Tales from the Down Under: #11- The Doll House

The gust exerts its full force and crackles mercilessly the frail windowpane, well-secured from the impervious inclemency, the owner of the room quibbles with a trifle cold. A dismal day reminds me of some Impressionist painting- blurry, sombre, patchy, with smudges of blue there and grey here. An indisposed state evokes the childhood memory of incessant bedridden days, in which the vapid image shows its rays of hope with the installation of the sickly heifer’s mom. Story after story the mother tried to invoke, her incantation even more alluring than the Magical Flute, and image after image those stories played up before that heifer, with snots ceaselessly dropping into her wide-opened mouth.

My mom loved to read me stories when I was young. However, while most of my childhood memories are recklessly blocked out, it is often those unfestive moments that I remember the most. The bedtime stories that still retain their vividness are those I used to digest when I was overcome with a fever, or just a nagging blocked nose. There was the children’s version of Dickens’ Haunted House, Lindgren’s young adult fiction of a boneheaded girl who dreams of adopting Mary Poppins’ antics or some others about gnomes who beg, snowman who walks, gingerbread man who weeps.

As those stories unfolded before me, it was only a matter of time before finally realizing how a fairy tale is never only about fairy, nor is the fairy a traditionally good fairy. Pitfalls and hazards those stories are muddied with. The narrators cannot be more insouciant when any poor character is meddled in a hot water. The binary thinking seems prematurely consolidated in a child’s mind. It is like asking about how one dough adding one dough will equal to and one toddler proffers his answer peremptorily: two! Following by waves of cloying praises.

So I answered promptly bad if someone asked what the reverse of good is. I had already felt myself worming into the hazardous society when I couldn’t even perform a proper human interaction. I knew some unfortunate kids who slid before they learned to walk, and still now their legs are handicapped. Those varying children books are unblamable though, they are merely recording the memories that are trenched in our minds.