Читать книгу All the Wild Hungers - Karen Babine - Страница 10

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ONCE UPON A TIME, a girl who loved chocolate wanted to become a teacher. Her parents were both teachers, each the first in their rural farm families to attend and graduate from a four-year college. The girl loved music and believed chocolate was the answer to any question she had. The woman who loved chocolate made children the work of her life, spending the last fifteen years of her career teaching fourth grade. She would say, They’re old enough to read and young enough to still listen. When Christmas would come around, the children remembered she loved chocolate more than anything, wrapping up Hershey’s rather than another World’s Greatest Teacher coffee mug. She would warn them that there’s no fun in fourth grade and they would look up, startled, and say, But this is fun! and laugh at the twinkle in her bright blue eyes. I wonder what she would see now if she were still in her classroom, looking out at those ten-year-old faces. I wonder which stories this teacher would read to her students now, the lights dimmed after lunch. Would the woman who loved chocolate see old tales in their faces, the dark stories, the ones where the women are the danger, the absent and dead mothers, murderous stepmothers, evil disguised as grandmothers, the stories where witches lure children closer with houses made of candy and gingerbread, where stepmother-witches offer poisoned apples, where tiny bottles labeled Drink Me and cakes labeled Eat Me send us to places we never expected to go?