Once upon a time
when you were eight, it was the Complete Brothers Grimm
you turned to in lonely hours, that silver tome
of grisly parables—toes chopped off for vanity, eyes pecked out
for evil or maybe lazy crow-culling—the answer
to questions you hadn’t uncovered yet. Like this one,
The Robber Bridegroom: girl meets man, falls
over herself loving him, the oldest story until
she walks the ash-path to his house. Sees him drag
another woman in, fill her with every color
of wine, which caused her heart to break (the victim’s,
you thought, though the pronouns didn’t tell); sees him
strip the dead girl, dice and salt her. In the end
he’s caught as always. You could find the page
by touch, predicting the knife, the fragmented flesh
before the covers parted, once upon a time
or every week for a year. What you were looking for
lay in the shredded brocade, the wine, the seasoned pieces
of that stranger’s body the same sand-white
as your own; you never questioned this,
just as you never asked how the bridegroom found
his morsel on the side to begin with. Now you listen
firsthand to other women’s stories of drink, bared skin,
tears, not sifting the words for what shudders
at their heart, swollen with soured pleasure, bursting.
* Kelly Kanayama grew up in Honolulu
and lives in Norwich. She is a writer, editor, English tutor and
occasional dance teacher.
