This is a picture from ‘The Cabbage-Patch Mother,’ another story in the collection ‘There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill her Neighbour’s Baby’ by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya. The sentence conjured up the image so vividly I had to get it down on paper. Because the tales are translated from the Russian I made the matchbox Russian too.
‘The girl’s mother took out a matchbox she kept in her breast pocket, and out of this matchbox she took half of a hollowed bean, and in that cradle, wiping the sleep from her eyes with her tiny little fists, sat a tiny little girl.’
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