“Gorse Is Not People”
by
Janet Frame
Do you remember your twenty-first birthday? The party, the cake, and cutting a slice of it to put under your pillow that night, to make you dream of your future beloved; the giant key; the singing:
I’m twenty-one today!
Twenty-one today!
I’ve got the key of the door!
Never been twenty-one before!
Trivial, obvious words. Yet when the party was over and you lay in bed remembering the glinting key and the shamrock taste of the small glass of wine, and perhaps the taste of a sneaked last kiss in the dark, then the song seemed not trivial or obvious but a poetic statement of a temporal wonder. You had, as they say, attained your majority. You could vote in the elections; you could leave home against your parents’ wishes; you could marry in defiance of all opposition. You had crossed a legal border into a free country, and you now walked equipped with a giant tinsel key, a cardboard key covered with threepenny spangles.
Or perhaps your twenty-first birthday did not happen that way. Perhaps there was no party, no cake, no wine, and no kiss? I would like to tell you about Naida’s twenty-first birthday.
Naida was a dwarf, which is not really a rare thing. I suppose in our lifetime we see many dwarves—first, perhaps, at the circus, where they are advertised as the tiniest people in the world and we pay to watch them moving about in their almost walnut-shell or matchbox beds. Sometimes we pass them in the street and stare hard for a moment, then pretend we haven’t seen them, until they have passed us and we look back, saying, “It must be strange, how strange it must be, such tiny folk, and us out of reach, like tall trees!” Continue reading ““Gorse Is Not People,” a short story by Janet Frame”
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