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Posts Tagged ‘James and the Giant Peach’

By page twenty, things
have not gotten better.
Vivian clenches into my ribs.
She does not seem to breath,
as if her silence might help
the young boy with the two
evil aunts who beat him,
rebuke him, and lock him up.
Finn, curled into my other side,
twists at the hem of his blue and gray
flannel pajamas and fidgets
with a pillow’s edge. We are all
hoping for something miraculous
to happen, and soon. Something wonderful.
Something to stop all this
sinking we’re feeling. By page twenty-six,
things are still not better
and it is long past bedtime
and I cannot stop reading
until there is something brighter
to end the night. I can feel in this
chapter of dulled hatchets
and threats, how I want to offer
my boy and my girl
not just happily ever after,
but happily now. Though I also feel
how even this now, with the boy in the book
tripping and spilling all of his magic
into the ground and the aunts hurling “wretched” at him,
and “miserable” and “twerp,”
there is something here more than
happy, something that straddles
real and unreal, the three of us curled so closely
into each other, so warm and still
trembling at the edge of despair.
It is like that feeling of falling
right before sleep, and you don’t know
where you will land, or when,
are you really falling? could it hurt?
only this time we’re falling together.

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