Read Online Fairytales for Wilde Girls by Allyse Near - Free Book Online

he’d said simply, placing them on her bedside table. ‘In case you die in your sleep.’
    The funeral had been grand and stoney, with impassive Jesus in the window, his face broken into coloured glass. Grandmother had looked so strange in the casket, her make-up painted far too thickly. Grandmother herself would have sneered and said she looked like one of those street-corner unfortunates .
    Isola had slipped Father’s wallet into the casket before the lid had closed, hoping that paper money would be enough to buy a one-way boat ride.
    Mama’s Sinclair’s funeral was earthy and sweet-smelling, and under their black coats people wore vibrant colours. At the burial, Isola fingered the cool coins in her pocket that Alejandro had given her all those years ago. She hadn’t realised, not for years and years, what precious things these were – the last gift from his own small sisters. Isola tossed a snippet of honeysuckle into Mama Sinclair’s deep grave, two coins from her own piggybank hidden in the blossom.
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    Tick Tock
    A shriek. A thud in the earth.
    â€˜ They’re eating my time! ’
    Isola shouldered her schoolbag and hurried out the front door. ‘What is it?’
    â€˜My thyme! Those pesky rabbits!’ cried Mother Wilde, rubbing her forehead with a gloved hand. ‘They’ll be into the rosemary next, just you watch.’
    She slammed a garden hoe into the dirt again, raging against the creatures that nibbled up her herbs. Isola caught sight of dusty bobtails vanishing into the scrub. One pure black rabbit dived recklessly under the porch of Edgar Allan Poe’s new house. She hadn’t seen the boy in a while; she left for school much earlier than him, and didn’t emerge from the woods until the sky had darkened.
    â€˜Ooh, those rabbits! I know you love them, Isola, but I swear, if I catch them –’ she throttled the air ‘– I’ll wring their adorable little necks and make adorable bunny soup!’
    Isola kissed Mother on her way down the garden path. When she reached the front gate her smile wilted – as the garden did at its edges these days. She was both pleased and despairing to see Mother this way. On one hand, it was wonderful to see her out of the house, working on her long-abandoned project. The unwalled secret garden was not the Eden it once was.
    But Isola knew that the manic stage would pass soon enough, and the longer it lasted, the deeper Mother would sink when it ended. Swinging high always meant falling low in the circus of her life. Today, Mother might be the trapeze artist, her sequinned torso glittering in the spotlight, flying high above her illness, but tomorrow she could well be the cockroach crushed under the ringleader’s boots, squashed juiceless under the strain of being sad.
    Lately in the Wilde house, the swings had become more extreme, a pendulum gathering speed. Soon, Isola feared, the clock would once more stop altogether.
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    By the time she’d kicked off her shoes in the hallway after school that afternoon, Isola knew that the pendulum had swung.
    Yesterday’s dishes were stacked high in the sink. The house was unwelcoming, celibate; the kitchen cold with uncooked dinner.
    â€˜How was school, then?’ Father asked from the lounge room, his perfunctory question accompanied by the flutter of turning newspaper pages.
    â€˜Grape and I faked cramps to get out of P.E.,’ said Isola, stopping in the doorway and shrugging at him. ‘But Sister K said we used that excuse last week, so I guess the nuns are tracking our periods now.’
    From upstairs came the familiar waterfall. The sounds of Mother stripping in the bathroom.
    Father turned the television on, pressing the volume control like an addict on a morphine drip. Louder louder louder, the noise shackling Isola’s ankles as she trudged her way upstairs. The aural riot tried its hardest to tug her down the