Poetry Book: Changeling

Changeling by Clare Pollard – review

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She was fond of them really. She blamed Thomas for what had happened to Johnny. Johnny was a sensitive child and Thomas had pushed him too hard. Thomas thought Johnny was bright and he was determined to make him brighter. He had been a nice little boy, wistful and impressionable but with simple needs.

The last time Pearl had gone into the room she had seen ants. There, in a committed procession, had come a hundred ants. Miriam had seen them too. Had not ants come to Midas as a child and filled his mouth with grains of wheat? Had not insects visited Plato in his infancy, settling on his lips, ensuring him powerful speech? Johnny had started dying, or whatever it was analogous to it, two months ago, in August.

August was the month when Sam was born. August was also the month for the birthday party. The children had always celebrated their birthdays collectively. At the birthday party, Johnny had announced that he felt inhabited. He was inhabited by hundreds.

There were cells in his body and all stronger than he. He lay with his face in the pillow, his poor little body like a graveyard in which the family dead of several generations had been buried. He had had beautiful eyes. Before he got his notions, he had been normal enough, gorging himself on chocolate rabbits at the appropriate time of year, learning how to sail and water-color and so on, and doing everything with those beautiful and commanding eyes which were a luxurious violet color like certain depths of the sea.

In his illness, he said that he could see the blood moving though the veins of things. He said he thought he could induce the birds and the butterflies and animals of the picture books to come to life, to totter out of the books, leaving holes behind them.

He said he was sure he could do this except he was afraid.

March 2018

The child was overstimulated. He had been reading since the age of four. They all read at four. He worried about the people who wrote to Miriam and told her the terrible things that had happened to them. Thomas encouraged him in these worries because he thought they honed the mind. Thomas told Johnny he could do anything if he just set his mind to it.

Miriam had four-month-old twins, Ashbel and Franny, and Thomas was probably at them, even this very moment. He would hold the twins and talk to them in French, in Latin. He would talk to them about Utrillo, about knights, about compasses. When they got to puberty he sent them off to boarding school and forgot about them. In the bar, she took a breath of air, as though she were tasting freedom, and coughed slightly. She liked her baby. She was glad they were together, alone. She was glad that neither one of them would ever have to see Thomas again.

She supposed, however, that the baby might grow to miss his cousins. Pearl herself would not miss Walker much. It was true that once Pearl had seen Walker with her heart but that was no longer so. He was very seldom on the island. She imagined that it simply might be taking women out to lunch and then sleeping with them.

She had often wished, in the months when she was pregnant, that he would have been content enough to do just that with her, instead of bringing her back to his family and marrying her. He could still have given her her baby but she would not have had to spend that lonely year on the island where she was the only one, it seemed, with any ordinary sense at all. She was going to keep Sam calm and common. She would not let him play in a questionable manner.

Clare Pollard

Everything would be bought in a store and have some sort of a guarantee. When he got sick, she was going to call a doctor. Even when Johnny weighed only eighteen pounds, Thomas had not called a doctor. He had brought over a psychiatrist. It was like contacting a voodoo priest, Pearl thought. The psychiatrist had come over to the island in a velour jogging suit and had spoken at length about love, rage and the triumph of hateful failure.

The psychiatrist had suggested that Johnny was a very willful, angry, even dangerous little boy. They all realized that Johnny was willful. He had always gotten everything he wanted, usually just by the demands of his beautiful, insistent eyes. As for the idea that Johnny was angry and cruel, how could anyone, least of all Miriam, believe that? Miriam could only remember him as the child who fell asleep on her white bed after a day in the sun, smelling wonderful, tiny sea shells stuck to his bottom.

There was a smell of sex and death and cooking, Miriam said. The slap of bodies coupling and quarreling was terrific. The racket of baroque construction. The cries and slithering, the giggles and complaints. The babies and fabulous animals. The darkness, Miriam said to Pearl, held only the path. Pearl put a pretzel log in her mouth. It tasted as though she were eating her napkin. Miriam made wonderful pretzels.

Pearl might never get a decent pretzel again.

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Miriam was the best cook Pearl had ever known. She loved to bake and make.

She never wearied of it. The gathering, the selecting. The boning, chopping, grating. The only day she ever made a mistake in the kitchen was the day her husband, Les, had abandoned her, a week before the twins were born. Les had been a mess. Les was a borderline simpleton with a big handsome face and a large appetite. Miriam had never paid much attention to him. She was too busy with her sewing, cooking, shopping. How Miriam loved to shop!

She approached supermarkets with joyously clenched teeth. Pearl had never done well in supermarkets. She saw Miriam as a successful conqueror penetrating a hostile country, routing out the perfect endive, the blemishless peach, the excellent cheese.

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Miriam had confided to Pearl once that she was glad Les was gone. Miriam had told Pearl he had a business bright and shiny as a carrot. Pearl looked at the rings of moisture her glass had made on the barroom table. She rearranged Sam in her arms. There was a crack in the formica that had hair in it. Pearl put her cocktail napkin over it.

The Changeling

On the napkin were animals drinking and playing poker. Pearl put her hand over the cocktail napkin. It was a face made up from the heads and parts of animals. All the children thought it terribly witty. They envied Johnny for having it. Johnny adored Thomas for having given it to him. Pearl had never thought it very witty. She found it disgusting. A picture razored from an art book. Antlers, ears tusks, haunches, tails, teeth. No wonder Johnny had nightmares, that wretched thing being the last he saw before he fell asleep at night.

Well, that was rather witty, Pearl thought. Pearl could not remember what he looked like. Sometimes her memory was not good at all. Pearl would be the first to admit that her mind was like a thin pool, on the bottom of which lay huge leaves, slowly softening. Or had Thomas said that to her once? Poetry Society of America. Back Into Poetry via Ted Hughes. Soil for the Pen. Poetry blog list - the annual update.

Sidevent Adkick Day Get this Partridge Started! Martin's Upcoming Fantasy Novel, 'Lo! Squandermania and other foibles. My Favourite Poetry Collections in Suzi Feay's Book Bag. The Stone and the Star: Jun 13, Pages. Jun 13, Minutes. And the backdrop for this rich phantasmagoria? The boroughs of New York. Now Apollo is a father himself—and as he and his wife, Emma, settle into their new lives as parents, exhaustion and anxiety start to take their toll. At first Emma seems to be exhibiting signs of postpartum depression.

But before Apollo can do anything to help, Emma commits a horrific act and vanishes. His odyssey takes him to a forgotten island, a graveyard full of secrets, a forest where immigrant legends still live, and finally back to a place he thought he had lost forever. Like a woke Brothers Grimm, his clever new spin on the ages-old changeling myth is a modern fairy tale for the Trump era, taking on fatherhood, parenting, marriage, immigration, race and terrifying loss. The story is a long, slow burn with a lingering sizzle.

Victor LaValle is the author of six previous works of fiction: LaValle has written a story full of things to terrify not children but the parents who lose sleep worrying about how best to protect them.

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