Malus Domestica Read Free Page A

was a felt mosquito the approximate size and style of a Muppet, with big white ping-pong ball eyes. At the back of his open mouth was a sort of voicebox, and when you pinched one of his feet he whined like a kazoo. In her tiny hands, he came alive. “Yes, Miss Robin,” she said in a high, growly giant-mosquito voice. “It’s very warm today and I think I’m going to go down right now and find someone to bite for breakfast!”
    Robin giggled. “Okay. Wait right here.”
    She sat him up very carefully on top of the quilt and wriggled out of her nightshirt, putting on a sundress and a pair of sandals. Cradling the puppet, she clomped down the twisting stairway and opened the door at the bottom.
    The smell of bacon and biscuits were waiting to roll over her in a warm wave. Robin danced along the second floor landing and down a flight of switchback stairs to the foyer, skipping into the kitchen. Her mother sat at the kitchen table, reading a newspaper and sipping a cup of coffee.
    Robin stared at the back of the newspaper and tried to read it again, but as always, it was just a grid of black squiggles.
    “Goo morvig,” said her mother.
    “Good morning, Mama.”
    Mrs. Martine—Mama to Robin, Annie to everybody else—talked as if she had a mouthful of water. She had a speech impediment that made her difficult to interpret, but Robin had grown up with it and found her as easy to understand as anybody else.
    She smiled, scooping bacon and eggs onto her daughter’s plate. “Did you sleep good?”
    “Yep.”
    Robin arranged her pet mosquito on the counter in front of the bread box and hopped into her chair.
    “Your birthday is at the end of the month.” Annie cut a biscuit open and knifed grape jam into it. “Have you decided what you want yet?” Annie Martine wasn’t the loveliest of women, but her petite Audrey Hepburn frame and heart-shaped face gave her an ethereal, elven quality that people couldn’t seem to resist.
    In that brutally honest fashion of curious children, Robin had asked her several times over the years why her tongue was the way it was.
    Annie gave her a different tale each time. “I stuck it out at a crab and he pinched it,” she’d say, or “I was running with scissors and tripped and, well, snip snip!” and sometimes, “I tried to kiss a turtle and he bit me,” and the last time she claimed she’d stuck it in a light socket. Once Robin had even hauled out her toy doctor bag and asked to examine Annie’s tongue with a magnifying glass. A jagged red scar about an inch long bifurcated the very tip, twisting it.
    Most strangers who heard Annie speak assumed she was deaf and spoke loudly to her, carefully enunciating their words. But she was never offended. She dryly looked up at whoever was speaking to her and said, “I’m not deaf,” and then stuck out her tongue. Robin hated the way they would recoil in horror at her twisted scar, but Mama always laughed gaily and carried on as if it were nothing but a bawdy joke.
    “No. What about a book? I like books.”
    “Books are the best. Even better than toys and videogames, I think. Definitely better than videogames.”
    “I want a Harry Potter book.”
    Annie sneered in mock disgust. “Harry Potter? What do you want to read about Harry Potter for?”
    “Harry Potter does magic.” Robin rolled her eyes. “I want to read about magic. And swords and kings and dragons and wizards.” She waved her fork around as if it were a wand, touching her eggs, her orange juice, the table. “I love wizards. I wish I could do magic.”
    As she always did when her daughter spoke of magic, Annie smiled bitterly, as if the word dredged some long ago slight from the water under the bridge. “No, you don’t, honey.”
    “But I do.”
    “You know there’s no talk of magic in this house, ma’am.” Annie folded the newspaper and set it aside, cradling her coffee in both hands. The steam curled lazily against her face. “Magic is wrong. Magic goes