A Modern Moral Fairy Tale
7.0
The curious old woman watched the woman walk toward the village from when
she was a tiny dust speck moving at the edge of the horizon until she was
an ant crawling at the edges of sight. She walked out to meet her at the edge
of the village (which was honestly as far as she had ever walked before, because
only in her dreams at night or in her daily perusals of the BBC pictures had
she gone beyond the edges of the tiny village where she was born.) They never
spoke, but the curious old woman took the baby from the woman, who fell to
the ground, exhausted. And the old woman spooned parboiled rice into her dry
mouth caulked over with sores and gave her cool, clear water that the salmon
had swam in the night before (the children hauled up pails of water from the
ravine each morning, before they went into the internet café to attend
the State Virtual Academy for Outlying and Backwards Villages). But this was
not enough to revive her after her journey, when she had of course given every
bit of life to her baby and kept nothing back for herself
to live on.
