Bedtime Story by Serrina Zou
Associate editor Allison Peters on today’s bonus short: Maybe the happiest “happily ever after” story is the one you decide to write over the truth—your own truth told slant—to make it better, and truer, in spite of itself.
[CW: references to rape and abortion]
Bedtime Story
after “The Eternity Berry” by Grace Q. Song
When my daughter asks me for a happy story, I line my lips shut. I could cradle her in the fraying cotton blankets strewn across our couch like prayers & tell her all the Disney fairytales I know, but I don’t. Instead, I press the Grimm fables into her small, quivering hands. Bury her hopeful laughter, quiet & broken. At bedtime, I read her my favorite fiction from growing up: “Sun, Moon, & Talia.” Tell her the truth about love, language, loss. Pretty girls soured into women. Sleeping Beauty raped until two suckling infants bloomed at her bosom. Joan of Arc churched into a martyr. Histories so gaping full there are no more words left. I am searching for the right words to tell her I’m sorry. That women like us don’t get happily ever afters. Or both. Anything to say life doesn’t have a moral, only this story does. That I loved her too much to give birth, so I didn’t.
Serrina Zou is a first-year undergraduate at Columbia University. She has been recognized by the National YoungArts Foundation, the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, the U.S. Presidential Scholars Program, the Poetry Society of the U.K., and Frontier Poetry, among others. Her work appears or is forthcoming in The Rumpus, Cosmonauts Avenue, AAWW: The Margins, and elsewhere.
