Guitar - “Inventory”
Under “One boy, one girl,” The narrator recalls, “She buried her face in my neck and said “Like this” to my skin. I laughed. I was nervous, excited. I felt like a guitar and someone was twisting the tuning pegs and my strings were getting tighter. They batted their eyelashes against my skin and breathed into my ears. I moaned and writhed, and hovered on the edge of coming for whole minutes, though no one was touching me there, not even me.” The metaphoric guitar underscores the narrator's excitement which stems from proximity to the girl. Bodily contact enthralls the narrator to the degree of eliciting the feeling of wholeness.
“Dead Foliage” - “The Husband Stitch”
The narrator explains, “Our son is eight, ten. First, I tell him fairy tales – the very oldest ones, with the pain and death and forced marriage pared away like dead foliage. Mermaids grow feet and it feels like laughter. Naughty pigs trot away from grand feasts, reformed and uneaten. Evil witches leave the castle and move into small cottages and live out their days painting portraits of woodland creatures.” The metaphoric “dead foliage” underscores the tangling of themes of “pain, death and forced marriage” which is predominant in the fairy narratives. Such themes appear conjointly and they elicit conflicts in the fairy tales.
