and speaking of things I read and forgot about, here’s one I was able to identify a while back with the help of Reddit. Paul Jennings is an Australian children’s author who usually writes about weird events with some gross-out humor for the kids, but he does the occasional story that’s just creepy. Granddad’s Gifts is one of them.
A boy and his family visit his grandmother’s farm, I think to help her prepare it for sale, since the grandfather is dead and she can’t manage on her own any more. The boy sleeps in a room with a locked cupboard, which he is instructed not to open, and of course does, finding a fox skin for wearing as a shawl. Apparently the grandfather shot and skinned it for the grandmother but she was upset by the fox’s death and they locked it away, buried the remains of the fox under a lemon tree, and never spoke of it again.
Anyway, the boy works on the farm every day, and is given two lemons from the bigger of two lemon trees on the property after work. Instead of eating them, he puts them in the cupboard, only to hear moving and chewing noises in the middle of the night. He also dreams about his grandfather, who he can’t remember well, but had striking blue eyes. In the morning, the lemons are gone, and when he touches the tail of the fox skin, he can feel two bones that weren’t there before.
So every day, he puts his lemons in the forbidden cupboard, and every night the fox skin regains two parts, and this goes on for his entire stay. Until the last day, when he finds that his grandmother has taken the last two lemons and made a pie for the family. The boy opens the cupboard to find a complete and live fox, with the exception of its eyes, which are still taxidermy glass, blind and stumbling. He locks the cupboard, then goes and sits on the step and cries, at which point his grandmother says that she doesn’t understand what the problem is, but he can have the two lemons off the small tree if he wants them so badly. The boy knows it won’t work, because it isn’t the tree where the fox was buried, but he takes them anyway.
The next day, he sees a fox run into the woods, which turns and looks at him for just long enough to notice that it has blue eyes.
His grandmother mentions that the small tree has rarely grown any lemons, and it is strange that it never grew well, because that’s where his grandfather is buried.
AUSTRALIAN CHILDREN’S LITERATURE, EVERYONE
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