Took by Mary Downing Hahn

Author:Mary Downing Hahn
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

In Auntie’s Cabin

The old woman watches the boy lead Selene away. She chuckles to herself. She can see Selene, but Selene can’t see her no more. The boy will take her down the hill to the farm. They’ll keep her there until she dies, which won’t be long, a few days, a week maybe. It’s what happens when they go back to their time. Makes no difference to Auntie. She’s got herself a new girl now.

Trouble is, the girl ain’t quite up to the work. You’d think she’d never tended a fire or swept a floor or cooked a meal or scrubbed a pot. She acts like she never seen a washtub. She don’t know how to make soap or candles or sew a seam. Out in the garden she pulls up more vegetables than weeds. She can’t tell an onion from a beet. She’s scairt of spiders and anything else that crawls on floors or scurries across walls or hides in the firewood.

What can Auntie do with such a stupid, lazy girl but scold her and beat her and shut her up in the hidey-hole under the cabin floor.

When she can’t stand it no longer, Auntie brings in Bloody Bones and tells the girl he eats bad children like her. The girl cries and shakes with fear at the sight of Auntie’s dear boy. He rears up over her, taller than most men. Why, his head bumps the ceiling.

He clacks his teeth and rattles his bones. He makes the girl look into the dark eyeholes in his skull, which is like looking into a bottomless hole, blacker than the blackest night. The girl curls up into a ball like a baby that don’t want to be birthed.

After Auntie sends her dear boy outside, the girl tells the old woman she’s doing her best, but that ain’t good enough, is it? She cries and promises to do better. But she keeps on dropping things and spilling things and breaking things like that’s all she’s good for.

What Auntie needs is a servant who does everything she’s told and never gets tired or needs to be fed. She’d give just about anything to have herself one of them.

She reminds herself she’s had the girl for only a few days. Maybe she’ll catch on if Auntie beats her harder and locks her up in the hidey-hole more often and threatens to give her to Bloody Bones for his supper.

In the meantime, she better not catch that boy snooping around the cabin again. Or that pitiful Selene either.

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