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The giants sprinkled the trees here to guard us from the outside world, Little One.
Even though I am beautiful, Little One, people don’t trust women who have bad teeth.
Mama explained to me that a house didn’t mean bricks, four walls and a roof. A house meant something in our hearts and people without them were called strays. They were the lost ones.
‘I’ve never understood why mamas are expected to be perfect,’ she said. ‘Men are forever thought of as boys. But girls? Once we’re mamas or once we’re ripe, we can never be girls again. Not in their eyes. But we are always girls and daughters, underneath. Always.’
‘The devil looks as ordinary as you and me.’
wondered if this was what being a real human was: accepting you were pieces of other people too. The people you loved and the people you hurt.
I felt ancient, like a long-forgotten standing stone or a language no longer spoken. As old as hills, as old as water, and as old as the beginning itself. Soon enough, the landscape would shift, the beck becoming a stream and the stream becoming a river. Then, one day, hot and bothered, this earth would become an ocean and forget all about us.
