She always did have a weird sense of humor. “Baldeziwurlekistan is not a word. But it isn’t fair. :- Then we shook hands and he kissed me once on each cheek. The librarian made a choking noise and threw Zofia’s handbag away from her. ). “Are you going to knock me down? Even I felt sorry for Jake then. It isn’t tennis. When I was eight, I believed everything Zofia told me. "The Price of Glamour" by Steve Berman: Faery thieves in Victorian London. It’s hard work telling everything in the right order. I cried even harder. She told him about how she and her husband made it all the way across Europe, hiding in haystacks and in barns, and how once, when her husband went off to find food, a farmer found her hiding in his chicken coop and tried to rape her. The faery handbag: It’s huge and black and kind of hairy. I’m always running late. They walked through the snow, Zofia carrying the handbag, until they came to another village, one that they’d never seen before. We were doing biography projects. I mean, she used to feed it popcorn at the movies. “Have you been telling them your fairy stories?” she’d say. The narrator, Genevieve, describes her strange grandmother Zofia, her grandmother’s even stranger handbag and its purported properties, and finally relates the sad day her childhood friend disappeared into it. He’d spent one night in the handbag and then come out again twenty years later, exactly as handsome as I remembered, and enough time had passed that I had forgiven him all the quarrels. He was wearing this stupid red paper hat and some kind of apron-bib thing. I’m a feminist. Everybody except for me. “For almost twenty years I thought he’d left me and your mother and taken off for California. We’ve known each other since third grade. If you opened it one way, then it was just a purse big enough to hold a chicken and an egg and a clay cooking pot, or else a pair of reading glasses and a library book and a pillbox. He said sure and so all five of us sat and watched “Bring It On” and every once in a while Zofia dropped a couple of milk duds or some popcorn into her purse. Double strung-drawstring pouch with an unlined interior. “You mean Baldeziwurlekistan is a real place?” my mother asked Rustan. It’s better to cook what I want to eat, and clean up when I decide to clean up. Faerie quest event though, I've never had the chance to be a part of that, and I'm super excited for my first one! Maybe when you’re old enough to look after the handbag, I’ll poke my head inside, just long enough for a little visit.”. What he said was, “This is really good pizza.”. “He’s a very bad boy,” she said. Lo I the man, whose Muse whilome did maske, As time her taught in lowly Shepheards weeds, ... Or wearied with bearing of her bag . See more ideas about celtic wedding, merida, scottish wedding themes. A whimsical short story of Genevieve, her kooky grandmother Zofia, and the faery handbag. Zofia never looked like a grandmother. Of course she didn’t say a word. Most guys think that they’re better at it than they really are. I helped her sit down in a chair, but I don’t think she was really there any more. She looked it up in the dictionary, and lost a turn. Then she said one last thing, but I think it was in Baldeziwurleki. Not Natasha. She rode a bike. Maybe she made friends with it. My adventures in the Air Force in the late 1970s. Maybe you’ll kiss her, Jake, because she’s put a spell on you. I was so sick of people and their stupid nametags. Down in the basement at the Garment Factory they sell clothing and beat-up suitcases and teacups by the pound. The people who lived under the hill knew the future. Even though the characters in “The Faery Handbag” are ordinary people, extraordinary, unbelievable, and magical events occur in their lives. I hate writing that. Maybe they know I’m supposed to look after it now. She said, with absolute certainty, or maybe with all the skill of a very skillful liar, “My plan will work. They would burn down everyone’s houses and take the young men and women for slaves. I’ll explain why, but you have to be patient. I called it the faery handbag because I put “faery” down on the Scrabble board once. “The poor dog is probably asleep,” Zofia said. But Zofia had been guardian of the faery handbag for a lot longer. Zofia claims to be from the country Baldeziwurlekistan and also to be the guardian of a community of fairies who now live in her black handbag. That’s okay. You know exactly how important this is. My grandmother had all sorts of stories about McCarthy. (Try doing max 4 in one meditation) Step 7) Finish and come back from trance. I hate those movies, those books, where some guy gets to go off and have adventures and meanwhile the girl has to stay home and wait. The Fantastic in Fiction © 2021 All Rights Reserved. The greatest part of the faery handbag is that there’s a wrong way to open it — meaning a dangerous way, a way that can eat you alive. I was studying Joseph McCarthy. Welcome to the blog for JGB's Fall 2017 Creative Writing 383: The Fantastic in Fiction workshop. But I already knew. He thought that way she’d have to stay alive. Now and then Zofia would consult the tiles and talk to the people who lived in the handbag and they would tell her how best to avoid trouble and how she and her husband could make some money. You can tell that they’re dead, because of the way that they smell. Not that we like each other that way, but just for practice. Not quite as tall as me. He said to me and Zofia, “I’ll be right back.” And then he wasn’t there anymore. Everyone except for me was getting a look at Zofia’s handbag. There was going to be an earthquake as well, which was bad news because usually, when raiders showed up, the village went down under the hill for a night and when they came out again the raiders would have been gone for months or decades or even a hundred years. She said that it would be my responsibility. Are you going to say goodbye to your friends? That’s okay. She just lay there, this little smile on her face, as if she thought the whole thing–death, blue eyeshadow, Jake, the handbag, faeries, Scrabble, Baldeziwurlekistan, all of it–was a joke. And now her son, Jeep, is publishing a memoir. He asked if I wanted to go see a movie, and I asked if I could bring my grandmother and Natalie and Natasha. I didn’t fall in love with Jake because he plays guitar. But I didn’t let that distract me. Zofia told my parents that he was an expert in Baldeziwurlekistanian folklore who would be staying with her for a few days. They don’t really like Scrabble, but they feel like it’s their job to cheer me up. I’ve never read it–he says it was awful. Jake threw up all over my shoes. Zofia died. When Zofia was nineteen, the shaman-priestess in her village threw the tiles and discovered that something bad was going to happen. She acted like one too. She was so excited about M.I.T. ... Free WordPress Themes | … “Zofia claims to be from the country Baldeziwurlekistan and also to be the guardian of a community of fairies who now live in her black handbag. How was the part I was working on. “I’m a wonderful liar,” she’d say. It was probably much better than anything I’d come up with. But they couldn’t stand to be criticized. In the novel, Offred, who is a narrator of the story, is one of Handmaids in the society of Gilead. She was teaching Jake and me how to curse in Baldeziwurleki. What am I supposed to do now?”. 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