I thought I might read my daughter some fairy tales. My favorites are the ones where animals come back from the dead. I like to think of the beloved horse, reminiscing with its rider from the grave. It is skeletal now yet still has a tail to swish. What God lets us keep. What the dirt, anyway, leaves the body. But most horses aren’t buried. They’re cremated. Otherwise, there would be too many gravesites with too-big bones, confusing paleontologist and farmer’s child alike.

In fairy tales, cremation is a punishment for villains. A witch tricks a beautiful girl, and they say: now you must burn. Dance in the red-hot shoes. Jump in the furnace. Or in some of the stories: now you must bleed. Ride in a barrel, naked, with nails hammered in to prick you at every angle as we roll you down a hill. And in some stories: now you must break apart. Your arms and legs are tied to four horses that run in opposite directions, quartering you.

I always found that the most terrifying. Quartering. These villains lose their right to wholeness. I think that’s the appeal of burial, versus cremation. Ashes scatter. Bodies rot in one piece. In peace.

I wanted to read my daughter some fairy tales, but I couldn't find any suitable. She lacks the taste for gore. If she saw a dead horse, she would die. I mean she has a weak stomach. All kids do, but she, really. Even if the horse talked, and it said, “Look, Carrie, it’s me. Place an apple in my mouth to let me cross the Horse River Styx. Slip it between my translucent teeth,” Carrie would faint. I would be left to grab the apple, to tuck it in the animal’s undead maw and give it a pat on the rump and say, godspeed. And the horse would tell me it lacked the capacity to believe in God or muster up speed. But I wouldn't be listening. I’d be tending to my daughter.

Fairy tales scare me only when I stop to think about the parts that were true, like the quartering. It’s times like that, at night, in my bed, Carrie long sleeping in the other room, when it comes to me that someone was quartered in real life. Many people were. Did the horses know what they were doing? Or were they simply trying to escape the whipping, the yelling, the crowd? How could the torturers be sure all the horses would go in different directions? What if they all went the same way, and the body merely dragged and dragged along the ground, still in one piece?

I think about how none of it really has a basis—how one day man must have been a cave-dweller, barely grasping the mechanics of the mystery we would later name fire, and many years on man was tying another man, or woman, to a horse, to one, two, three, four horses, and using them to split that person apart. And it’s just like, God, how did everything occur in such a way as to go from one to the other? How did we end up with that?

I must go to sleep, because Carrie has school in the morning, and I have to take her there—not on horseback, but in the intrepid heap of parts known as my car. She depends on me, and that fact is a terribly good motivator. I remind myself that they are fairy tales, after all, and I am thinking too much, as always. I choke down melatonin. Drink chamomile tea. Lie still in the darkness of my bedroom. That doesn’t do it.

I am an animal with reason. If I died and came back from the dead, I would reunite with my daughter. I think she could handle it—weak stomach notwithstanding. Children are always surprising you, how much they mature when they must. How much they’re willing to believe. To be a girl again—to believe that fairy tales have not a kernel of truth. But there are no time machines. I can never go back. There is only knowing now.

Fairy tales don’t put me to sleep anymore. What does is the truth, paradoxically. The truth: many people were quartered. But, also, the truth (confirmed under covers by sight, by touch): there are no ropes on my wrists and ankles, no horses for miles to pull them, to split me apart and scatter me across this godforsaken earth.