Tag: manners

Mira Morganstein: The Pink Lemonade Club 008

MMCoverMira blinked into a slow eternity as her brain tried to make sense of what she had just heard. “Were you speaking to me?” she asked, as politely as she could. She glanced around, making sure this wasn’t some boyish prank. But her street was strangely empty, save for herself and the talking hairless cat.

It made a sound of exasperated annoyance. “Do you see anyone else around?”

Mira shook her head, wondering for a moment if her brain was rattling about inside her skull. Was she dreaming? Hallucinating? Suffering from a concussion?

First the old lady, and now this thing, whatever it was.

The creature tugged on its ears that were round and decidedly not cat-shaped. “Great Barnaby’s toads!” If it weren’t clinging so tightly to the branch, it might have been dancing in place with impatience. “Don’t you know anything?”

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Mira Morganstein: The Pink Lemonade Club 004

Old Woman

MMCoverMira hugged her book of fairy tales to her chest, willing herself to fall between the pages into a land where fairies were real and goose girls could become princesses. Where fifth graders could be out doing heroic and magical things instead of being forced to endure fractions, decimals, and figuring out where Timbuktu lived on a map.

“Deep in the forest,” she whispered to herself, “lived two sisters. One as fair as the morning, the other dark as night. They lived with their mother in a forest glen, these two sisters: Rose Red and Snow White.”

Her backpack bumped comfortably against her as her stride and the story weaving itself through her mind and across her tongue all fell into rhythm. Her favorite time of the day, besides that silver hour when the world held its breath in between day and night, was the walk home from school.

It was then when she could be any princess she chose to, fall into any fairy tale she fancied, with no one to look over her shoulder or eye her disapprovingly from the front of the classroom. There were no chores for her to do—not yet—and her homework could wait.

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