March 2023

March 2023

There’s a story of an old man carving himself a son, my girl tells me, and that is fatherhood: a man at his desk shaping the future with a knife.

The girl is not a father, she’s working with a paintbrush, with little strokes. She’s painting signs of life and death. She’s not making a child, but a wooden dice set, testing the rolls to see the many futures, the ends of every story.

There’s a story about a girl small as a thimble, who slept in half a walnut shell and a swallow who carries her to a new flower with a fairy prince.

There’s a story I’ve been told about a girl who lives in a tall dark tower—trapped there by an evil mother and rescued by a prince. That’s the whole of it, the human story. Skips past everything to the mortal drama of building walls and feeling safe or sorry on either side of them.

If I were telling one I’d start with spring, the hopeful flowers budding on the winter bare branches and the day they all unfold. The day the trees let down their hair.

And I, the tower, wish I had ankles. And I, the tower, wish I were dancing. And I, the tower, steady against the spinning rolling tossed round ground. That is the story.

But all this nonsense, of the girl and her drama: The girl who was never trapped here. The girl came limping home. The girl wove us willow crowns. The girl jarred the honey. The girl tucked us in for bedtime stories and asked please, please, please, for never.

She is busy. She is trying to tell the many futures, but only the happy ones, and so the girl is often wrong.

Please, please, please,

the apple house