The Gingerbread Collection

Introduction

Some of my favorite books are reimaginings of ancient stories: fairy tales, myths, nursery rhymes, and legends. John Steinbeck set out to retell the story of Cain and Abel in East of Eden. Brom does a harrowing job of darkening the world of Peter Pan in The Child Thief. When a colleague claimed Beowulf was a dull story, Michael Crichton, shocked, wrote Eaters of the Dead to prove that it just needed to be modernized. A few months ago, I was completely enraptured by Eowyn Ivey’s debut novel The Snow Child, based on an old Russian folktale. For me, there is nothing more compelling than myths and fairy tales. However, scholars often attempt to preserve them, like flies in amber, in their original form. This is a mistake. Stories, like civilization itself, are living, breathing, evolving creatures.

When Hansel and Gretel wandered down the forest path leaving breadcrumbs, they had just been left for dead. They were deceived by the false kindness of the witch in the false paradise of her gingerbread house. But they had to travel into the heart of danger in order to be transformed and released, as in Jonah and the whale. Carl Jung said knowing your own darkness is the best method for dealing with the darknesses of other people. Knowing leads to dealing. These children did more than just dodge a bullet. They had to best the witch in order to get home. They had to reckon with that inner darkness—greed, gluttony, gullibility—in order to survive the dark outer world.

Although not all of my stories follow this Grimm-esque mythic formula, many of them do deal with this theme of inner darkness. In Gingerbread, two children sneak into a candy factory to steal sweets, risking capture by the dreaded superintendent, the Candy Man. In A Night at the Lake, a couple goes out camping and crosses paths with a malicious group of hunters. In Monster and Me, a little boy wonders why the monster in his closet won’t go away as he grows up. In Shiva, the family dog runs away and returns to her family changed in some mysterious, sinister way. I hope you will also enjoy Change, an experience that actually happened to me at a breakfast diner, and The Flying Kite, inspired by a real man who attempted to hike the spine of the Andes in the 1970s.

My medium of choice is the short story. I don’t know why they appeal to me so, but I suspect part of the reason is their bare-boned simplicity, much like a fairy tale. I consider it my job, as a writer, to lure you into my gingerbread house, my false paradise. I invite you to pick up these little breadcrumbs I’ve dropped, to follow my paths and tumble into my worlds. But make no mistake, I am the witch.

~ Victor A. Davis

Change

I’m reading my book at one of those roadside working-class diners, and in walks this girl. She can’t be but twenty or twenty-one, yet she has this old soul feel to her, a sense of self-confidence too over-developed for her age. The little bell on the door rings as she comes through. She waves at everybody like she’s a regular and sits down at the counter a chair away from me, next to the cash register, like it’s her spot.

Sipping on my coffee, munching on my scrambled eggs and hash browns, listening to the waitresses call orders while the cooks serve them up, I read my book in peace. These types of places have never made me feel uncomfortable. The waitstaff is not too aggressive. The food is always good, the bathrooms clean. They really don’t care how late you stay, what you order or tip, or what you do. They’re content to leave you to your own devices. Atlanta is a big, crowded, multi-cultural city, and with all the little enclaves this refuge is for everyone. It’s the only place I’m used to seeing two sharp-dressed business men come in with their computers to talk shop over coffee a table down from a Hispanic family of five, the little kids drowning their blueberry waffles in syrup. It’s a great equalizer, and it hasn’t changed much with the times.

More coffee, hon? the lady asks me. I nod and she fills me up.

Sneaking a peek at the young lady who’s just come in, I peg her as a working girl pretty easily. She’s in a restaurant uniform, maybe the Italian place in the shopping center next door. I can’t quite read her name tag. Chatting it up with the waitresses, they all lean over the counter to sequester their conversation in the quiet diner. I stare at my book to give them a sense of privacy, though it’s obvious I’m in earshot. She definitely used to work here. I can plainly tell from their comments and body language. She must have caught a break and gone to work at a fancier place with fancier pay, but I can tell she misses this place. And why shouldn’t she? These diners are a throwback to the fifties. The waitstaff feels like family, despite being perfect strangers in a completely different station in life. You get the sense that you belong, that everybody belongs. It’s the modern version of that hidden away place in an old Greek play. The one the hero visits but never stays. That place he knows he’ll return to someday to live out his eternity.

Whatcha havin’, darlin’? my waitress asks her.

There’s a pause. The working girl surprises me and captures my whole attention with her response. Well, something cheap. All I’ve got is five dollars in quarters in my pocket.

