No More Happy Endings

"The bedtime stories of my grandmother, Baba Jela, changed after the Bosnian civil war. Before the shooting began, her stories were ordinary, positive, life-affirming, with a clever hero or good-natured idiot overcoming challenges and a greedy foe soon reduced to a pitiful scrub. At the end, the world would turn out rosy and just, and taking part in it made sense. But after a war of nearly 100,000 deaths, millions of displaced bodies and souls, and decay peering out of every crevice, such propriety seemed unnatural. So Baba Jela decided to get rid of it. While other elderly men and woman decided to end their own lives after realizing that nothing would ever again be the way it was before the war, Baba turned her stories and lullabies dark and horrifying, her own way of refusing to play along with uncontrollable circumstances."