|
ISSN: 1941-4137 |
|
Volume Five Issue Two |
||
|
Speaking to the Field Mice You'd be surprised how much there is to say about roots, those endless tangles forcing their silent way down into darkness and the wet womb of earth. About seeds and berries and the green parts of plants they know what they know, a drama of nibbling and movement quicker than words sliding their meaningful way across my storytelling mouth as a child climbs on my back and up my shoulders, inventing a way to bring the story deep into her little bones. And she does. The wolf and its cruel smile, all the grandmothers and beasts with a single eye, golden haired girls with their red chapped hands and generous hearts sharing a meager meal and scrabbling up mountains of glass. When the thirteenth fairy falls at last into a chasm, a fissure gashed into bitter white rock, the story seems to end but not for her. "Where does she go?" she wonders. She demands to know what the fairy king with his black, paternal beard, will do with wicked trolls or women who could put a child to such a death-like sleep. Until that evil is redeemed there is no sleep, no matter how streetlights stripe this early dark. |
||