“PERSISTENCE” by Heather Rinehart

Why is it always the old woman who gets the blame? I sit and I sulk in my little stone house, because my children have all left to live in foreign countries with exotic names, and my grandchildren are roaming the universities of the world and have no time to come see their widowed grandmother. My husband has left me many, many years ago, first isolating me away from my kin—who left to other foreign-sounding places—and then dying on me—on the night I made gingerbread cookies, too, his favorite. And my dogs left be because they took a fancy to the she-wolves around these woods, and my cats left me because the rats were getting to be bigger than they, and even the rats left because I’d stopped tilling the earth and there was nothing for them to steal from me.

Here in northern Russia, it gets very very cold in the winter. I have no warmth of any human soul around me, I only have my oven. I bake morning, noon, and night, and I have no one to share it to, so I throw out the extra food to the birds. Yes, at least the birds are mine. The birds come and the birds stay. But only as long as I feed them. Once, I was too ill to bake, and they all flew away and did not return for a season. Traitorous birds.

So of course I was delighted when two little delightful children stumbled into my yard. Of course I was thanking God that they had not been skinned by the wolves in the forest or by my feral dogs. Of course I welcome them into my home and made gingerbread cookies for them and fed them cider and beckoned them closer to the warmth of my oven. It gets very, very cold in the winter in Russia, you see, your Honor. The children’s hands had not even thawed from the cold, and they were cold and frightened and alone. Their accusations against me are false, your Honor. I did not seek to hurl them into the oven.
In fact, I never hurl anything into the oven. I use to hurl in the bread, and then it came out charred and black. I’ve learned my lesson since then, your Honor, and I don’t appreciate your attitude.

“Angreek87″