Beyond the Woods: Fairy Tales Retold

by Paula Guran

  She shrugs her pink-white shoulders. “Four, five months ago, he came through, I woke up,” she says. “He was a nice guy, okay in bed. She was a real bitch, though.”

  “Who was?” you ask.

  Briar Rose finally notices that her new husband is glaring at her. “What can I say?” she says, and shrugs. “I have a thing for guys in squeaky boots.”

  “Who was a bitch?” you ask again.

  “The Snow Queen,” she says, “the slut in the sleigh.”

  This is the list you carry in your pocket, of the things you plan to say to Kay, when you find him, if you find him:

  1.I’m sorry that I forgot to water your ferns while you were away that time.

  2.When you said that I reminded you of your mother, was that a good thing?

  3.I never really liked your friends all that much.

  4.None of my friends ever really liked you.

  5.Do you remember when the cat ran away, and I cried and cried and made you put up posters, and she never came back? I wasn’t crying because she didn’t come back. I was crying because I’d taken her to the woods, and I was scared she’d come back and tell you what I’d done, but I guess a wolf got her, or something. She never liked me anyway.

  6.I never liked your mother.

  7.After you left, I didn’t water your plants on purpose. They’re all dead.

  8.Goodbye.

  9.Were you ever really in love with me?

  10.Was I good in bed, or just average?

  11.What exactly did you mean, when you said that it was fine that I had put on a little weight, that you thought I was even more beautiful, that I should go ahead and eat as much as I wanted, but when I weighed myself on the bathroom scale, I was exactly the same weight as before, I hadn’t gained a single pound?

  12.So all those times, I’m being honest here, every single time, and anyway I don’t care if you don’t believe me, I faked every orgasm you ever thought I had. Women can do that, you know. You never made me come, not even once.

  13.So maybe I’m an idiot, but I used to be in love with you.

  14.I slept with some guy, I didn’t mean to, it just kind of happened. Is that how it was with you? Not that I’m making any apologies, or that I’d accept yours, I just want to know.

  15.My feet hurt, and it’s all your fault.

  16.I mean it this time, goodbye.

  The Princess Briar Rose isn’t a bimbo after all, even if she does have a silly name and a pink castle. You admire her dedication to the art and practice of sleep. By now you are growing sick and tired of traveling, and would like nothing better than to curl up in a big featherbed for one hundred days, or maybe even one hundred years, but she offers to loan you her carriage, and when you explain that you have to walk, she sends you off with a troop of armed guards. They will escort you through the forest, which is full of thieves and wolves and princes on quests, lurking about. The guards politely pretend that they don’t notice the trail of blood that you are leaving behind. They probably think it’s some sort of female thing.

  It is after sunset, and you aren’t even half a mile into the forest, which is dark and scary and full of noises, when bandits ambush your escort, and slaughter them all. The bandit queen, who is grizzled and gray, with a nose like an old pickle, yells delightedly at the sight of you. “You’re a nice plump one for my supper!” she says, and draws her long knife out of the stomach of one of the dead guards. She is just about to slit your throat, as you stand there, politely pretending not to notice the blood that is pooling around the bodies of the dead guards, that is now obliterating the bloody tracks of your feet, the knife that is at your throat, when a girl about your own age jumps onto the robber queen’s back, pulling at the robber queen’s braided hair as if it were reins.

  There is a certain family resemblance between the robber queen and the girl who right now has her knees locked around the robber queen’s throat. “I don’t want you to kill her,” the girl says, and you realize that she means you, that you were about to die a minute ago, that travel is much more dangerous than you had ever imagined. You add an item of complaint to the list of things that you plan to tell Kay, if you find him.

  The girl has half-throttled the robber queen, who has fallen to her knees, gasping for breath. “She can be my sister,” the girl says insistently. “You promised I could have a sister and I want her. Besides, her feet are bleeding.”

  The robber queen drops her knife, and the girl drops back onto the ground, kissing her mother’s hairy gray cheek. “Very well, very well,” the robber queen grumbles, and the girl grabs your hand, pulling you farther and faster into the woods, until you are running and stumbling, her hand hot around yours.

