<i>Swallowing Mercury</i> Explores the Macabre Beauty of Childhood

Wioletta Greg’s story begins with waiting. “A christening shawl decorated with periwinkle and yellowed asparagus fern hung in the window of our stone house for nearly two years,” her young narrator tells us. “It tempted me with a little rose tucked in its folds, and I would have used it as a blanket for my dolls, but my mother wouldn’t let me go near it.” The shawl, we learn, is “a memento” symbolizing the absence of the narrator’s father, who was arrested for deserting from the army shortly before her birth. From the child’s-eye view, this ritualistic object takes on an aura of mystery and possibility. It clearly looms large among the adults—proof of a family’s