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[Page 4] RIVERHEAD BOOKS An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC 375 Hudson Street New York, New York 10014 Copyright © 2016 by Helen Oyeyemi Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader. The following stories have been previously published: “Books and Roses” (excerpt, Granta 129: Fate ); “Drownings” ( The White Review ); “‘Sorry’ Doesn’t Sweeten Her Tea” ( Ploughshares ); “Dornička and the St. Martin’s Day Goose” (Hayward Gallery anthology Carsten Höller: Decision ). The lines here are from (“Rice”), originally published in the poetry collection (No Place to Go Back for Longing) by Jak-ga-jeong-shin, Seoul, South Korea, 1998. Reproduced by permission of Chun Yang Hee. The lines here are from Karel Jaromír Erben, Kytice , translated from the Czech by Susan Reynolds (London: Jantar Publishing, 2013). eBook ISBN 978-0-698-40787-9 This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. Version_1 [Page 5] contents title page copyright epigraph books and roses “sorry” doesn’t sweeten her tea is your blood as red as this? drownings presence a brief history of the homely wench society dornička and the st. martin’s day goose freddy barrandov checks . . . in? if a book is locked there’s probably a good reason for that don’t you think acknowledgments about the author [Page 6] open me carefully —written on an envelope containing a letter from Emily Dickinson to Susan Huntington Gilbert, June 11, 1852 [Page 7] O books and roses FOR JAUME VALLCORBA nce upon a time in Catalonia a baby was found in a chapel. This was over at Santa Maria de Montserrat. It was an April morning. And the baby was so wriggly and minuscule that the basket she was found in looked empty at first glance. The child had got lost in a corner of it, but courageously wriggled her way back up to the top fold of the blanket in order to peep out. The monk who found this basket searched desperately for an explanation. His eyes met the wooden eyes of the Virgin of Montserrat, a mother who has held her child on her lap for centuries, a gilded child that doesn’t breathe or grow. In looking upon that great lady the monk received a measure of her unquestioning love and fell to his knees to pray for further guidance, only to find that he’d knelt on a slip of paper that the baby had dislodged with her wriggling. The note read: 1. You have a Black Madonna here, so you will know how