The Invention of Childhood
Rent from DeepDyve- The Invention of Childhood
When Little Red Heart found the house at the end of the clearing, a tree had grown into the hole in the roof and the staircase had been reduced to banister, but there were still three tea cups and a pot in the china hutch, there was a jar of dried rose hips in the pantry, also mint and chamomile. Flour and sago had found the mouse’s floor and the beans were black-eyed and menacing from in their murk of glass.
In the closet the wallpaper of hummingbirds stayed bright. A funeral suit hung beneath a black fedora on the top shelf. Beside a cotton dress printed with yellow flowers with a leather clutch that held tissues and a lipstick.
As you know, the chief virtue of the raccoon people is delicacy. They wash their fish before they eat them. They huff shine a grape until it gleams like a marble. Where could a china cup come from, if not from the gods of perfect care?
The boy in the basement was as cute as an owlet. A witch, when she eats a boy, does not wash him or spin him between her fingers, she does not conduct a careful study. Instead, the baba yaga dives in like a beaked thing and makes her face a visage of entrails. A witch who has no delicacy cannot be suffered in the kingdom, so Little Red Heart pushed her out through the fire, then ate the boy as carefully as a boy should be eaten until she was satisfied.
The light filtering through the rafters of tree was leafy like a broken bottle in the shallows of the stream. The quilt on the bed had been made from someone’s whole life of dresses. It was such a delicate garden to tuck up to her chin. [End Page 155]
When she woke the roof would need patched. She’d have a little cough from sleeping in the damp and brew a cup of rose hips to spread warm and florid through her throat and chest. She’d press the china to her cheek and be surprised how smooth it felt and also how naked her face had turned.
Should so hard a winter come that you cannot feed your pups, send them to our Little Red Heart and she will show them the changeling path out of the woods and into the village. Their new mothers will wonder how they grow so chubby on acorns and squirrel meat, how they can be so careless with their pockets of breadcrumbs and marrow bones. Their new mothers will not know to read the cursive of such delicately scattered trails back home. [End Page 156]
Kathryn Nuernberger is the author of The End of Pink, which won the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets and will be released from [End Page 187] BOA Editions in 2016, and Rag & Bone, which won the Antivenom Poetry Award from Elixir Press. She is an assistant professor of creative writing at the University of Central Missouri, where she serves as director of Pleiades Press.
