Beyond the Woods: Fairy Tales Retold

by Paula Guran

  But.

  You can plant a maiden, oh yes, and watch the maiden-tree flower. And the spindle planted me into a bed, and the bed grew with me. And look, oh, look at us now.

  I have wept in my sleep and watered it, but I might have saved the moisture. The rose-briar pushed its way into my heel, sinuously, insistently, as if trying to slide in unnoticed. There was a small, innocent popping noise when it pricked the skin, and left its red mark, predictably like a stigmata. It began a slow wind through the complicated bones of my ankle, and I could feel the leaves sliding against the meat of my calf.

  Almost immediately, it detonated a blossom, a monstrous, obscene crimson unfolding on the wall like a spider, and the silence of its breathing clambered into my ear. The petals were crushed by a ceiling of skin, but no matter—in a month or two those too will break through, and all my pores will be the roots of roses.

  And with this I will tangle you up in me, came the spindle-voice, soft and shattered as a witch who has sold her soul for the magnitude of her spell. The roses came open inside my legs—oh!—the thorns broke through the nails of my toes, and there was red, nothing but red, everywhere.

  If you had lived, you would still have had the spindle stuck in you—you cannot really escape it, the bruised fingers and the sheep-sweat smell of wool in your lap. Isn’t it better this way? A rose is a rose is a rose is a maiden, maidens are supposed to be roses, and I will make of you a bed for flowers like erupting maidenheads—

  Out of my torso the briars came, up around the shaft of the spindle, around my arms like shackles, around my throat, through my hair. I was soil, I was earth, I could not move and my flesh exploded into roses with a perfume like shadows. I screamed; I was silent.

  I’ve saved you, you’ll see. I am your spindle; I am your prince; this is my kiss. With this lacerate of flowers, I have taken you out of the world, the blighted, wasted world your beauty has stripped of cloth, the poor, rubbish-strewn landscape that was the country of your birth—it is all gone now, the vineyards and the rolling hills and the corn—

  No, no, someone will come and gather me up like a sack of cotton and I will eat blueberries again and drink new milk and you will be nothing but a faint scar between my breasts and he will remark when we are old that it looks something like a star. I will never hear your voice in my bones again, you cannot keep seeding my skin forever—

  I can. Whoever said this was a hundred-year sentence and not a whit more? Calendars lie, I lie. I lie inside you no less than a liver or a spleen, I breathe your breath, I rise and fall with your sleeping breast, my needle pulses in you, warm alongside your heart, and this is all there is.

  They wound out of the room, splintering the door, down the stair, and it was not some sepulchral perfume that felled the court—no, no, the roses did it, the roses snapped round their calves and whickered a path to their throats. The stems shot past their lips and sent out their petals there like thick cakes, blocking their breath as mine was never blocked, tearing their lungs as mine were never torn. Trails of thin blood trickled out of five hundred mouths, five hundred gasps were stoppered up like water in a jar. The maiden-tree was in its summer, and from its briar-branches hung five hundred bright and bobbing fruits, orange-ladies and lemon-lords, cherry-sculleries and plum-cooks, and an apple-king, and a queen among figs.

  I am not for them. I am for you alone.

  And they were not prepared, they were not treated with gold and formaldehyde, their bodies grayed on the vine as bodies will do, and I can smell my mother’s skin sodden through with mold, and I can smell my sisters rotting.

  There is nothing but briars, briars all around, and throttling roses scouring the stone.

  Nonsense, darling. I am here.

  Please. I am so tired.

  Years later, even the bed sprouted, little tendrils of green wandering out of the rain-saturated wood, seeking out more wetness, and finding all that there is to find here—my skin, my blood, my tears. The room which was ample to hold a maiden while she slept off an overdose has become a clot of green, snarled full of woody branches and tender, new shoots. I am enough to water them all, and the spindle is enough to water me. That is the biology of maidenhood.

  And so it was that even the bridal bower became rooted in me, and the pillows were blossoms, and the coverlet was bark, and I was the heartwood, still and hard within. Aristotle, Aristotle, with your beard of briars, there are such secret things at work when a bed becomes a tree. I do not fault you for ignorance.

