Sculptor's Daughter by Tove Jansson Page A

Crows’ legs are very thin.Human beings don’t realise how thin they can be. She flapped her wings and screeched, but this time she was screeching naturally and not just to attract Daddy’s attention.
    Then she died and was buried. Daddy said nothing. I went and sat behind the cellar and worked out a funeral elegy. It went like this: Ah! little crow, how short was your life! Over for you is all trouble and strife! There in your breast struck the life-taking shot, Ending for ever your terrestrial lot. Now you may sit on some far-distant star, White as a swan – oh! I pray that you are! Sunset now glows, the horizon’s all gold, Eider and swallow her rays bright enfold, Bullfinch and eagle, but not little crow – silent she lies in her grave here below! See where the full moon looks down from on high, Peaceful and calm on the spot where you lie!
    I heard Daddy say to Mummy that it was a talented bit of poetry. Perhaps my poem has helped him to grieve less. If it hasn’t, then the crow’s ghost will haunt me until I die. Who cares, anyway? I was the one who won!
    And another thing. Daddy doesn’t love flies. Is there such a big difference between crows and flies? Both fly. Both are greyish-black. Both have children, flies quite obviously. They sit on top of each other and carry on just like the canaries and make lots and lots of babies all the time. But Daddy doesn’t like them and just wants to kill them. He catches them in a net and when the net is full and thereare about six million innocent flies in it crawling around and crying for help he ties the top of the bag and drops it into boiling water. How
can
he!
    I walk two miles as far as the village before I let the flies out. Otherwise they would be drowned in boiling water. I wonder whether they like flies in the village? I’m the only one who takes pity on them and no one will help me save them. I asked Alan, who is a temporary visitor for the summer. Don’t be silly, he said. You know that I only bother about animals after they’re dead. I bury them.
    Well, I said, how about flies when they are dead? Do you put each of them in a separate grave or all in the same one? But he just stared at me and said again: you’re silly.
    Alan has five graveyards full of crosses and he collects corpses all day long and everybody is fed up with him.
    The only person who helps him is Fanny. She’s good at finding corpses and lines them up on the steps every morning. A row of pretty pebbles, a row of shells and a row of corpses.
    Alan doesn’t dare learn to swim and he can’t play games. He’ll be going away soon, which is a jolly good thing. A funeral is interesting every now and then, but not the whole time.
    In any case I shall visit his graveyards sometimes in the evening and sing a hymn or recite my funeral elegy; one should always maintain tradition, Daddy says.

The Spinster Who Had An Idea
    W EEK AFTER WEEK SHE SAT making steps with cement outside Old Charlie’s little house. But it was very slow work. They had to be terribly pretty and unlike any other steps in the whole world. They were to be her present to us for being allowed to live in our attic.
    She woke up earlier and earlier in the morning. We heard her squeaking terribly slowly down the stairs because she was so afraid of waking us up. Then she started moving her buckets and her stones outside the veranda just as slowly, and occasionally we heard a little clanking sound and then a scraping noise and a thud and a splash and in the end we were wide awake and lay waiting for the next cautious movement.
    Sometimes she creaked across the veranda to fetch something she had forgotten and opened thedoor, put her fingers to her lips and whispered: sleep soundly, ssh! Don’t worry about me. And then she smiled sadly and secretively. She was tall and thin and had anxious eyes set close together and she had reached that certain age. What exactly that certain