The Curiosities by Tessa Gratton & Maggie Stiefvater & Brenna Yovanoff

Author:Tessa Gratton & Maggie Stiefvater & Brenna Yovanoff
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780761375272
Publisher: Carolrhoda Books
Published: 2011-12-31T13:30:00+00:00

Back

Back

Back

Back

Back

Back

Back

CUT

by Brenna Yovanoff

I don’t know how to write a story like this. All interlocking pieces and spirals of narrative moving around and around to somehow make a cohesive whole. Every once in a while I try and then end up lying on my floor, staring at the ceiling. —Tessa

Snow White is a story I’ve never quite come to terms with. It bothered me a lot as a child (did I mention that I was a slightly neurotic child?), and I couldn’t really get a handle on the stepmother, because she was always two different people: the aging beauty, destroyed by her own vanishing youth, and the evil witch, lashing out, bent on destruction. It seemed like different versions of the same story, playing out in different ways, and this is kind of the same thing. —Brenna

My mother cut my heart out and put it in a box.

If this was a story, that’s how it would end.

It would begin with snow and the tragic, impersonal death of a young trophy wife and fade into a montage of the replacement bride, how she drenched her hair with honey and washed her face with milk.

That part’s true.

When my father remarried, the woman was unapologetically vain. She spent hours in front of the mirror, looking all alabaster and perfect. On Wednesdays and Saturdays she went downtown to the day spa, where they shaped her fingernails and peeled the top layer of her skin off with various kinds of acid.

I stayed home and dyed my hair. I caked my face with powder and drew black lines around my eyes to show everyone the difference between us, that I wasn’t like her, that she wasn’t really my mother. She kept buying me dresses in pink and turquoise and acting like we could be best friends.

Let me start again. My father’s wife had my heart cut out. She put it in a box.

The secret is that it wasn’t really my heart. Her slim gigolo boyfriend took me out to the Presidio, where the salt wind blew in off the sea. He touched my face and breathed licorice and aftershave on me, which made me want to scream. Then he bought a pound of lamb’s heart from a butcher in Greek Town and took it home to her. He told her he loved her. He told her that the dense, membranous muscle belonged to me.

Okay, that last part was a lie. Can you tell that I’m lying? My stepmother doesn’t have a boyfriend. But if she did, he’d be young, with wavy hair and bad shoes. He’d be the kind of guy who knows where to buy organ meat in primarily ethnic neighborhoods.

This is more like it: my obscenely vain stepmother put on her fifty-dollar Dior eye shadow and her Manolo Blahnik pumps and reached for her Gaultier clutch. She cut her own heart out and dipped it in lead or mercury—one of those metals that poisons you and makes you go crazy. She fed it to me in sly, careful moments, in pieces, so that I would be like her.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.