Wicked: Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West (Wicked Years) by Gregory Maguire

Author:Gregory Maguire
Language: eng
Format: azw3, mobi, epub, pdf
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2019-09-26T16:00:00+00:00

The Quadling Glassblower

F or one short, wet month, early in the next year, the drought lifted. Spring tipped in like green well water, frothing at the hedges, bubbling at the roadside, splashing from the cottage roof in garlands of ivy and stringflower. Melena went about the yard in a state of mild undress, so that she could feel the sun on her pale skin and the deep warmth she had missed all winter. Strapped in her chair in the doorway, Elphaba, now a year and a half old, hit her breakfast minnow with the bowl of her spoon. “Oh, eat the thing, don’t mash it,” said Melena, but mildly. Since the child’s chin-sling had been removed, mother and daughter had begun to pay some attention to each other. To her surprise, Melena sometimes found Elphaba endearing, the way a baby should be.

This view was the only thing she had seen since leaving the elegant mansion of her family, the only thing she would ever gaze upon again—the windswept surface of Illswater, the distant dark stone cottages and chimneys of Rush Margins on the other side, the hills lying in a torpor beyond. She would go mad; the world was nothing but water and want. If a frolic of elves scampered through the yard she would leap on them for company, for sex, for murder.

“You father is a fraud,” she said to Elphaba. “Off finding himself all winter, leaving me with only you for company. Eat that breakfast, for you’ll get no more if you throw it on the ground.”

Elphaba picked up the fish and threw it on the ground.

“Your father is a charlatan,” continued Melena. “He used to be very good in bed for a religious man, and this is how I know his secret. Holy men are supposed to be above earthly pleasures, but your father enjoyed his midnight wrestling. Once upon a time! We must never tell him we know he’s a humbug, it would break his heart. We don’t want to break his heart, do we?” And then Melena burst into a high peal of laughter.

Elphaba’s face was unsmiling, unchanging. She pointed to the fish.

“Breakfast. Breakfast in the dirt. Breakfast for the bugs,” Melena said. She dropped the collar of her spring robe a little lower and the pink yoke of her bare shoulders gyrated. “Shall we go walk by the edge of the lake today and maybe you’ll drown?”

But Elphaba would never drown, never, because she would not go near the lake.

“Maybe we’ll go out in a boat and tip over! ” Melena shrieked.

Elphaba cocked her head to one side as if listening for some part of her mother not intoxicated with leaves and wine.

The sun swept out from behind a cloud. Elphaba scowled. Melena’s robe dropped lower. Her breasts worked their way out from between the dirty ruffles of the collar.

Look at me, thought Melena, showing my breasts to the child I couldn’t give milk to for fear of amputation. I who was the rose

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