Greuelmärchen

“Listen: there was a girl's head hanging in the leaves of the tree.”

“Why?”

“She had a voice hidden in her tummy.”

The girl,pitted against the walls in the room,was waiting to burst her seams. To split

into a fully-grown bean in her mother's stewpot.

The little boys, to whom her ma told stories, her hands moving swiftly

between their mouths and the plate of rice and dal, dis-membered dissolved

Their little fingers and toes smeared in mustard oil, salt and a pinch of turmeric. Sizzling like pink onions on the skillet. Curried and adorning the girl's own plate of steaming jasmine-white rice.

Girl, you're worse than a rakshushi, Even the ones in your ma's stories wouldn't eat their own flesh and blood.

Her brothers' cooked limbs crushed into dust within her teeth, the white spaces between the letters in the accounts of Buddha leaving his wife in her sixth-grade history text-book : what did he feast on the night before?

Once again her ma had allowed her brothers third helpings

There would be no seconds for the girl. Once again.

And not even the first for her ma.

“Listen: there was a girl's head hanging in the leaves of the tree.”

“Why?”

“She had a voice hidden in her tummy.”