by Valerie Volk
He locked the doors, and took away
the pretty clothes he’d lavished on her …
(Dressed in rags? Now that’s a laugh!
The ones who wore the hand-me-downs
were my poor girls. No wonder
Ruby and Priscilla tried to pay her back.
But daddy always took her side.
They didn’t stand a chance!)
“For your own good,” he told her
as he shut her in.
“I just want daddy’s little girl to stay
the same sweet innocent she is.”
I wouldn’t call what she was ‘innocent.’
She’d learned a thing or two from him.
Time to act – and she was eager.
“Find yourself a prince!’ I said. “I’ll help.”
Not hard to find the key and organize a taxi,
find her some pretty clothes, and warn
“Make sure that you get back in time,
before his meeting ends and he gets home,”
I’d love to know what story teller
invented midnight as the time.
I’d told her 10 pm.
The first few nights we managed it all right,
and she was properly grateful.
Said I was her fairy godmother. We’d made
a sort of peace between us by that time.
New life for her –
maybe for me too …
She found her prince, of course.
A nice young man;
a salesman in a shoe shop in the town.
They met one day when she sneaked out,
(a little help from me) to buy some dancing shoes.
I guess that might explain how later on
the story got re-told.
They left together,
and her name’s not mentioned in the house
these days. Our lives have been much quieter.
The place is still at night.
The stairs don’t creak.
It makes me feel a bit queer, though,
when often in the middle of the night,
his bedroom door clicks shut – it has a real
distinctive sound –
then I hear the footsteps pause …
outside what would be Ruby’s door.
Sleeping Beauty (Briar Rose)
At the christening of a long-awaited baby princess, all the invited fairies offer gifts. But hosts really must check a guest list very carefully; there’s a danger if it causes offence! One fairy, angry at being left out, gate-crashes the party and brings an unwanted gift – one day the princess will die after pricking her finger on a needle. This fate is altered by a final gift from another fairy; though the curse can’t be undone, rather than death she will sleep for a hundred years. Despite great efforts to ban all needles from the castle, the curse is fulfilled on the girl’s sixteenth birthday, and the entire castle and all inhabitants are plunged into a deep sleep. The building itself is surrounded by an impenetrable hedge of thorns. Rescue comes when a handsome prince breaks through the thorns, is overcome by love, and kisses the princess, at which all wake. Amor vincit omnia wins out again.
Sleeping Beauties
Dad and bodies.
That’s what I remember.
Not something classy, like pathology.
Not even a GP. No family doctor.
But bodies fascinated us.
Forensic science shows on telly –
they had us hooked.
Cadavers stretched on gurneys,
whine of saw into rib cages,
flaps of skin peeled back
with expertise. An art.
So is embalming.
That was Dad’s field.
A whiff can take me back.
Formaldehyde and ethanol,
humectants – tools of trade –
all my childhood world.
He wanted me to follow
in the family business.
Not my scene.
I tried – real hard.
Could manage most of it:
draining blood, injecting fluids,
Okay. But other bits repugnant.
Compensations though.
Some bits I liked.
Grooming of the face and body.
Cosmetics, a real blush of life,
outlining lips, light powder coating
to prevent the oily sheen
that might upset the grieving viewers.
Easier to do on bodies that lie still.
True of other things as well.
Not good to tell too many others
just how I earn a crust. Especially
girls.
Hard anyway
to find a girl. Stammered.
Blushed. Blood uncontrollable
would redden cheeks, ears, nose, and leave me
flushed, perspiring, and apologetic.
The nicer ones would smile and treat me gently;
most laughed and went away.
I learned.
Yearning flesh
withers and subsides
when faced with a real girl.
Better those quiescent figures
who haunted night’s imaginings.
“Leave well alone,” that was my dad’s advice.
“They’re trouble, women,” he was quick to say.
After she went we didn’t talk of mum.
We had a quiet life.
Quiet in the house.
Quiet in the mortuary too.
I fixed Dad when he died.
He looked the same as always.
But silent.
Not that we’d ever talked much;
we liked the quiet.
Same with the work too. Those bodies
were so still. They never criticised or sneered.
Women lying absolutely passive.
No expectations, no demands on me,
except to make them look as good as ever.
Or better.
I took a pride in that.
“There, sweetheart,” I said once.
“Bet you never knew that you could look like that.”