My eyes stop scanning the words on the page. They hang on the dot of an "i," while I immerse myself into the scene playing out beside me, trying desperately not to intrude. My waitress grabs a menu and starts going over the five dollar options. A biscuit with this, two eggs scrambled with that, patty melt without the fixins. Finally they seem to settle on one option in particular for four dollars and ninety-two cents.

The girl, who’s been emptying the change from her pocket, hesitates. Well, that won’t leave enough for your tip, she says timidly.

I’ve always been humbled by the sense of honor and integrity displayed by the have nots in life. It stuns me to find that a man (or woman) with five dollars in his/her pocket will, with prudence, seek to use those dollars to better themselves and those around them in some small, mutually beneficial way.

Oh, honey, don’t you even worry about a tip. Let’s get some good food in you.

My waitress walks over to one of the cooks, and calls the order discreetly in his ear. He’s a young black kid who’s been looking over his shoulder smiling the whole time. He knows her too. He maybe even has a little crush. Nodding, he gets to work, happy to join the fray.

Well, let me run to my car. I have a little more change out there.

She disappears. I eat my food in silent watchfulness. The waitresses tally up figures on the little yellow ticket pad, watching as she goes to her car, digs around on the floorboards, in the cupholders, opens the glovebox. They make intermittent eye contact with me and smile, acknowledging my small part in this play, the silent witness to their endearment. I wonder if I legitimize it for them in some way. I know they’d be acting the same whether I was here or not. I just can’t help but feel judge and jury for them as they dutifully work their case.

I can read the subtext. My tie and jacket are in the car, but I’m still wearing my dress clothes. They know it’s tippers like me, not her, who’ll carry their day. The well-off white collar patrons who descend temporarily from our white collar universe to enjoy their meals. There’s never much conversation. Our lives are so different there’s not much to talk about besides the weather. They still call me hon and serve me the same coffee and eggs as the rest, but there’s a social distance. I’ve always been able to feel it. They know that way up high in my well-off universe things are easy. That we only suffer from problems of our own design. That we’ve never had to pull a sixteen-hour shift to pay a water bill before. And it’s true. There is a distance. Not that that’s ever made either of us uncomfortable. It’s here that we can all sit around the same table, checking those unspoken differences at the door. They’ve never visited my world, and deep down they don’t want to anymore.

The working girl comes back, and methodically lays nickels and dimes and pennies out on the counter and mumbles her arithmetic. They start haggling over the menu again, and while it’s clear she’s only increased the pot by seventy cents or so, the price of her meal begins to climb. Adding hash browns and a waffle brings them to six dollars, a slice of cheese and extra jalapeños and a few strips of bacon tips them north of seven. The girl resists. I only have such-and-such, she keeps saying, over and over, while the waitresses wave her off.

My waitress digs into her apron and scoops out some change of her own, laying it down on the counter. The others follow suit. The girl keeps resisting, trying to preserve her honor, separating her change from theirs with a vertical hand like a sieged city wall, but they insist. When the cook calls order up they distract her with plates. They set the little plates in front of her and tell her to "Eat, just eat. We’ll count this up."

Don’t you do that, she protests. Stop it.

But the mother hens are not going to stop. She’s outnumbered and out-experienced by these middle-aged survivors. My waitress scoops the growing pile of change away from the girl with her arm, incidentally toward me, and begins counting. Several coins go flying off the counter on her side into the dishwasher. A few come tinkling down beside me. I climb off my barstool and pick them up without a word.

Thanks, hon.

The girl eats. She eats like she didn’t eat at all yesterday. I’m so broke right now, she laments. Then laughs. It’s clear she’s not complaining. She’s just so damn content, happy to be here, happy to have a job, happy to see her friends. She’s being modest and self-deprecating. The warm food is burgeoning her already high spirits, and they all ask her about the new job and she asks how so-and-so is doing. I’m invisibly walled off again, a brief visitor to this world of actual troubles and the unexpected joy found in navigating them.

I keep wanting to break this wall. It was not so long ago that I sat in her place. Only I wasn’t so lucky. I never had warmth from the other side of the counter because frankly I’d never dealt it out myself. If I had five dollars in quarters, then I’d be eating the four dollar and ninety-two cent meal and I’d be thankful to have it. And my waitress would be cursing my disrespectful eight cent tip without a care that it was all I had. I’d have been too ashamed to admit it, and she’d have been too tired to care. That was years ago, of course, before I’d made it into the universe of the well-off.

She’s far more graceful than I ever was. I never found grace until after I found money. When the chips were down, I’d always been too consumed by shame to have anything but awe and coldness toward others.