  I have had a long time to think.

  I am sorry about the needle.

  Catherynne M. Valente is the New York Times bestselling author of over a dozen works of fiction and poetry, including Palimpsest, the Orphan’s Tales series, Deathless, and the crowdfunded phenomenon The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making. Her most recent novel is Radiance. She is the winner of the Andre Norton, Tiptree, Mythopoeic, Rhysling, Lambda, Locus, and Hugo awards. She has been a finalist for the Nebula and World Fantasy Awards. She lives on an island off the coast of Maine with a small but growing menagerie of beasts, some of which are human.

  Attempting to save a loved one from the faeries always takes courage, intelligence, and a strong will. Holly Black’s hero is a brave “tailor” who has an almost-magical talent for creating exquisite clothing.

  The Coat of Stars

  Holly Black

  Rafael Santiago hated going home. Home meant his parents making a big fuss and a special dinner and him having to smile and hide all his secret vices, like the cigarettes he had smoked for almost sixteen years now. He hated that they always had the radio blaring salsa and the windows open and that his cousins would come by and try to drag him out to bars. He hated that his mother would tell him how Father Joe had asked after him at Mass. He especially hated the familiarity of it, the memories that each visit stirred up.

  For nearly an hour that morning he had stood in front of his dressing table and regarded the wigs and hats and masks—early versions or copies of costumes he’d designed—each item displayed on green glass heads that stood in front of a large, broken mirror. They drooped feathers, paper roses, and crystal dangles, or curved up into coiled, leather horns. He had settled on wearing a white tank-top tucked into bland gray Dockers but when he stood next to all his treasures, he felt unfinished. Clipping on black suspenders, he looked at himself again. That was better, almost a compromise. A fedora, a cane, and a swirl of eyeliner would have finished off the look, but he left it alone.

  “What do you think?” he asked the mirror, but it did not answer. He turned to the unpainted plaster face casts resting on a nearby shelf; their hollow eyes told him nothing either.

  Rafe tucked his little phone into his front left pocket with his wallet and keys. He would call his father from the train. Glancing at the wall, his gaze rested on one of the sketches of costumes he’d done for a postmodern ballet production of Hamlet. An award hung beside it. This sketch was of a faceless woman in a white gown appliquéd with leaves and berries. He remembered how dancers had held the girl up while others pulled on the red ribbons he had had hidden in her sleeves. Yards and yards of red ribbon could come from her wrists. The stage had been swathed in red. The dancers had been covered in red. The whole world had become one dripping gash of ribbon.

  The train ride was dull. He felt guilty the green landscapes that blurred outside the window did not stir him. He only loved leaves if they were crafted from velvet.

  Rafael’s father waited at the station in the same old blue truck he’d had since before Rafe had left Jersey for good. Each trip his father would ask him careful questions about his job, the city, Rafe’s apartment. Certain unsaid assumptions were made. His father would tell him about some cousin getting into trouble or, lately, his sister Mary’s problems with Marco.

  Rafe leaned back in the passenger seat, feeling the heat of the sun wash away the last of the goose bumps on his arms. He had forgotten how cold the air conditioning was on the
train. His father’s skin, sun-darkened to deep mahogany, made his own seem sickly pale. A string-tied box of crystallized ginger pastries sat at his feet. He always brought something for his parents: a bottle of wine, a tarte Tatin, a jar of truffle oil from Balducci’s.

  The gifts served as a reminder of the city and that his ticket was round-trip, bought and paid for.

  “Mary’s getting a divorce,” Rafe’s father said once he’d pulled out of the parking lot. “She’s been staying in your old room. I had to move your sewing stuff.”

  “How’s Marco taking it?” Rafe had already heard about the divorce; his sister had called him a week ago at three in the morning from Cherry Hill, asking for money so she and her son Victor could take a bus home. She had talked in heaving breaths and he’d guessed she’d been crying. He had wired the money to her from the corner store where he often went for green tea ice cream.

