This fairy tale is to be told in the morning while eating a fry-up for breakfast after a night’s heavy drinking

Tom Thumb

Have you got back together with that fellow who’s the same age as me, Mum? Oh, if only I weren’t your son... It’s not that I’ve got anything against him. He’s a good man, and he paid the 714 euros for my treatment. I’d like to take this opportunity to thank him for thinking of me and paying for my stay at the sanatorium, although it did look more like some kind of corrective institution than a place where people are cured. You know what I mean. Soon after I got there, during the first week of my stay, I was punished for listening to music during the so-called ‘hours of rest’ between 3 pm and 5.30 pm. How could I have known that the music from my iPad would be a nuisance to anyone? But I was caught. And she – Kyrie the Matron – ordered that I be locked up for two whole days and nights in an empty cellar where a chair riveted to the floor was the only furniture. I was tied to that chair and an unbearably strong spotlight was set up to shine straight in my face. You can imagine how I felt, Mum, with that sharp needle of light piercing the pupils of my eyes and the tight rope cutting into my body. I was so distressed and helpless there in the ‘Damned Cell’, as the kids at the sanatorium called that dreadful cellar with no windows and only a slit in the iron door. Within just a few hours you lose track of whether the sun is shining outside or people are sleeping peacefully in the stillness of the night. After a terribly long time, someone opens the hole in the door and peers at you. You can feel their cold, sneering gaze but can’t see who it is because your eyes feel like they’re covered with blisters of light from the constant aggression of the spotlight. Somewhere out there, beyond that little hole, behind that sarcastic tormentor, there exists a world in which people talk, move about, and sometimes, perhaps, even laugh.
You start to feel that the unpleasant, restricted world of the sanatorium is beautiful and free compared to the ‘Damned Cell’. Yes, free! But then you’re back in prison with the light stabbing you like an executioner’s knife for a long, long time without end... Until you start yelling and screaming like crazy, and that’s what you’ve become. You scream like a wild thing and howl with frayed vocal chords in a voice you’ve only heard twice before: at your own birth, and that time in the bathroom. They unlock the door. You hear Kyrie the Matron approaching and recognize her step but can’t see her in the murderous light. She comes up to you and you know she’s observing you with disdain. You can imagine she’s wearing black trousers, as usual, and the black coat she always buttons up, neat and orderly, with the blindingly white collar of a freshly ironed shirt showing at the neck. And then you hear her voice.

Mummy, if anyone has cared for me since my birth, it was you, even though I was such a shock to you! You couldn’t even admit to yourself that I was your baby. And how could you have? Such a little runt, all covered in black hair as a result of the irritation in your belly. I c