elaborate and gruesome. Truly, if I ever turn out to be a murderer or something, the newspapers can pretty much say, She didn’t have a chance to be normal. Her family twisted her from the day she was born. Because what bedtime stories to tell little kids! They’re full of corpses and devils and infestations, unnatural things hatching from your breakfast eggs, and the sounds of bones splintering. I thought everyone was like this, that every family had their secret haruspex uncles, their ventriloquist Resistance fighters, their biting puppets. A normal bedtime, Deda would conclude with something like, ‘And Baba Yaga has been hunting me ever since,’ and then cock his head to listen at the window. ‘That doesn’t sound like claws on the roof, does it, Podivná? Well, it’s probably just crows. Good night.’ And then he’d kiss me and click out the light, leaving me to fall asleep to the imagined scrape of a child-eating witch scaling the roof.
And I wouldn’t have it any other way. I mean, who would I be if I’d been raised on milquetoast bedtime stories and not forced to dust the glass prison of a psychotic undead fox Cossack? I shudder to think.
I might wear lace collars and laugh flower petals and pearls. People might try to pat me. I see them think it. My height triggers the puppy-kitten reflex – Must touch – and I’ve found that since you can’t electrify yourself like a fence, the next best thing is to have murderer’s eyes.
The point is, I wouldn’t be ‘rabid fairy,’ which is Karou’s nickname for me, or ‘Podivná,’ either, which is Deda’s. It’s for mucholapka podivná , or Venus flytrap, in honor of my ‘quiet bloodthirst’ and ‘patient cunning’ in my lifelong war with Tomas.
Anyone with an older brother can tell you: Cunning is required. Even if you’re not miniature like me – four foot eleven in a good mood, as little as four foot eight when in despair, which is way too often lately – morphology is on the side of brothers. They’re bigger. Their fists are heavier. Physically, we don’t stand a chance. Hence the evolution of ‘little-sister brain.’
Artful, conniving, pitiless. No doubt about it, being a little sister – emphasis on little – has been formative, though I take pride in knowing that Tomas is more scarred by years of tangling with me than vice versa. But more than anyone or anything else, it’s Deda who is responsible for the landscape of my mind, the mood and scenery, the spires and shadows. When I think about kids (which isn’t often, except to wish them elsewhere and stop just short of deploying them hence with my foot), the main reason I would consider… begetting any (in a theoretical sense, in the far-distant future) is so that I can practice upon small, developing brains the same degree of mind-molding my grandfather has practiced on us.
I want to terrify little kids, too! I want to build spires in their minds and dance shadows through like marionettes, chased by whispers and hints of the unspeakable.
I want to torture future generations with the Puppet That Bites.
‘He asked it how and when he was going to die,’ I told Karou.
‘And what did it say?’ She seemed freaked out, which maybe I should have questioned, because though we’d only been friends for a few months and I knew next to nothing about her, it was clear she was a cool cucumber. The puppet’s a pretty horrible specimen, though, and the storm was loud, the candlelight pale.
The stage was set.
‘It opened its bare-bone jaws,’ I said, mustering my full theatricality, ‘and in a voice like dead leaves blowing down an empty street, it told him, though it had no way of knowing his name, You will die, Karel Novak…WHEN I KILL YOU! ’
At that moment, Tomas bumped the glass case so that the puppet seemed to jump, and Karou gasped, and then laughed and punched him in the arm.
‘You two are terrible,’ she said, and that should have been the end of it. That was the
And I wouldn’t have it any other way. I mean, who would I be if I’d been raised on milquetoast bedtime stories and not forced to dust the glass prison of a psychotic undead fox Cossack? I shudder to think.
I might wear lace collars and laugh flower petals and pearls. People might try to pat me. I see them think it. My height triggers the puppy-kitten reflex – Must touch – and I’ve found that since you can’t electrify yourself like a fence, the next best thing is to have murderer’s eyes.
The point is, I wouldn’t be ‘rabid fairy,’ which is Karou’s nickname for me, or ‘Podivná,’ either, which is Deda’s. It’s for mucholapka podivná , or Venus flytrap, in honor of my ‘quiet bloodthirst’ and ‘patient cunning’ in my lifelong war with Tomas.
Anyone with an older brother can tell you: Cunning is required. Even if you’re not miniature like me – four foot eleven in a good mood, as little as four foot eight when in despair, which is way too often lately – morphology is on the side of brothers. They’re bigger. Their fists are heavier. Physically, we don’t stand a chance. Hence the evolution of ‘little-sister brain.’
Artful, conniving, pitiless. No doubt about it, being a little sister – emphasis on little – has been formative, though I take pride in knowing that Tomas is more scarred by years of tangling with me than vice versa. But more than anyone or anything else, it’s Deda who is responsible for the landscape of my mind, the mood and scenery, the spires and shadows. When I think about kids (which isn’t often, except to wish them elsewhere and stop just short of deploying them hence with my foot), the main reason I would consider… begetting any (in a theoretical sense, in the far-distant future) is so that I can practice upon small, developing brains the same degree of mind-molding my grandfather has practiced on us.
I want to terrify little kids, too! I want to build spires in their minds and dance shadows through like marionettes, chased by whispers and hints of the unspeakable.
I want to torture future generations with the Puppet That Bites.
‘He asked it how and when he was going to die,’ I told Karou.
‘And what did it say?’ She seemed freaked out, which maybe I should have questioned, because though we’d only been friends for a few months and I knew next to nothing about her, it was clear she was a cool cucumber. The puppet’s a pretty horrible specimen, though, and the storm was loud, the candlelight pale.
The stage was set.
‘It opened its bare-bone jaws,’ I said, mustering my full theatricality, ‘and in a voice like dead leaves blowing down an empty street, it told him, though it had no way of knowing his name, You will die, Karel Novak…WHEN I KILL YOU! ’
At that moment, Tomas bumped the glass case so that the puppet seemed to jump, and Karou gasped, and then laughed and punched him in the arm.
‘You two are terrible,’ she said, and that should have been the end of it. That was the
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