  “Not good. He wants to see his son. I told him if he comes around the house again, your cousin’s gonna break probation but he’s also gonna break that loco sonofabitch’s neck.”

  No one, of course, thought that spindly Rafe could break Marco’s neck.

  The truck passed people dragging lawn chairs into their front yards for a better view of the coming fireworks. Although it was still many hours until dark, neighbors milled around, drinking lemonade and beer.

  In the back of the Santiago house, smoke pillared up from the grill where cousin Gabriel scorched hamburger patties smothered in hot sauce. Mary lay on the blue couch in front of the TV, an ice mask covering her eyes. Rafael walked by as quietly as he could. The house was dark and the radio was turned way down. For once, his greeting was subdued. Only his nephew, Victor, a sparkler twirling in his hand, seemed oblivious to the somber mood.

  They ate watermelon so cold that it was better than drinking water; hot dogs and hamburgers off the grill with more hot sauce and tomatoes; rice and beans; corn salad; and ice cream. They drank beer and instant iced tea and the decent tequila that Gabriel had brought. Mary joined them halfway through the meal and Rafe was only half-surprised to see the blue and yellow bruise darkening her jaw. Mostly, he was surprised how much her face, angry and suspicious of pity, reminded him of Lyle.

  When Rafe and Lyle were thirteen, they had been best friends. Lyle had lived across town with his grandparents and three sisters in a house far too small for all of them. Lyle’s grandmother told the kids terrible stories to keep them from going near the river that ran through the woods behind their yard. There was the one about the phooka, who appeared like a goat with sulfurous yellow eyes and great curling horns and who shat on the blackberries on the first of November. There was the kelpie that swam in the river and wanted to carry off Lyle and his sisters to drown and devour. And there were the trooping faeries that would steal them all away to their underground hills for a hundred years.

  Lyle and Rafe snuck out to the woods anyway. They would stretch out on an old, bug-infested mattress and “practice” sex. Lying on his back, Lyle’d showed Rafe how to thrust his penis between Lyle’s pressed-together thighs in “pretend” intercourse.

  Lyle had forbidden certain conversations. No talk about the practicing, no talk about the bruises on his back and arms, and no talk about his grandfather, ever, at all. Rafe thought about that, about all the conversations he had learned not to have, all the conversations he still avoided.

  As fireworks lit up the black sky, Rafe listened to his sister fight with Marco on the phone. He must have been accusing her about getting the money from a lover because he heard his name said over and over. “Rafael sent it,” she shouted. “My fucking brother sent it.” Finally, she screamed that if he didn’t stop threatening her she was going to call the police. She said her cousin was a cop. And it was true; Teo Santiago was a cop. But Teo was also in jail.

  When she got off the phone, Rafe said nothing. He didn’t want her to think he’d overheard.

  She came over any way. “Thanks for everything, you know? The money and all.”

  He touched the side of her face with the bruise. She looked at the ground but he could see that her eyes had grown wet.

  “You’re gonna be okay,” he said. “You’re gonna be happier.”

  “I know,” she said. One of the tears tumbled from her eye and shattered across the toe of his expensive leather shoe, tiny fragments sparkling with reflected light. “I didn’t want you to hear all this shit. Your life is always so together.”

  “Not really,” he said, smiling. Mary had seen his apartment only once, when she and Marco had brought Victor up to see The Lion King. Rafe had sent her tickets; they were hard to get so he thought that she might want them. They hadn’t stayed long in his apartment; the costumes that hung on the walls had frightened Victor.

  She smiled too. “Have you ever had a boyfriend this bad?”

  Her words hung in the air a moment. It was the first time any of them had ventured a guess. “Worse,” he said, “and girlfriends too. I have terrible taste.”

  Mary sat down next to him on the bench. “Girlfriends too?”

  He nodded and lifted a glass of iced tea to his mouth. “When you don’t know what you’re searching for,” he said, “you have to look absolutely everywhere.”

  The summer that they were fourteen, a guy had gone down on Rafe in one of the public showers at the beach and he gloried in the fact that for the first time he had a story of almost endless interest to Lyle. It was also the summer that they almost ran away.

