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w i n t e r also been unhappy, and that child still lived in her, lived to choose the elegant, odd, inappropriate things she gave me. Fairy Flowers, I think, represented her ambitions for me—to love beauty, to become a reader, to become educated, to become the artist she hadn’t had the chance to be. The pictures in Fairy Flowers were so powerful that, for the next two years, I struggled through the text, as if that were the fee I had to pay to earn the pictures. I don’t remember my mother reading me the book, but she probably did, or told
me the meaning of words when I asked. The diction was florid, the vocabulary way above our second grade text books. “The Legend Of The Purple Dahlia” described the main character: As his name implies, Monsieur Rosette was a most formal and methodical servitor, precise and punctilious in his duties, which he performed each day….Indeed, he was an exceptional gentleman, a paragon of etiquette, whose only desires and pleasures in life were in the service of his sovereigns. I might have figured out that he was
Object of Life By R.G. Evans The butterfly had loved being a caterpillar, growing fat on tomato leaves, the sun warm as forever on its back. Some days the job is simple: mistake dying for living. Master this, and the next thing you know, you have wings, crave food insubstantial as nectar, feel the pull of migration like gravity pulling along the Y axis. The butterfly forgets how the caterpillar loved the caterpillary life, the way a man forgets that sublimate begins with sublime— it doesn’t end there— as any monarch could tell if it weren’t lost in a black and orange cloud of longing. R.G. Evans's book Overtipping the Ferryman, won the 2013 Aldrich Poetry Prize. His poems, fiction, and reviews have appeared in Rattle, Paterson Literary Review, The Literary Review and Weird Tales, among other places. Evans's original music, including the song "The Crows of Paterson," was featured in the 2012 documentary All That Lies Between Us. Evans teaches Language Arts at Cumberland Regional High School and Creative Writing at Rowan University.
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a good servant, but the line drawing that illustrated the story showed me that he was silly as well as noble, a serious man, admirable yet quaint. The most enthralling illustration was the one for the water lily legend. In it a young woman was floating underwater, naked except for her long hair and a few cleverly placed wave swirls. I’d never seen a naked person in a book before. I stared at the woman’s breasts. According to the words, she was a princess who’d drowned while foolishly clutching gold she’d found at the bottom of the pond, a gift she would give to the prince she loved. Sinking into the mucky floor of the pond, unable to drop the gold or pull her feet free, she’d been transformed into a water lily—the very first water lily. Reading the words, I felt the suck of the mud, the weight of the gold in her hands. Terrifying. The story had a moral, maybe a few of them: 1. Don’t be greedy; 2. Stay close to home; 3. You are not the equal of the prince you love; 4. Expensive gifts and swampy ponds are dangerous. Such plot lines (bad behavior/death/ transformation/lesson) were frequent in the book, though some ended the way “proper” fairy tales did, happily ever after. But the words, the plots were beside the point—Pogany seemed to have his own interpretation of the legends, and the illustrations whispered his version: that perfect servant was an ass, the naked girl wasn’t weighed down with gold—she loved the water, look, her hands were empty, as if yielding to the element that embraced her, luscious blues and greens blending from gentian to palest aqua. She was ecstatic, erotic, full of the joy of her body. And she could breathe under water. Why not? Of course, I wasn’t, at the time, consciously aware of this disjunction between the text and the pictures, but I was enthralled by their uneasy balance. Perhaps the book, in a dream-like way, reminded me of the gritty child life we were experiencing and the noble, con-
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