“Mommy, can you tell me a story before bed?”
Iris glanced at the small brown bookcase across the room. Now that she’d become aware of the cold, she was reluctant to leave the warmth of the bed.
“Sure,” she said after a moment. “What would you like?”
Ella seemed to hesitate. “Is daddy going to be home soon?”
Iris gave her a curious look and spoke slowly. “I don’t think so…”
Ella’s expression brightened in that way that only seems to happen when you feel delighted and mischievous. “Can we read one of the fairy stories?”
A laugh tickled at Iris’s throat, but she just smiled at the pleading green eyes with flecks of golden brown.
She reached over the edge of the bed and pulled out a small pink shoe-box decorated with plastic beads and glitter-glue from underneath it.
Ella had fallen in love with fairy tales as soon as she could understand them. But despite her grandmother’s insistence that she only watch the Disney versions, she’d always been fascinated with the much older, mature classics. The perfect gift for her was a new Grimm story, or one of the Andrew Lang Coloured Fairy collections.
Like his mother, Jon had never been impressed by the gruesome, tragic nature of many of the original tales, and refused to consider allowing Ella to read them. But Iris encouraged it.
They were darker than she’d like, for a six-year-old girl, but Ella’s favorites always seemed to be the ones where the frightening, depressing elements were somehow overcome in the end. Often this resolution was not what she expected, but she liked the surprise even more.
Iris liked to believe that, even at her age, Ella appreciated that you have to go through a lot of struggles before you can get to your happy endings. Maybe she even understood in some way that so-called “happy endings” weren’t ever what you expected them to be, too.
Sometimes she figured she was probably over-thinking it, or even that she was giving Ella too much credit. But other times, while she read to her, she saw a glint of quiet, patient understanding in her eyes, and Iris knew she that neither of those things were true. Ella was smart. Ella was amazing.
“Okay,” she said, sifting through the books in the box, “what do you want to hear?”
“Something… new.”
Iris nodded, searching. One book, near the bottom, still had a bookmark only a few pages into it. The cover was a faded green with Celtic knots around the edges. The pages were yellowed with age and Iris turned them carefully.
She hadn’t gone through the book of Irish tales to weed out the ones that were a little too mature, but the story right after the bookmark looked good enough.
“The Selkie,” she read, her voice soft but commanding, and she began to read.
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