Beneath the Sugar Sky

There is kindness in the world, if we know how to look for it. If we never start denying it the door.

“I don’t know, baby,” he said. “I told you when you went that I didn’t know. I’m just a candy corn farmer. My only part in this play was loving your mother and raising you, and I did both of them as well as I could, but that didn’t make me worldly, and it didn’t make me wise. It made me a man with a hero for a wife and a daughter who was going to do something great someday, and that was all I wanted to be. I never saved the day. I never challenged the gods. I was the person you could come home to when the quest was over, and I’d greet you with a warm fudge pie and a how was your day, and I’d never feel like I was being left out just because I was forever left behind.”

Just her, and an environment where her size was an asset, not an impediment.

I can’t be the only estuary in your waterway.”

Sometimes I think that’s part of what we do wrong. We try to make things make sense, even when they’re never going to.”

Sometimes I think that’s part of what we do wrong. We try to make things make sense, even when they’re never going to.”

“It’s a miracle your parents got you here before the beauty companies snatched you up to try to figure out the mystery of the girl with the seaweed pubes.”

Sugar, flour, and cinnamon won’t make a house a home,

So bake your walls of gingerbread and sweeten them with bone.

Eggs and milk and whipping cream, butter in the churn,

Bake our queen a castle in the hopes that she’ll return.

—CHILDREN’S CLAPPING RHYME, CONFECTION

done, and I want you to meet me so you can

“I want you to meet me. You always said I was the best thing you’d ever done, and I want you to meet me