the lint baby
Once upon a time, there was a little girl named Janet.
The problem is that when we start stories with once upon a time, we hope and assume that they will be happy stories. Those words indicate fairytale and fairytale as a genre tells us that, no matter what happens, there’s a happy ending. This isn’t always true – the original version of The Little Mermaid, for instance, definitely didn’t have a happy ending. And Snow White, despite having a happy ending, was also quite gruesome in the death of its major villain – all of that dancing with iron slippers made red hot until her feet burned and she died – that’s gruesome, if you really think about it.
We’re predisposed, perhaps, to thinking fairytales will have happy endings. The prince and princess will end up together. The hero will save the damsel (or perhaps the other way around, although this is often less likely). The trials will be completed by the third son (or daughter), and their luck will get them through. Animals are meant to help, not to hinder, regardless of how much of a trickster they may be. And goodness is always, always, always rewarded.
This story, she tells me, is not like that.
Not like that at all.
Once upon a time, there was a seamstress who was desperate to have a child. She was widowed early in life; her husband had died during the war with the trolls – he’d been on the front lines because he didn’t have any skills to keep him in the back – he wasn’t a blacksmith, he wasn’t a doctor, and he wasn’t rich. His heart hadn’t been torn out by any of the witches, as far as she knew or heard; he had simply died, as people do in wars. The woman spent her years alone, wishing for a child that she knew she could not have without being unfaithful to her long dead husband or without being shamed by the women who still lived in the village.
Besides, none of the other men would have her. She had a deep scar like lightning etched into her left eye, and more often than not it was swollen shut, so that she was not able to see through it. Her teeth were crooked, and her nose was bent, and the women in the village often suggested that her clothes were the work of witchery and not of her nimble little fingers. They were, of course, wrong. The seamstress had no magical bone in her body.
And yet magic still came to her.
One day, desperate as she was, the seamstress took the leftover scraps from the floor of her shop and began to stitch them together into the likeness of a human body. The body was mismatched, since it was stitched together of scraps – all plaid and dotted and different weaves – but she meshed them together as carefully and as beautifully as she could. She gave the scrap body two different-colored buttons for eyes – one a deep, mottled brown and the other a bright, shining blue – but as she stitched the blue button into place, it split down the middle. She stitched a thin scar through the blue eye to mimic the one on her own, as though that scar split the eye in two, even though she herself had done it quite by accident. She gave the body a sly little smile and a triangle for a nose, and when she was done, she filled it not with cotton stuffing but with the scattered pieces of lint she could find from her floor. The body was not soft, but it was there, and it was real, and it was hers.
At first, the seamstress called the body her lint baby – my lint baby – and, eventually, those words formed together to become Melinda. It wasn’t a name the seamstress liked, and it certainly wasn’t one she would have named her child if she had ever had one. And yet, somehow, the name stuck.
The seamstress hid the little lint baby in her home, and she left it there day after day as she worked.
You would think, given that this is a fairytale, that somehow the seamstress had infused the lint baby with some of her life and that somehow the baby would come to life.
This, of course, is not entirely true.
The seamstress did nothing that would give the lint baby life. She only crafted it.
And yet, somehow, in the course of things, the baby came alive anyway.
It didn’t call itself Melinda, though. It thought Melinda was a stupid name.
It fashioned itself a new one.