- i felt a lot like alice that day, exploring a new world in which nothing quite made sense. piglet and i wandered past a disheveled herb garden, and overgrown bed of rosebushes, and a broken old gazebo, all the way down the length of the lawn to the point at which the garden ended and the forest began.
- the darkness beyond the window was vast and deep, nothing like the hazy gray of london at night. this sky belongs in my book of fairy tales, i thought. an evil queen's black velvet cloak, embroidered with diamonds...
- somehow, it felt as if every day was sunday. i spent hours reading on a blanket in the garden, in the shade of a huge sycamore tree. i read the same books over and over again -- alice's adventures in wonderland, the secret garden, the wind in the willows, my fairy tales ... these were the books of my childhood. they were familiar, safe. i knew how they ended.
- i looked at her and, when my eyes eventually focused, i saw that she was much younger than i had first thought. her hair was wild and her nails were dirty -- but she wasn't an old woman at all. she couldn't have been much older than mama, in fact. and she was strangely beautiful. her skin was ghostly pale. her eyes shone brightly in the firelight. she looked more like a forgotten, fairy-tale princess than a wicked witch.
- there was another burst of song from the nightingale, and the woods seemed to fill with a beautiful silver light. it was as if the stars had fallen into the forest, or the forest has risen up to the stars.
- as she sat in the darkness, with her fragile, white face illuminated by the moon and the faint glow of the fire, and her torn woolen wings folded around her, i thought it was a name that suited her perfectly. _moth, the forgotten princess, banished to the dark forest ...
aug 6 2019 ∞
sep 7 2019 +