26

 26

NO ONE CAME, ONLY THE MICE.

Mice have little girls’ faces, and little girls have faces like mice. Mice are running under the leaves, the floor of the hut is a tingling spine, the white moon is a snowy line. Their bare paws make her flesh creep, resembling as they do the minuscule hands of a newborn.

She summons them with the last crumbs of her sandwich, touches their fur with a finger. “Your plaits look like rats’ tails,” her grandmother would say. “Come and eat something nice. Beans make your hair thick; best of all is an egg yolk. Just think, it can come alive! If you put blood and heat on it, it turns into a chick.”

Silvia stopped drinking milk and eating eggs when she grew up.

And now a child has given her something to eat. It’s all backward.

The leaves are coming down from the trees, and between the fallen leaves the mice watch her with black eyes, shiny black beads. Pinheads. Suddenly they run. An owl must have flown by. Their fear courses through Silvia, as if she’s touched an electric fence.

Marilena the girl slowly approaches, curls rounding the contours of her colorless face. They’re natural but they look perfectly formed, as if with a curling iron. The nuns couldn’t tolerate them.

At boarding school, she and Silvia read Grimm’s Fairy Tales and recognized themselves in the stories of dysfunctional families where mothers might be lost or cruel, fathers useless, and your brothers and sisters your only security. Silvia and Marilena didn’t even have those, but they decided to be each other’s sister. In fairy tales especially, the dead were alive: their bones sang and could be used as keys. You came and went from the world below. All you had to do was go down a well, walk for a long time, and plump up the pillows and mattress of a witch. Their favorite fairy tale was “The Juniper Tree” because the heroine’s name was Marilena, a coincidence that made her tremble with emotion.

The little girl stops in front of Silvia, hands clasped behind her, and starts reciting in the monotone they were meant to use for poems about the Madonna and the angels:

My mother she killed me, my father he ate me

My sister Marilena collected my bones.

In a silk scarf she bound them

In a ditch she laid them,

There where the juniper grows.

Tweet tweet! What a beautiful bird is here!

Tweet tweet! What a beautiful bird is here!