Wednesday, August 19, 2009

Gets her karma with a catch

Once there was a girl, and this girl wasn't pretty, but she was very attractive. She was excellent at maths and liked to birdwatch, and every evening at six o'clock she would cry out her woes and store the tears in a glass jar. She had never touched a telephone in her life, and she lived alone. Every fortnight she would write letters to each of her forty three pen pals, in alphabetical order. She preferred jam over marmalade on her toast, but if she ran out of jam, and it was Tuesday, Thursday, or Saturday, she would have to have marmalade (she can only go to the store on odd days, you see). She had a tiny pewter box with a tiny lock, and she kept the tiny key on a chain around her neck. She wrote down her thoughts and secrets in tiny handwriting on tiny rose-scented sheets of paper and put them in the box.
She owned only one dress, and every Sunday she would tie up her hair and put on her dress and walk down the street with a bottle of whisky. She took this whisky to a man whose name I cannot mention, and they both drank equal amounts until they were equally drunk. They made love on his wooden floor, and after she would put back on her dress, and tie up her hair again, and walk home. By this time it was six o'clock, and the girl would cry out her woeful sins, filling up the jar. She would take the jar into her garden, and pour the contents onto the roots of a single apple tree. Then she would write down all the sinful secrets and thoughts in tiny handwriting onto tiny sheets of rose-scented paper and put them in the box, filling it up. She burnt the secrets and thoughts and collected up the ashes in the tiny pewter box. She took the box to the garden, and would tip the ashes at the root of her apple tree.
Here she would pick an apple and eat it, and die.

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