Poetry from The Literary Review
Fairy Tale
Cathleen Calbert
|
Everyone knows who the witch is. We’ve seen her dropping her kids off at daycare. She’s the anesthesiologist who hires a British au pair. She’s the teacher who gave you a D. She’s the woman who isn’t smiling. A lovely young thing into cigarettes and barbiturates failed at suburban housewifery. Her children ran off with their grandmother. Her husband swam in his own pool of gin. Their cottage creaked open like a Cape Cod beach shack. It moaned, “Love me, love me,” on summer mornings. In the winter, it stayed in a trance. The witch is mad. She’s fruit-loops. She’s ding-dong nuts. Besides, she’s not the brightest bulb in our poetic chandelier. She can’t remember anything. She’s been alone too long in her red nightie. In the old days, she bedded the milkman, the mailman, the guy from ups. Witches drive men crazy. Then witches drive men crazy. “Love me, love me,” on summer mornings. In the winter, a trance. She’s grown lonely as a flasher, as a sheep rancher, as an underpaid parlor maid. She has been dreaming of the flashy disappearances of sister-witches, how they clawed their way to that moon. She types out her own death warrant: A boy and a girl, brother and sister, two pumpkin seeds, jog into the forest with seven finger-puppets, a bottle of their father’s homebrew, and a number of questions. Little Ingrid and Petrovich punch each other’s stomachs with the puppets sewn by their put-upon stepmother. They throw their golden bottle through the witch’s window though no glass shatters. There is no glass. The damn bottle lands in her lap. Petrovich pokes his head in. Mr. Inquisitor. The witch is lean as an ex-model, her smoky growl theatrical. She takes him into her starving arms and calls him Little Richard, sweet gherkin, my final folly. She diddles his pizzle and asks him to rock away on top of her, a boat lost at sea. He does what he’s told. He’s a good boy. He plants his seed. Yet her uterus is blessed with emptiness. There’s no way around this. She’s in her forties. She writes fourteen poems for him when he leaves her to sleep off the beer buzz. The witch tongues another Valium, ocean eyes on the moon. “I’m a circus freak,” she says. “God’s little Jesus.” “Love me, love me,” Ingrid pipes up, taking her turn. “Love me, love, me,” the witch moans into her cold soup. Ingrid nestles into her neck until the witch cuddles the girl, feeling the matching fingertips, mother-of-pearl rosary, and ruby nipples, then finds the peach-divide of her daughter’s body, and eats the child out of the woman, her rival, her devotee, her replacement. |
