The Forty-Foot Sword

Snuggled against my father on the couch, hugging my stuffed Minnie Mouse, I could feel the pull of sleep hastened by Dad’s baritone reading of Gulliver’s Travels: “The maids of honor often invited Glumdalclitch to their apartments, and …”

Dad stopped reading and cleared his throat. “Laurie, you keep on reading aloud. I’m going to go to the kitchen and make some iced tea.”

“O-kay,” I said nervously. The words of the story were too big for me. The leather-bound book was heavy in my lap.

On the other side of the wall I heard Dad pull out the freeze-dried Lipton and the packets of Equal.

The page before me blurred. The text was so much smaller than that in James and the Giant Peach, my favorite book in my second-grade class. Maybe if I read it in my head first, I won’t make a mistake aloud, I thought.

Silently, I read the next line, “She would bring me along with her, on purpose to have the pleasure of seeing and touching me. They would often strip me naked from top to toe, and lay me at full length in their bosoms.”  I felt I might be sick. I knew that “bosoms” were part of a woman’s bathing suit area. And why was Gulliver naked? It was so horribly gross. I couldn’t read this aloud to my Dad.

“Why aren’t you reading?” Dad called from the kitchen.

“Um,” I squeaked. “There is a really big word I don’t know.”

“Sound it out,” I could hear Dad snapping the plastic tub of ice, cubes clinking as they fell into a glass.

“Ok!” I squeaked. I need to get through this gross part before he comes back. I don’t want him to read this stuff to me!

I skipped to the next paragraph. It got worse. The maids of honor continued to play with Gulliver, one even setting him on her nipple. What is wrong with this book?

The metal spoon clinked against the glass. Dad would be coming back soon.

Please God, let the nasty part be over, I prayed silently as I flipped the page. As Dad returned to the living room I read about Gulliver witnessing an execution of one of the giants, “his head cut off at one blow, with a sword of about forty feet long. The veins and arteries spouted up such a prodigious quantity of blood, and so high in the air, that the great jet d'eau at Versailles was not equal to it for the time it lasted,”

“Wait Laurie,” Dad sat back down on the couch. Oh no, he will know I skipped the nasty part. “It’s pronounced “jeh do at Ver-sigh” not “jet d-ee-o at Ver-sails.”

I nodded my head. “But other than that, you are reading well. Do you want to continue?”

I hesitated. The words were big. But I needed to be the censor. For the both of us.

“Ok.”