She had a look, a half smile, I was sure
no-one except her lovers ever saw before.
She was the first one that I kissed.
Cool kisses – for the first time I was fine:
no blush, no stutter
when I spoke. I knew
I’d found the women for me. After that,
the rest was easy.
But wondered sometimes what it might be like
with someone who was still alive ...
Not enough to take the risk. All that writhing,
bodies straining, struggling with each other.
Who’d need that? My way was better.
My work was good; I had a reputation.
When someone special died, they called me in.
State funerals and dignitaries; people
in the social swim. If family wanted someone
to look good, they knew they needed me.
Different this time, though.
She was the real McCoy.
Social pages, top-drawer stuff,
although she had been out to it a long long time,
years in fact.
No, not a hundred, that’s typical
of how these stories get blown up
and out of all proportion.
Just like that other tale,
that she’d been cursed at birth. I ask you!
Who’d believe that sort of garbage?
I grant you
that it was a mystery, the way she’d suddenly
collapsed, and then was out to it, in la-la land.
Expensive nursing home …
they called it coma.
Gossip, sure. A lot. We heard
the stories, talk of needles in her room.
There’s always someone who will think the worst.
People do ha
ve nasty minds.
All those doctors! Still, no explanation,
or even what might happen next.
And so they kept her,
cared for, lovely as she’d always been.
Or even, I thought, better,
in her stillness and her sleep.
They showed me photos, later.
I swallowed hard.
She was a vision as she lay there.
When it was over,
came the call to me:
“Keep her just the way she is!”
They left me to my ministrations.
My rules.
No interruptions.
A priest. Her priest, summoned to adore. And,
in adoring, to preserve to all eternity.
An old familiar surge of feeling,
the need to have her, to possess.
So this is where there is indeed
some truth in that familiar tale
that generations have so utterly distorted.
So beautiful, a sleeping beauty,
still and white,
her flesh almost translucent.
I leaned above her,
lifted from her lovely face
the veil that tender hands had laid there.
She was the woman I had waited for.
My lips touched hers in our first kiss.
And then the stupid bitch woke up.
Snow White
When her magic mirror informs a wicked queen that she is no longer the fairest in the kingdom, she becomes jealous of the beauty of her young step-daughter. It’s no fun seeing the younger generation take over! The queen arranges for the girl to be disposed of in the forest, but her life is saved and she is taken in by seven dwarves, becoming their servant. The mirror, quite distressingly honest, lets the queen know that her beauty is still out-shone by Snow White. This calls for more action. After several failed attempts, the queen, disguised as an old peasant, tricks the girl with a poisoned apple. In a deep coma, Snow White is preserved in a glass coffin by the heart-broken dwarves, until a passing prince sees the coffin and falls in love with its beautiful inmate. He kisses her, dislodging the poisoned apple from her throat, and she wakes. As the queen might have said: “You can’t keep a good woman down …”
A Tiny Tale
‘Little’ –
not a word I’ve ever liked –
or any of its synonyms.
‘Mini’, ‘scaled down’, ‘diminished’.
They’re really much the same.
They carry with them
connotations of inferior,
a lesser world.
A lesser man?
‘Big is beautiful’ – hah!
An outmoded concept!
But for a while there it was central
in the thinking of a world
that had not recognised the dangers
in its expanding picture of the universe.
Among ourselves we talk about it now,
in tones of cynical amusement,
how experts castigate the eighties’ sins
and how today the ‘less is more’ philosophy,
a world where ‘small is beautiful’,
has more to offer.
But they’ve not yet accommodated
human beings
in this new perspective.
Might have improved my schooldays if they had.
Years of playing clown,
Butt of every acned pre-pubescent joker.
Trapped,
locked in rabbit hutches in the playground.
Stuffy, claustrophobic,
frightened whites of eyes stare back at me.
Picked up and stuffed in rubbish bins
(oh yes, I was an easy fit!)
planted high on ledges others might
have safely jumped from –
(yet another broken arm …)
while Happy tells of his especial torment:
the guys who spent each lunchtime holding him at bay
while that day’s lucky winner got to tickle him
until he wet his pants. That’s how
he got his nickname – “Happy” –
uncontrollable, the giggling.
Me?
I just retreated from the world
and slept.
Through classes, breaks and lunchtimes.
They named me ‘Sleepy’.
Not much fun if poking, prodding,
won’t wake up the promised
victim.
