Brooklyn Bedtime Stories
By LindaAnn LoSchiavo
Nov 15, 2025
Nov 15, 2025
Nestled in the palm of my crib, I demanded a sleep-time story. Lights shushed themselves out for the performance. Unlike my mother, who’d reach for the stale bones of a Little Golden Book, my father’s wiliness galvanized the nursery as he transformed into The Raconteur, the sound cues, and a one-man band.
No Prince Charmings charged into his tales nor bland Little Miss Muffets on tuffets. Pinocchio kept his nose out of these fanciful yarns, spun feverishly from my father’s curious cleverness. Mysterious forces kidnapped his 5 o’clock voice, replacing it with a melting pot of foreign accents and haunted house chortles, the flesh of every villain created in his windpipe creeping through my pajamas to gooseflesh my legs.
We are all made of hunger. His penitentiary of poverty, growing up during the Great Depression, was perhaps reformed through humorous accounts of dark, disturbing tales of criminals and mayhem along the Brooklyn waterfront which became the crusts that nourished him ― and now the strange food he offered me at bedtime.
Sinister hues singed the nursery walls as mobsters appeared, ripe with rage, sputtering slang as a hapless fellow was fitted with cement shoes, my father’s forefinger pulling a trigger, his whispers coarsening to gunfire muffled by a silencer. Boom! Pow! Rat-a-tat-tat!
Barely decipherable in the gloom, my mother ghosted into the doorway, spilling her disregard on the carpet, imploring him to switch to “The Tinder Box” or “Rumpelstiltskin.” Compared to my father’s made-up-on-the-spot inventiveness, predictable pre-packed fairytales already made me yawn. Snow White. Rose Red. The Little Mermaid. Goldilocks. La Cenerentola. Even in my crib, I started to be suspicious of long-dead authors who had applied a thin but gratifying veneer of tragedy to each fake female’s life. Bah.
My father was onto them, too. He knew the Brothers Grimm were as grim as daily newspaper headlines and Hans Christian Andersen’s concoctions came with calamity. Fascinated by local crime bosses, whose bloody narratives were hammered out of losses, foolish choices, and bad company, his telling restored weight to its proper place via exaggeration and sly humor.
Our frugal bilingual household, always tight on money, was soothed by the buttery balm of the sprezzatura fueling my father’s neologisms and sneaky synonyms. Early on, I, who had been introduced to my hand in Italian, understood that a fairytale godmother ― una comare in Italian ― might waltz into Dad’s scenarios but refitted as a gangster’s moll, mantled in mink, equipped with her own black Cadillac. He counted on me to know that uno canarino was not my nonna’s pet songbird but a lousy snitch, that a fingerman angled a plot twist, and that dropping a dime meant revving up more melodrama.
Brooklyn bedtime stories were couture creations, designed for one listener, for one occasion, and never repeated. Predictability was never tied to the fencepost like a warning sign. There was one unspoken rule: don’t be boring.
Cradled in his mouthfuls of wonders, I would not waste time on nightmares about the decadent waterfront, the rats, the bodies tossed overboard. Instead I’d dream about spinning my syllables into sorcery, stiff enough to tame a saucer-eyed dog guarding a tinderbox, potent enough to grow a garden of my own night-dyed creations, thereby escaping all safety on the page, sealing my future, willing it into being.
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Lexicon:
nonna – grandmother comare – as part of a proper noun (i.e., Comare Maria) a godmother; in slang, a mistress canarino – canary; in slang, a snitch sprezzatura – nonchalance |
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LindaAnn LoSchiavo
Native New Yorker. Poet. Writer. Dramatist. In 2024, LindaAnn LoSchiavo had three poetry books published in 3 different countries; two titles won multiple awards. In 2025, there are two new titles: Cancer Courts My Mother — winner of the BREW Seal of Excellence and the Voyages of Verses Book Award — and Vampire Verses.
Website/socials:
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Author’s Note:
In “Brooklyn Bedtime Stories,” my favorite lines conclude my essay, specifically this: “I’d dream about spinning my syllables into sorcery, . . . potent enough to grow a garden of my own night-dyed creations, thereby escaping all safety on the page, sealing my future, willing it into being.”
By day, my father was a government employee, who toiled in The Navy Yard and telepathed to my mother on his lunch-hour. By evening, he became “the wizard of words,” weaving fantastic nonsense.
These story-telling episodes played a part in my becoming a writer.
By age 9, I had my first one-act drama onstage in New York City.
Also by age 9, I had my first poem published.
By age 15, I was writing the short story that won my school’s gold medal for “Literary Achievement.”
In 2024 I had three books published and two won awards.
In 2025, I am having two book launches. Cancer Courts My Mother has already won two awards.
By day, my father was a government employee, who toiled in The Navy Yard and telepathed to my mother on his lunch-hour. By evening, he became “the wizard of words,” weaving fantastic nonsense.
These story-telling episodes played a part in my becoming a writer.
By age 9, I had my first one-act drama onstage in New York City.
Also by age 9, I had my first poem published.
By age 15, I was writing the short story that won my school’s gold medal for “Literary Achievement.”
In 2024 I had three books published and two won awards.
In 2025, I am having two book launches. Cancer Courts My Mother has already won two awards.