| Fairy
Tale Review,
The Blue Issue
Table
of Contents, The Blue Issue
Editor’s
Note
Kim Addonizio, “Ever After”
Joshua Beckman & Matthew Rohrer, Four Stories
Aimee Bender,
“Appleless”
Mary Caponegro, “Carrion Comfort”
Julie
Choffel, "Rapunzelus Goldilocksii"
Monica Fambrough, "Girls Will Be Girlscouts"
Sarah Hannah, Two
Poems
Brent Hendricks,
“Hansel”
Norman Lock, 13 Tales
Stacey Richter, “A Case Study of Emergency Room Procedure
and Risk Management by Hospital Staff Members in the Urban
Facility”
Marjorie Sandor, “The White Cat”
Kiki Smith, “Rapture,” “In a Field”
Donna Tartt, “From Barrie to Stevenson”
Sara Veglahn, Two Poems
Marina Warner, “Rapture: A Girl Story for Kiki Smith”
Kate Bernheimer, Francine Prose,
Kiki Smith, Wendy Weitman, Jack Zipes, “Retelling Little
Red et al: Fairy Tales in Art & Literature,” transcript
of a panel held through the Museum of Modern Art, NYC
Contributor’s Notes
Appleless
Aimee Bender
I once knew a girl who wouldn't eat apples. She wove her walking
around groves and orchards. She didn't even like to look at
them. They're all mealy, she said. Or else too cheeky, too
bloomed. No, she stated again, in case we had not heard her,
our laps brimming with Granny Smiths and Red Deliciouses.
With Galas and Spartans and yellow Golden Globes. But we had
heard her, from the very first; we just couldn't help offering
again. Please, we pleaded, eat. Cracking our bites loudly,
exposing the dripping wet white inside.
It's
unsettling to meet people who don't eat apples.
The
rest of us, now, eat only apples, to compensate. She has declared
herself so apple-less, we feel we have no other choice. We
sit in the orchard together, cross-legged, and when they fall
off the trees into our outstretched hands, we bite right in.
They are pale green, striped red-on-red, or a yellow and orange
sunset. They are the threaded Fujis, with streaks of woven
jade and beige, or the dark and rosy Rome Beauties. Pippins,
Pink Ladies, Braeburns, Macintosh. The orchard grows them
all.
We
suck water off the meat. Drink them dry. We pick apple skin
out from the spaces between our teeth. We eat the stem and
the seeds. And for the moment, there are enough beauties bending
the branches for all of us to stay fed for awhile. We circle
around the core, teeth busy, and while we chew, we watch the
girl circle our orchard, in her long swishing skirts, eyes
averted.
One
day we see her, and it's too much. She is so beautiful on
this day, her skin as wide and open as a river. We could swim
right down her. It's unbearable to just let her walk off,
and all at once, we abandon our laps of apples and run over.
Her hair is so long and wheatlike you could bake it into bread.
For a second our hearts pang, for bread. Bread! We've been
eating only apples now for weeks.
We
close in; we ring her. Her lips fold into each other; our
lips skate all over her throat, her bare wrists, her empty
palms. We kiss her like we've been starving and she tilts
her head down so she doesn't have to look at us. We knead
her hair and kiss down the long line of her leg beneath the
shift of her skirt. We pray to her and our breath is ripe
with apple juice. You can see the tears start races down her
face while our hands move in to touch the curve of her breasts
and the scoop of her neckline. She is so new. There are pulleys
in her skin. Our fingers, all together, work their way to
her bare body, past the voluminous yards of cloth. Past those
loaves of hair. We find her in there, and she is so warm and
so alive and we see the tears, but stop? Impossible. We breathe
in, closer. Her eyelashes brighten with water. Her shoulders
tremble like doves. She is weeping into our arms, she is crumpling
down and we are inside her clothes now and our hands and mouths
are everywhere. There's no sound at all but the slip of skin
and her crying and the apples in the orchard thumping, un-caught:
our lunches and dinners and breakfasts. It's an unfamiliar
sound, because for weeks now, we have not let even one single
fruit hit dirt.
