Free How a Mother Weaned Her Girl from Fairy Tales by KATE BERNHEIMER Page B

the cardboard. Then you are safe. If the witch seesyou in there, she will think you’re a witch. Also, the nails will change color along with the seasons and this will hide you from everyone else.

    I did as she told me; I made the small house. This was one night, when the witch slept. Then I carried it carefully into the woods and set it down on the ground. I became small, I crawled inside, and then I hammered and hammered.

    I’m still in here now, but it is cold and I am so lonely, even though crows visit the house and poke it with beaks. Sometimes they tip us right over—me and the house—and the nails stick in the ground and the fake bird legs poke up and only a hard wind will get us upright once again.

    I don’t really want to be found, but the problem with that is the complete solitude. When I had my sister, she told me great stories—now I only have fragments of those that I can even remember; I am very old now and do not have a good brain.

    When I was still young, my sister would come from her bedroom in a pink nightgown and slippers—running into my room in the dark, with a flashlight. She’d perch on the edge of my bed with a big blue book of the witch’s, the only book in the house, but she never read any words. She turned the pages and she recited, but I knew she said things the book itself never said, things about ukuleles and pirates and donkeys. She said, Brother, once upon a time there was a glittering and beautiful place full of pirates and donkeys and monkeys! Brother, once upon a time there was a land of card decks and sugar and saddles! The book’s real words were not very good. I can’t bear to say them; they were all very bad. Okay, I’ll say one. It was cock —and the cock had a tail. It was cocktail. You know what I’m talking about.

    So I don’t read anymore, in my house made of nails. The paper would make too much noise and someone wicked might find me. Still, at least I’d have company then—did I mention that it’s lonely in here? Did I tell you this house is too heavy for words?

The Librarian’s Tale
    As the town librarian, I don’t have many opportunities for social contact—unless you count books. I live in a secret compartment behind the front desk: if you pull out the first volume of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women series, the entire wall swings completely wide open—and there’s my apartment.

    The apartment has just enough room for what one human might need: a wooden table with one wooden chair, a single mattress with a thin coverlet, and a one-burner stove. Teakettle, slippers, and candles.

    I store all the food I need in the crate on the front stoop of the library, which used to be for returned books (no one comes to the library anymore, so I tuck my bread and cheese inside of the crate, wrapped in a kerchief). In summer I will leave a jar of water in there overnight; cools it off, which is nice. In the morning I sit on the stoop and sip from the jar as I watch the sun come up in the sky—it rises above the church across the road. (Behind the church is a hill that is good for moongazing.) When the sun is up, I take the skeleton key and pretend to use it to open the library door. This is in case anyone driving by happens to look: they will think that I am just then arriving to work.

    No one knows that I sleep in the library—not even my mother, Professor Helen C. Andersen, who lives down the road. She thinks I live all the way over the hill toward the next town, in a small trailer she purchased for me and my sister and three elderly goats.

    It is not that I don’t like the trailer; I love it! It’s a wonderful trailer: metal, with the sweetest casement windows you ever did see, and an awning with a picnic table underneath it. There’s a tree swing under an elm near the barn. But when my sister died, I felt so sorry for those three elderly goats. They missed her a