How a Mother Weaned Her Girl from Fairy Tales

HOW A MOTHER WEANED HER GIRL FROM FAIRY TALES

ALSO BY KATE BERNHEIMER

FICTION

Office at Night
(with Laird Hunt)

Horse, Flower, Bird

The Complete Tales of Lucy Gold

The Complete Tales of Merry Gold

The Complete Tales of Ketzia Gold

EDITED BOOKS

xo Orpheus: 50 New Myths

My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales

Brothers and Beasts: An Anthology of Men on Fairy Tales

Mirror, Mirror on the Wall: Women Writers Explore Their Favorite Fairy Tales

CHILDREN'S BOOKS

The Girl in the Castle inside the Museum

The Girl Who Wouldn't Brush Her Hair

The Lonely Book

COPYRIGHT © 2014 Kate Bernheimer

COVER + BOOK DESIGN by Linda Koutsky

INTERIOR ILLUSTRATIONS © Catherine Eyde

AUTHOR PHOTO © Cybele Knowles

            
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CIP INFORMATION

Bernheimer, Kate.

[Short stories. Selections]

How a Mother Weaned Her Girl from Fairy Tales : Stories / by Kate Bernheimer.

pages cm

ISBN 978-1-56689-348-0 (E-book)

I. Title.

PS3602.E76A6 2014

813'.6—dc23

2013035175

HOW A MOTHER WEANED HER GIRL FROM FAIRY TALES

For Mom

The fairy tale tells us

of the earliest arrangements

that mankind made

to shake off the nightmare

which the myth

had placed upon its chest

—
WALTER BENJAMIN

The Old Dinosaur

Pink Horse Tale

Tale of Disappearance

The Librarian's Tale

Professor Helen C. Andersen

Oh Jolly Playmate!

How a Mother Weaned Her Girl from Fairy Tales

Babes in the Woods

The Girl with the Talking Shadow

G
irl from another planet, I'm yours. Your planet is small and difficult, but what planet isn't? I like your suit and your hands of metal flowers. I have always wanted a friend like you, you know. Also I can hear the vibrations come out of your helmet. That is the song I have always wanted to hear: the song of our friendship, and the song, also, of time. We will stay together here for a great while, I think—until someone finds us, I think. Girl from another planet, thank you for visiting us. It was unexpected, and nice.

The Old Dinosaur

An old dinosaur lived in a big city, and one evening he sat in his room all alone, thinking how he had first lost his wife, then his two children, then little by little all of his relatives, and then his last friend, a small child who had walked with him daily through the park blocks until that very evening. The old dinosaur was alone and forsaken. He was sad at heart—yes, that is the saying.

Hardest of all to bear, of course, was the loss of his two daughters, and the grieving for that never had ceased. Of course, as was reasonable, he blamed humans for his misfortunes. He was sitting quietly, deep in thought about this, when all at once he heard bells ringing from the white church down the street. He was surprised to find that he had stayed up all night in the armchair by the small fireplace. (Usually he climbed into bed in his giant pajamas on which were printed pandas and rainbows.)

The old dinosaur lit a lamp in the window. He left through the window, by flying. He was in no other way striking—he was pretty much an ordinary dinosaur guy.

When he arrived at the church it was lighted—a strange and diffuse glow filled the space. There were no candles burning. It was crowded, the pews overflowing. When the old dinosaur came to his usual row, it was occupied; so was the row in front of it; and so was the row in front of that one; and so on, and so on, to the front of the room. There, he turned around and stared at all of the humans who stood and stared back at him. They all held photographs: the photographs were of his relatives, the ones mentioned before, who had died.

The scene wasn't striking, but it had a strong feeling. The people were dressed in beautiful vintage clothing—the fabrics elegant, dusty, and dark. Their faces were pale. No one spoke and no one sang, yet the church was filled with a murmur—like bees, who also were gone from the planet. He thought of them then.

A woman—elderly, very stoop-shouldered—began to walk toward him slowly. As she got closer he saw that she was, in fact, a dinosaur too—and not only that, she was his beloved great aunt. She was dressed, now, in the manner of humans. She wore a black bonnet with lacy white trim. Her pale green dinosaur's face peeked out at him. In her hands, she held a photograph of herself torn out of a children's history book.

“Look at that altar,” she said, taking his arm. “You will see your two daughters.” And he did: he saw one hanging from gallows, the other tied to a wheel. “You see,” said his great aunt. “That would have happened to them, if they had lived. The innocent children.” Her eyes misted over. They stood there for a long time.

The old dinosaur flew home—this was difficult, as he was trembling—and as soon as he got through the window he kneeled on the hard, wooden floor. “I have seen mercy,” he thought. He could not think of anything to do besides think about mercy. On the third day, he lay down and died.

He was the last dinosaur. My story is done.

Pink Horse Tale

A long time ago, I was very poor and often traded my body for cigarettes, Chelada, or food (these are listed in order of preference).

I had two children—both daughters—and together we lived in a motel on the coast. It was a knotty-pine kitchenette cabin, and had come furnished with a teapot, a few chipped flowered plates, some utensils, and bedding. The cabin overlooked a paved parking lot and beyond it, the beach.

If a man came to visit, I sent my youngest girl out to find driftwood and starfish and shells. (Her sister went to elementary school, so often was gone.) There was no market for these trinkets among the occasional tourists, but they were precious to my young girls, truly their only possessions. We carefully washed them and kept them along the edge of the porch rail outside, and on the white windowsills inside, which otherwise were totally bare, apart from a pink horse my youngest had found in the woods.

That pink horse, how she loved it.

Once, when she had gone a long way to gather her treasures—all the way through a natural tunnel that had grown inside the cliff, which led to a narrow beach that would trap you and kill you if you were stuck there during high tide—an old woman with pink hair approached her and sang her a song.

My daughter told me about this old woman. I almost didn't believe her. Later that week, the girl brought home a sea urchin, closed. She said that when the sea urchin opened, the old woman would return and on top of that, the old woman had promised to bring us good luck at that time.

I got an empty jar from the cupboard—a nice jar that had once been full of beach plum jelly but had long been gathering dust. My daughter and I walked down to the edge of the ocean and filled the jar with salt water. Back home, we placed the closed sea urchin carefully inside the jar. It quickly sunk, and stayed closed.

The next morning, my littlest girl didn't wake up. The sea urchin had bloomed.