She
cries through it all and when we're done and piled around
her, suddenly timid and spent, suddenly withered nothings,
she is the first to stand. She gathers her skirts around herself,
and smoothes back down her hair. She wipes her eyes clear
and folds her hands around her waist. She is away from the
orchard before we can stand properly and beg her to stay.
Before we can grovel and claw at her small perfect feet. We
watch her walk and she's slow and proud but none of us can
possibly catch her. We splay on the ground in a circle instead
as she gets smaller and smaller on the horizon.
She
never comes by the orchard again, and in a week, all the apples
are gone. They fall off the trees and the trees make no new
ones. The air smells like snow on the approach. No one dares
to mention her but every morning, all of our eyes are fixed
on the road, waiting, hoping, staring through the bare branches
of an empty orchard. Our stomachs rumble, hungry. The sky
is always this same sort of blue. It is so beautiful here.
Fair
Seed-time: A Tale
Sarah
Hannah
“Fair
seed-time had my soul, and I grew up
Fostered alike by beauty and by fear.”
—Wordsworth
A
pregnant woman can’t afford to laugh off
Superstition. March, she pads cautiously along the river.
She is startled by the sudden pronouncements
Of crocuses, a hand of them lighting all at once.
She thinks the pheasant notices and is spooked
By them also. April, she hangs red around the nursery—
Cloaks and yarns, a pompon on the crib—a Jewish charm
To ward off evil. She turns her paintings of skulls to the
wall,
Commences a different style: across turbid seas,
A flotsam of Redonesque flowers.
She doesn’t drink or smoke.
She’s careful not to stand too many hours.
The first of June, eight p.m., certificate of live birth:
WITNESS MY HAND
AND THE SEAL OF THE CITY REGISTRAR.
After digits, limbs, and breath are all accounted for,
The notary will make several typographical errors:
The child’s name will lose all hs. He’ll
ask the mother’s
Occupation, and when she tells him artist
He’ll type housewife.
A side effect of labor will occur:
The skin beneath her thumbs will flush
And mottle, deeply red—
A permanent crimson at the palms.
Hansel
Brent Hendricks
He
decided to do it anyway—walked out the door
and dropped his first memory at the driveway's edge.
It was the beginning scene, way back when,
of the kid with the miraculous leg of wood
galloping across a neighbor's yard.
And on from there. At the city line
he left his grandmother's smile
and by the time he strolled the frontage road
his friends from high school were roadside trash.
In the suburbs he unloaded his father's funeral,
a cast of lovers, the Mexican sunset
that glazed the ocean red,
all images littering the path he walked
like bread crumbs leading back somewhere.
And only a few birds circled above.
He realized soon he should turn around,
the stakes climbing, but the sky he saw
was overfilling with sky, his fields swept green,
wildflowers teeming to an impossible yellow
as he moved along a country road.
Then a shudder of wind about a mile behind—
and a louder buffeting at the trail head—
something, a feeling, a memory of wings
widened behind his eyes.
As the earth beat loud in the trace of his veins
he fled up the hill and high in the trees.
He was changing to light as his bones rose.
He remembered everything at the speed of brightness.
The
White Cat
Marjorie
Sandor
In the stories you liked best as a child, my love, there was
always a terrible repetition of tests. The hero, in order
to win a wife and make his fortune, set out full of confidence
to retrieve some object not even precious to himself. He was
driven by the father-king who, facing the wobbling end of
his reign, was in an unusually selfish, wheedling mood. And,
let’s face it, this father had never been a noble fellow:
forever trying to steal a kingdom, or defend his own against
imagined enemies.
Three times the hero plunges back into the unknown world he
has by dream of accident discovered, where the treasure—coveted
by the king, whose hungers are unconscious and therefore impossible
to sate—lies surrounded by obstacle, tedium, dragon.
Three times he plunges in, three times risks his life to get
the prize: first it’s the golden apple, second, the
magical linen woven of thread so fine the whole cloth can
pass through the smallest needle, and at last, the tiniest
dog in the world, who can best be heard barking inside a corn
kernel, itself enclosed in a walnut shell.