It was only when we got together,
our salvation came.
Till then we hadn’t realised
that we were … marketable.
Circuses were first;
always keen on Little People.
A few of us joined forces,
found a whole new world
in film, stage shows, the television.
Ever noticed all those Munchkins?
We were there. You wouldn’t find
a costume drama of the past
without us.
Got ourselves an agent – did OK.
The four of us were often in demand.
Yes, only four of course. The way
these stories get passed on is never right.
Seven? No way. Who ever heard
of seven Little People living in a forest home?
I guess the house we share,
which sort of borders on a park,
gave rise to that revision of the truth …
Yet if we hadn’t had that house
and gone out most nights walking in the woods
we never would have found her.
We took her home and cleaned her up.
She was so white that it was scary.
“She looks like snow,” said Happy. “Snowy white.”
Clothing bloodied, torn to shreds;
threw that away. Those guys
had had their fun with her. When she came to,
she couldn’t tell us anything. Didn’t seem
to know who did it, but screamed
blue murder when she saw us there.
We knew the world.
Knew if we took her anywhere, we’d get the blame.
What to do?
But Dopey always has good stuff. Doc sees
to his supplies. And ours.
We settled her with that;
soon she was as quiet as a lamb.
I don’t know whose idea it was but, looking back,
whoever thought of it should be congratulated.
She keeps the house quite clean, and doesn’t seem
to mind at all the fact that she’s our guest.
Prisoner? Such an ugly word.
She’s kept contented. Dopey’s job.
She gets her fix each day, and never finds
the nightly payment any problem.
We find a roster system works real well.
Except some nights we all share in the fun.
At least she gets a home now
in return for what those others got for free.
Goldilocks and the Three Bears
An inquisitive little girl called Goldilocks is wandering through the forest when she comes upon a charming cottage. No-one has ever informed her that curiosity killed the cat … So, finding no-one home, she walks in. It could be called breaking and entering – but then, the door was unlocked. She finds three chairs; one is too hard, the next too soft, so she sits on the smallest of the three, unfortunately breaking it. Next she tries the three bowls of porridge on the table, rejecting one as too hot, the next as too cold, but eating all of the third, as just right. Tired, she goes upstairs to the bedroom: one bed is too hard, the second too soft, but she falls asleep in the ‘just right’ third. On a good day, we’d call her ‘discriminating;’ on a bad day we’d say she was ‘picky.’ When the three bears who own the cottage return to find a broken chair, porridge eaten, and an intruder in bed, they angrily chase her from their home. One
is inclined to feel they were justified!
The Bare Facts
Of course she fooled us all –
the little slut!
I should have had the wit
to see it wouldn’t be
a good idea. But when
I found her at the bus stop,
the make-up from her eyes,
those big blue eyes,
in streaks of black that lingered
down her dolly cheeks,
her yellow curls a tangled mess –
well, call it ‘golden’ if you must –
she just stirred something in me,
something I hadn’t felt a long long time.
I guess you’d call it …
‘motherly’.
I always would have liked a daughter.
This little waif said she had
no-one,
no friends, no money, and no place to go.
I took her home.
Edward hit the roof.
“What made you bring her here?”
But then it wasn’t long before
she’d wheedled her way round him too.
I should have seen much earlier
just what the little minx was up to.
Yet still
I found her loving ways
so winning …
clearly he did too.
I had such pleasure
brushing out those golden curls.
Young Ted took longer though.
A canny lad, our Ted, for all the way
they joked at school.
They called him Teddy Bear.
He liked his food, that’s true. So did we all.
But Teddy’s baby fat
kept girls away.
Until she came …
Then Ted for all his wariness
had no defence against her charms.
She had the three of us
in thrall. She ate our food,
sat in our chairs, slept in our beds.
Oh yes, I’m not a one to be suspicious,
but I well knew whose beds she’d slept in.
They’d had her, both of them – the way
they looked at her made that quite clear –
while she was like a cat
who’d swallowed cream!
It wasn’t true, the way they told it later.
Made it sound as if she was
a victim!
I kept my peace, and let the story stand.
We didn’t throw her out. Truth was
she sloped away one night,
with every bit of cash we had, my jewellery,
and all the family silver. We never saw
young Goldilocks again.
I sometimes wonder
who she’s taking for a ride these days.
Rapunzel