  “I saw grandma’s faeries,” Lyle had said the week before they were supposed to go. He told Rafe plainly, like he’d spotted a robin outside the window.

  “How do you know?” Rafe had been making a list of things they needed to bring. The pen in his hand had stopped writing in the middle of spelling “colored pencils.” For a moment, all Rafe felt was resentment that his blowjob story had been trumped.

  “They were just the way she said they’d be. Dancing in a circle and they glowed a little, like their skin could reflect the moonlight. One of them looked at me and her face was as beautiful as the stars.”

  Rafe scowled. “I want to see them too.”

  “Before we get on the train we’ll go down to where I saw them dancing.”

  Rafe added “peanut butter” to his list. It was the same list he was double-checking six days later, when Lyle’s grandmother called. Lyle was dead. He had slit his wrists in a tub of warm water the night before they were supposed to leave forever.

  Rafe had stumbled to the viewing, cut off a lock of Lyle’s blond hair right in front of his pissed-off family, stumbled to the funeral, and then slept stretched out on the freshly-filled grave. It hadn’t made sense. He wouldn’t accept it. He wouldn’t go home.

  Rafe took out his wallet and unfolded the train schedule from the billfold. He had a little time. He was always careful not to miss the last train. He looked at the small onyx and silver ring on his pinkie. It held a secret compartment inside, so well hidden that you could barely see the hinge. When Lyle had given it to him, Rafe’s fingers had been so slender that it had fit on his ring finger as easily as the curl of Lyle’s hair fit inside of it.

  As Rafe rose to kiss his mother and warn his father that he would have to be leaving, Mary thrust open the screen door so hard it banged against the plastic trashcan behind it.

  “Where’s Victor? Is he inside with you? He’s supposed to be in bed.”

  Rafe shook his head. His mother immediately put down the plate she was drying and walked through the house, still holding the dishrag, calling Victor’s name. Mary showed them the empty bed.

  Mary stared at Rafe as though he hid her son from her. “He’s not here. He’s gone.”

  “Maybe he snuck out to see some friends,” Rafe said, but it didn’t seem right. Not for a ten-year-old.

  “Marco couldn’t have come here without us seeing him,” Rafe’s father protested.

  “He’s gone,” Mary repeated, as though that explained everything. She slumped d
own in one of the kitchen chairs and covered her face with her hands. “You don’t know what he might do to that kid. Madre de Dios.”

  Rafe’s mother came back in the room and punched numbers into the phone. There was no answer at Marco’s apartment. The cousins came in from the back yard. They had mixed opinions on what to do. Some had kids of their own and thought that Mary didn’t have the right to keep Victor away from his father. Soon everyone in the kitchen was shouting. Rafe got up and went to the window, looking out into the dark backyard. Kids made up their own games and wound up straying farther than they meant to.

  “Victor!” he called, walking across the lawn. “Victor!”

  But he wasn’t there, and when Rafe walked out to the street, he could not find the boy along the hot asphalt length. Although it was night, the sky was bright with a full moon and clouds enough to reflect the city lights.

  A car slowed as it came down the street. It sped away once it was past the house and Rafe let out the breath he didn’t even realize that he had held. He had never considered his brother-in-law crazy, just bored and maybe a little resentful that he had a wife and a kid. But then, Lyle’s grandfather had seemed normal too.

  Rafe thought about the train schedule in his pocket and the unfinished sketches on his desk. The last train would be along soon and if he wasn’t there to meet it, he would have to spend the night with his memories. There was nothing he could do here. In the city, he could call around and find her the number of a good lawyer—a lawyer that Marco couldn’t afford. That was the best thing, he thought. He headed back to the house, his shoes clicking like beetles on the pavement.

  His oldest cousin had come out to talk to him in the graveyard the night after Lyle’s funeral. It had clearly creeped Teo to find his little cousin sleeping in the cemetery.

  “He’s gone.” Teo had squatted down in his blue policeman uniform. He sounded a little impatient and very awkward.