The trouble is, in that other world, there appears someone
more alluring than the object of the quest, for instance a
beautiful white cat who begs the hero to stay—without
words, of course. Please stay. Take the treasure back to the
king, but come back. I need you here. I am forbidden to say
why.
The mystery of the white cat’s need, not to mention
her startlingly human beauty and intelligence, is far more
deep and fulfilling and morally necessary than the foolish
king’s demand for a golden something-or-other. It in
fact turns the quest trivial, wrong, and inconsequential.
With each successive journey it gets harder and harder to
cross the border back to the king, the real world. The reward—wife
and land and future fortune—goes dim, the whole thing
revealed for what it is, a repetitive, pointless exercise,
an exchange of commodities: Golden apple for king’s
kingdom, princess-bride, etc. The taste of ashes in his mouth,
the hero travels into middle-age. Meanwhile, deep in the woods
of his awakened imagination, the cat-queen who can offer no
material reward or even a logical reason why he should give
up the world for her, waits helplessly by the midnight gates
of her kingdom, bound by an ancient curse of silence, forbidden
to ask favors or tell her story. Who is she? You don’t
know, but the prince’s third and final return to his
father’s castle, with apple, linen, dog at last acceptable
to the king, and the earthly reward achieved, always left
you feeling hollow, incomplete.
By now the lost domain, with its caverns and balustrades,
its pointed gates and absolute danger, had gotten hold of
you.
Meanwhile, back at the king’s palace, the elusive world
is dismissed with shocking ease by courtiers and peasants
alike. The prince himself is now bound by silence, too, his
story trapped behind walls and briars and the hills in the
distance, until, like the blurry cluster of the Pleiades,
it is only visible when you gaze to the side.
But it’s too late: your heart’s been surprised,
its true domain awakened. A domain that will haunt you until
you go looking for it once more, on your own and without assignment,
without hope that it will bring you anything useful in this
world. Certainly it won’t make your fortune. It will,
in fact, destroy you, as far as the king and his courtiers
are concerned. Is this the world you lean toward, the one
you cannot reenter a fourth time without dying, without abandoning
the life lived reasonably, dutifully, under the king? Do you
fear that if you put your sword to that life, everything,
including the white cat, your silenced queen, might turn to
ash along with everything else?
In the fairy tales of your childhood, my love, recall that
the hero never came to this pass. He stayed home after the
third journey, ever dutiful, and was rewarded by the last-minute
appearance of a girl, strangely familiar, but from another
kingdom entirely. And in that same moment, the father-king
is released from the terrible grasp of his own desires, and
lets you marry her. Who can say which is the greater miracle?
Never mind: the kingdom rejoices.
You rejoice too, but even at the height of celebration you
suspect the truth. I do, too: I watch you sleeping. I know
that when you look across the border in your dreams, you see
her plainly there, the white cat lost in her castle, her woods,
her kingdom, she of fantastic, inhuman dignity, forever awaiting
rescue. Observe her closely: she is your own kerneled heart,
woven of miraculous thread and thrice-protected from human
view, she whose life will open like a palm on the day, please
God far from now—of your own death.
White Cat, I am revealed for what I am: his human wife. Be
patient. Keep by the gate as you must. Silent sufferer, cruelly
bound, wait as we wait, but on the other side.
HUM
Sara
Veglahn
I.
I
was this once:
a sparrow refusing supper
my small fevers making small steam
A
little engine
flying up
I’ve polished my children until they shined
II.
I
surface
from a slender river
a
little sack of stuff
nothing pretty
in
an old face in an old age
singing several debts
to
the sinner in the corn
III.
It
is not possible
to be grateful
It is not possible
I left the forest, left the view
I left the children and their bells
IV.
I work wires into drone
I make a dreadful sound
I
am nothing
but a flame
inside the golden egg
that I am
V.
Understand:
I was in the alleyway
My children fell out the window
I was breathing all right
I was there in my splendor that you called nervous
VI.
It’s not the same thing twice ever
you
couldn’t say that
about
anything ever
but in my mind
I
was calling out so loud
it seemed impossible you didn’t hear me
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