Delicate Edible Birds Read Online Free PDF Page A

she’s too young to understand all this Lucky Chow Fun crap? She’s only ten. She’s just a baby. I don’t think she can handle it.”
    My mother stopped washing the mug she was holding and let the hot water run. The steam circled up around her, catching in her frizzy gray hair, spangling it when she turned around. “Lollie,” she said. “I’ll make sure she takes the Ritalin from now on. But nobody in town is going to be able to escape what happened. Not even the kids. It’s better that we tell her the truth before someone else tells her something much worse.”
    â€œWhat’s worse?” I said. “And I don’t think people are made to take truths straight-on, Mom. It’s too hard. You need something to soften them. A metaphor or a story or something. You know.”
    â€œNo,” she said, “I don’t.” She turned off the water with a smack of her hand. “Why don’t you teach me, since you seem to know everything.”
    â€œWell,” I said, but at the moment when we most need these things, they don’t always come to us. I couldn’t remember a word. I opened my mouth and it hung open there, useless. I closed it. I shrugged.
    My mother nodded. “That’s what I thought,” she said, and turned away.
    Â 
    YEARS LATER, I WOULD HAVE HAD the presence of mind to offer the tale “Fitcher’s Bird,” from the Brothers Grimm, tooffer up an allegorical explanation. I would have told my mother how a wizard dressed as a beggar would magically lure little girls into his basket. He’d cart them to his mansion, give them an egg and key, and tell them not to go into the room that the key opened. Then he’d leave, and the little girls would explore the magnificent house, finally falling prey to curiosity and opening the door of the forbidden chamber.
    There, they’d find a huge basin filled with the bloody, dismembered remains of other girls. They’d be so surprised, they’d drop the egg in the vat, and wouldn’t be able to wipe the stain away. When the wizard would come home to find the stained egg, he would dismember the girls and toss their remains into the vat.
    Eventually, he did this to the two eldest girls from one family, and came back for the third daughter. This girl, though, was uncommonly clever. She hid the egg in a safe place and brazenly went into the room, only to find her dismembered sisters in the bloody vat. But instead of panicking, she pulled their severed limbs out and pieced them back together again, and when the parts were reassembled, the girls miraculously came back to life.
    The clever girl hid her sisters in a room to await the wizard, and when he returned and saw she hadn’t bloodied the egg, he decided to marry her. She agreed, but said first that she would send him home with a basketful of gold for her parents. She hid her two sisters in the basket, which he carted home, now a servant of his clever bride. In his absence, the little girl dressed a human skull in flowers and jewels and putit in the attic window. Then she rolled herself in honey and feathers to transform herself into a strange feathered creature, and ran out into the bright day.
    On her way home, she encountered the wizard, who thought she was a wonderful bird and said, “Oh, Fitcher’s feathered bird, where from, where from?”
    To which she responded, “From feathered Fitze Fitcher’s house I’ve come.”
    â€œAnd the young bride there, how does she fare?” he asked, imagining his marriage night, and the soft young body of his wife.
    And she, smiling softly under her down and honey, said, “She’s swept the house all the way through, and from the attic window, she’s staring down at you.”
    When the wizard arrived home to find the skull in the window, he waved at it, thinking it was his bride. When he went inside, the brothers and father of the little