And may Brittney and Juliette be safe, she added in a sudden rush of P.S., an impromptu addendum, just in case it could still count.
Gage thought, I believe in story. Zeke believes in prayer. Dinah believes in magic. Rebecca Ruth — who knows what Rebecca Ruth believes in? Rebecca Ruth believes in Rebecca Ruth. Who is to say that any single one of us is wrong?
Together, they faced the little candle. Confirmed in their own convictions, everyone in the room wished.
The big wind was over, but their four wishes made a little wind, coming from four directions at once. Which of their breaths extinguished the candle?
They couldn’t tell. They would have to wait and see what came true.
– ACKNOWLEDGMENTS –
I owe thanks to a lot of people, he thought, hoping he could remember them all. He listed them:
Stephanie Loer of the Boston Globe for asking me to supply a serialized story (“Gangster Teeth”) from which What-the-Dickens descends;
Elizabeth Bicknell for the exercise of her editorial craft, which in her hands becomes an art;
Natacha Liuzzi for a little quote-hunting in libraries and bookstores;
Betty Levin, my longtime first reader and commentator;
William Reiss of John Hawkins and Associates;
the good people of West Concord Union Church, in whose basement kitchen I was allowed to work;
Andy Newman, for brushing the kids’ teeth while I took notes;
the following for their collective brilliance, referred to directly, allusively, or parodically, but always respectfully: the anonymous authors of the world of nursery rhymes; William Allingham; James Barrie; Robert Burns; Lewis Carroll; James Carville and George Stephanopoulos; the scriptwriters of Casablanca; Samuel Coleridge; Emily Dickinson; Robert Graves; Paul Heins; whoever adapted the line from Herodotus into the inscription on the Main Post Office, New York City; Madeleine L’Engle; Norman Maclean; J. G. Magee Jr., RCAF; Andrew Marvell; Edgar Lee Masters; Margaret Mitchell; Alfred Noyes; Carl Sandburg; William Shakespeare, who first used the phrase “what the dickens” in print; the Star Trek scriptwriters; Wallace Stevens; Dylan Thomas; and the scriptwriters of the 1950s Superman television series.
Gregory Maguire is best known for reimagining Oz in his books Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West and its sequel, Son of a Witch. About What-the-Dickens, he says, “I gave a writing assignment to some middle-school kids. I told them to write about the meeting between an impossible creature and an ordinary citizen. I did the assignment myself, and I came up with an ancient bedridden grandmother mistaking a lost tooth fairy for the Angel of Death. Eventually that story evolved — in the lighthearted, civilization-threatening way that stories do — into What-the-Dickens.” Gregory Maguire lives with his family outside Boston.
Gregory Maguire, What-The-Dickens: The Story of a Rogue Tooth Fairy
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