Things change, I want to tell her. Things always change for people like you. It sounds right in my head, but when I picture saying it out loud, all I see is a young girl and three mother hens staring blankly, as if I’d uttered something in a foreign language and might need to be reminded in which country I was dining. Give me her ticket, I imagine whispering to the waitress. I fantasize about paying them both, mine and hers, and delivering a touching Pulitzer-winning speech about tenacity. But that might turn their stomachs. So I might skip the speech and just give a dignified smile, but in my silence they might project an ulterior motive.

That sleaze was hitting on her, they’d say, throwing his money around like that. They’d be guarding her from me, mortified, as if I’d decided to take a souvenir from my visit down here. She’d be embarrassed, smitten, and disgusted all at once. They’d be forming a wall around her and staring me down. Was I attracted to her? Yes. But there was nothing overtly, objectively attractive about her. A clear-faced young person in her restaurant uniform, brunette hair tied back. She was neither fat nor thin, pretty nor ugly. She exuded a radiant confidence, a sense of self-worth and passionate love for the world around her that so baffles and seduces reserved men. But she was young, and clearly caught up in the same web as many her age, that inextricable tangle of money, time, education, and work. I remember what it was like. Everything seemed to preclude everything else and nothing seemed like it could break the cycle.

Besides, anything I offered would only draw me into the comedic squabbling, and have the cook sizing me up over his shoulder in dismay. So I close my book, pile my silverware and napkins onto my plate, pick up the check, and stand before the cash register to leave. That’s where she’s sitting, incidentally. Only fourteen inches away from her now, I steal glances at her smiling and laughing and eating heartily as more plates with extra bacon or eggs or hash browns materialize. She waves them off as they push them forward, knowing she’s already lost the modesty tug-of-war.

I wish I’d had some cash, but I have none. Those of the well-off world never carry cash anymore. A tip left under a coffee mug is so much classier, so much easier, than those cold little credit card receipts. Nonetheless, I sign my name and leave a ten dollar tip on my ten dollar meal. On the back I write what goes around comes around. My waitress eyes me strangely, the customer writing her a note. Quickly, I hand over the slip and the pen and turn tail. This is my rare good deed for the day.

On the drive back, I think about how much I’ve changed over the years. How lucky I’ve been. I think about how a person spends their last few quarters and what it says about them. I think about the warmth of those waiting for me at home.

The Bargain

One hundred thousand years ago…

There was an animal in the Congo, and there was an animal in the Alps, both with the semblance of men. Each had two arms, two legs. They used spears and wore the skins of other animals they had hunted and killed, not for sport, but for food. Over an unfathomable course of time these animals would become what we today call men. But these were not men. They had no souls. They had no language, no writing. They had no knowledge of the world outside their hunting trails. Theirs was a cold, dark world—a world of heathenism, superstition, blood, hunger, and death. Their lives were nasty, brutish, and short.

We are naïve to call these animals men. We did not stand eye to eye with them. We never had to fight them with only our fists and teeth. We never had to feel the pit of hunger in our stomachs that drove them down their game trails. We never lost babies to wolves or snow. We never died of broken backs, forcing our wives and children to walk for days to the next clan for food and shelter. To call them jaguars or boars or wolves is closer to truth.

Except these man-like creatures had something those beasts lacked. They had lost their claws, and in their stead, filed sticks to a point. They had lost their fangs, and carved blades out of stone. They had lost their fur, and wrapped themselves in the furs of their prey. Their muscles had dwindled over many millions of years, to be replaced by cleverness. One might have wondered what God was up to with this counterintuitive design. One may have asked the Creator what sort of strange deconstructionist vision He was after. One could have looked at this demented experiment—had one been there to question—and wondered what drove the experimenter.

Animals go extinct every day. Some experiments succeed, others fail. Every species must change, ever so slightly, in order to brave the colder, darker, bloodier world. Longer claws, thicker skin, fuller fur, sharper fangs, a more flexible backbone or a stronger bicep. But this animal seemed the unfortunate subject of an experiment gone wrong, an experimenter away from the wheel, a forsaken race. But we shall see presently what He had in mind. We shall see with what brilliance and wickedness this Creator formed a maze for His mice. As with all things, it started with a spark. God said Let there be light, Zeus threw a bolt of lightning to the earth, Vulcan erupted in form upon a tree, and Prometheus made a gift of it.

The man-like creature from the Alps was on a trail, wrapped in furs, spear in one hand, the other pulling a hood over his face to shield his skin and eyes from the burn of the freezing wind.