# 3

"Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten " - G. K. Chesterton

I'd wanted to write a story for my daughters that told them something I wished I'd known when I was a boy: that being brave doesn't mean you aren't scared. Being brave means you are scared, really scared, badly scared, and you do the right thing anyway. 

Coraline wondered why so few of the adults she had met made any sense. She sometimes wondered who they thought they were talking to. 

"You people are spread all over the place. Cats, on the other hand, keep ourselves together. If you see what I mean?" (Dialogue by a talking cat to Coraline) 

Coraline knew that when grown-ups told you something wouldn't hurt it almost always did. She shook her head. 

She did not know where she was; she was not entirely sure who she was. It is astonishing just how much of what we are can be tied to the beds we wake up in the morning, and it is astonishing how fragile that can be. 

"Names, names, names," said another voice, all faraway and lost. "The names are the first things to go, after the breath is gone, and the beating of the heart. We keep our memories longer than our names."

"She's not best pleased," said the thing that was once the other father. "Not best pleased at all. You've put her quite out of sorts. And when gets out of sorts, she takes it out in everybody else. It's her way. "

"Yes," said Coraline, " I'm not frightened, she told herself, and as she thought it she knew that is was true. There was nothing that frightened her. These things - even the thing in the cellar - were illusions, things made by thr other mother in a ghastly parody of the real people and real things on the other end of the corridor. She couldn't truly make anything, decided Caroline. She could only twist and copy and distort things that already existed. 

"M-my governess, " said the boy, "used to say that nobody is given more to shoulder than he or she can bear. "