The Girl With Glass Feet by Ali Shaw

Author:Ali Shaw [Shaw, Ali]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Romance, Literature, Magic, Contemporary, Fiction, Literary, Fantasy, Man-Woman Relationships, Metamorphosis, General
ISBN: 9780312680459
Google: nLQ-cAAACAAJ
Amazon: 0312680457
Barnesnoble: 0312680457
Publisher: Picador
Published: 2011-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

While Midas did his dishes, Ida was huddled in a chair in the centre of Carl Maulsen’s lawn, the cottage to her back and the woods beginning abruptly at the top of the slope where the garden ended. Carl had no flowerbeds, no tended bushes, just hacked growth and a glade of mowed turf in the summer. That was invisible now, buried under two inches of snow that had creaked like floorboards when she laboured across it with her crutch and the chair. The snow was as stiff as the rest of St Hauda’s Land. The awkward bending of branches in the wind, the brittle leaves that broke like ancient parchments. Even a falcon she had watched fly without grace, with mechanical beats of its wings. As if that was the way of these islands, to seize things up, to weather away their vitality.

That was what the place was doing to her.

It was good to get outside. She would rather feel cold in her body than in her heart. She lifted hot tomato soup in a thermos mug to her lips, enjoying its sour steam inside her nostrils. She’d put on scarlet woollen mittens and scarf to fight the island’s blacks and whites. But that was the story of this place and its people, as stilted and monochrome as sets and stars of pre-colour TV. Take Midas: what made a person rigid in every way? Years had made her mum rigid. Religion had done it to her dad. She remembered the only time she’d seen him cry, on the night before their relationship morphed from that of father and daughter to that of courteous housemates. He’d caught her in bed with Josiah, a South African exchange student staying in the house for a month (a tenure cut short by that incident), but the crying the night before came about when her dad, who’d been edgy for weeks leading up to Josiah’s arrival, tried to address him in Afrikaans. He’d been learning Afrikaans for three years and she had no reason to believe him anything less than accomplished. Then when he cleared his throat at the dinner table to address Josiah he met a blank stare. He took it with blushing grace, although as she spied on him later (when he thought he was alone unnoticed in their garden of dusty dandelion clocks) she saw him cry. Slow-worm tears as he held a half-blown dandelion clock to his heart. That was rigidity like Midas’s.

In a sudden flush of anger she dashed her tomato soup across the garden. She watched the red arc sink through the snow like a healing burn. A flash again of Dad. His craggy face turned childishly awestruck while he took communion. And seeing him pray with the stain of the budget sacrament wine on his bottom lip, crossing himself over and over. When he opened his eyes the first thing they had tearfully fixed on was her.

Midas had said he hoped his father would be in hell. He had described his character and told her about recollections from his childhood.

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