We Have Always Lived in the Castle

by Shirley Jackson

I remember that I stood on the library steps holding my books and looking for a minute at the soft hinted green in the branches against the sky and wishing, as I always did, that I could walk home across the sky instead of through the village.

and I made a rule for myself: Never think anything more than once, and I put my hands quietly in my lap. I am living on the moon, I told myself, I have a little house all by myself on the moon.

I was pretending that I did not speak their language; on the moon we spoke a soft, liquid tongue, and sang in the starlight, looking down on the dead dried world;

“Can’t you make them stop?” I asked her that day, wondering if there was anything in this woman I could speak to, if she had ever run joyfully over grass, or had watched flowers, or known delight or love.

“It could be said that there is danger everywhere,” Uncle Julian said. “Danger of poison, certainly. My niece can tell you of the most unlikely perils—garden plants more deadly than snakes and simple herbs that slash like knives through the lining of your belly, madam. My niece—”

Or consider just the mushroom family, rich as that is in tradition and deception.

All the omens spoke of change.

“If I had a winged horse I could fly him to the moon; he would be more comfortable there.”

but the air of change was so strong that there was no avoiding it; change lay over the stairs and the kitchen and the garden like fog.

I sat very quietly, listening to what she had almost said. Time was running shorter, tightening around our house, crushing me. I thought it might be time to smash the big mirror in the hall, but

the soft notes falling into the air like petals.

“I am thinking that we are on the moon, but it is not quite as I supposed it would be.”