingers over her nose until she couldn't breathe no more, and he took her out back and buried her in the midden heap. He went back to his wife and he says, "It's a good thing we passed by here, as my old aunt has just died and left us her cottage."
Oh, he was a bad one, that man. So he took her to the cottage and there he left her. He'd come back, every few weeks to make sure she was still there, and to see his children, for she had three lovely girls over the years.
It was a deserted part of the country, but there were vegetables in the garden and now and then he'd bring her back a hen or a pig, so she never starved, and neither did the children.
However, one day he comes home, and the children are nowhere to be seen. And the little girls are the apples of his eye...
"Where are the children?" he asks his wife. "Gathering berries," she replies.
"In the spring?" he says. But she says nothing, and the children don't come home. So when night comes, he says to her, Where's the children?" "Off fishing," she tells him. "The baby too?" he asks her, but she pretends she can't hear him.
In the morning he woke her up: "Where are the children? WHERE ARE MY GIRLS?"
"They've flown away," she told him.
"Flown away?" he shakes her to make her tell the truth, but she won't change her tale. So he fetches the axe in from outside and chops her into bits.
There's a noise outside, so he pushes the lumps and limbs and lights of her under their bed. And it's his daughters, the oldest, the middle, and the little wee baby, coming down from the sky, each on wings.
And they come inside the cottage.
"Where's our mam?" they asked him.
"She's out, picking berries," he tells them.
"And what's all this blood on your hands and on the floor?"
"I was killing a pig," he says.
But the youngest girl looks under the bed, and she sees her mother's dead face, staring out at them. And they let out a wail deep and long and sad. Then they fell on him, all three of them, teeth and claw, and they killed him. They left his body on the floor.
And they flew off into the sky, and nobody saw them again.
And as soon as he was sure he was dead, he got up and shook himself, and he looked around, and there waiting for him on the bed was his wife, with long claws out, and her eyes blazing like a green cat ready to spring.
Naturally (this time for all of us), the man got up and ran away, but he could feel her cold breath on the bare of his neck.
And he called out to the thunder, "Strike me dead!" but the thunder wouldn't, for he was dead already. And he ran to the fire, and begged the fire to burn him up. But the fire couldn't burn him, for the chill of death put it out...
And he threw himself into the water, and he screamed, "Drown me blue!", but the water wouldn't, for the death-colour was coming into his face already, and the water tossed him out.
Last of all, he throws himself onto the ground, onto the middenheap, and prays for the worms to come and eat him, so he could rest in his grave and be quit of the woman. He puts out one hand and he finds himself touching the skeleton hand of the old woman he'd killed in the cottage.
He lies in the mud, his hand holding tight to that skeleton hand, waiting for his wife...
And by and by along crept a great worm, and a strange thing it was, with his wife's face on the end of its long slimy body, and it crept up beside him and over him and all around him, and it drove all other worms away. Her teeth were sharp and long.
And she wrapped her slimy wormy body around his, and whispered his name into his ear.
And he screams, "KILL ME, for god's sake, just get it over with." But she licks her lips with a long worm tongue, and she shakes her head.
"A meal this good must never be hurried," she says. "Just hold still, boy, and let me enjoy myself."
And she takes her first, gentle bite from his cheek with her sharp sharp teeth...