  You have lost all sense of direction; your feet are no longer set upon your map. You should be afraid, but instead you are strangely exhilarated. Your feet don’t hurt anymore, and although you don’t know where you are going, for the very first time you are moving fast enough, you are almost flying, your feet are skimming over the night-black forest floor as if it were the smooth, flat surface of a lake, and your feet were two white birds. “Where are we going?” you ask the robber girl.

  “We’re here,” she says, and stops so suddenly that you almost fall over. You are in a clearing, and the full moon is hanging overhead. You can see the robber girl better now, under the light of the moon. She looks like one of the bad girls who loiter under the street lamp by the corner shop, the ones who used to whistle at Kay. She wears black leatherette boots laced up to her thighs, and a black, ribbed T-shirt and grape-colored plastic shorts with matching suspenders. Her nails are painted black, and bitten down to the quick. She leads you to a tumbledown stone keep, which is as black inside as her fingernail polish, and smells strongly of dirty straw and animals.

  “Are you a princess?” she asks you. “What are you doing in my mother’s forest? Don’t be afraid. I won’t let my mother eat you.”

  You explain to her that you are not a princess, what you are doing, about the map, who you are looking for, what he did to you, or maybe it was what he didn’t do. When you finish, the robber girl puts her arms around you and squeezes you roughly. “You poor thing! But what a silly way to travel!” she says. She shakes her head and makes you sit down on the stone floor of the keep and show her your feet. You explain that they always heal, that really your feet are quite tough, but she takes off her leatherette boots and gives them to you.

  The floor of the keep is dotted with indistinct, motionless forms. One snarls in its sleep, and you realize that they are dogs. The robber girl is sitting between four slender columns, and when the dog snarls, the thing shifts restlessly, lowering its branchy head. It is a hobbled reindeer. “Well go on, see if they fit,” the robber girl says, pulling out her knife. She drags it along the stone floor to make sparks. “What are you going to do when you find him?”

  “Sometimes I’d like to cut off his head,” you say. The robber girl grins, and thumps the hilt of her knife against the reindeer’s chest.

  The robber girl’s feet are just a little bigger, but the boots are still warm from her feet. You explain that you can’t wear the boots, or else you won’t know where you are going. “Nonsense!” the robber girl says rudely.

  You ask if she knows a better way to find Kay, and she says that if you are still determined to go looking for him, even though he obviously doesn’t love you, and he isn’t worth a bit of trouble, then the thing to do is to find the Snow Queen. “This is Bae. Bae, you mangy old, useless old thing,” she says. “Do you know where the Snow Queen lives?”

  The reindeer replies in a low, hopeless voice that he doesn’t know, but he is sure that his old mother does. The robber girl slaps his flank. “Then you’ll take her to your mother,” she says. “And mind that you don’t dawdle on the way.”

  She turns to you and gives you a smacking wet kiss on the lips and says, “Keep the shoes, they look much nicer on you than they did on me. And don’t let me hear that you’ve been walking on
glass again.” She gives the reindeer a speculative look. “You know, Bae, I almost think I’m going to miss you.”

  You step into the cradle of her hands, and she swings you over the reindeer’s bony back. Then she saws through the hobble with her knife, and yells “Ho!” waking up the dogs.

  You knot your fingers into Bae’s mane, and bounce up as he stumbles into a fast trot. The dogs follow for a distance, snapping at his hooves, but soon you have outdistanced them, moving so fast that the wind peels your lips back in an involuntary grimace. You almost miss the feel of glass beneath your feet. By morning, you are out of the forest again, and Bae’s hooves are churning up white clouds of snow.

  Sometimes you think there must be an easier way to do this. Sometimes it seems to be getting easier all on its own. Now you have boots and a reindeer, but you still aren’t happy. Sometimes you wish that you’d stayed at home. You’re sick and tired of traveling towards the happily ever after, whenever the fuck that is—you’d like the happily right now. Thank you very much.

  When you breathe out, you can see the fine mist of your breath and the breath of the reindeer floating before you, until the wind tears it away. Bae runs on.

  The snow flies up, and the air seems to grow thicker and thicker. As Bae runs, you feel that the white air is being rent by your passage, like heavy cloth. When you turn around and look behind you, you can see the path shaped to your joined form, woman and reindeer, like a hall stretching back to infinity. You see that there is more than one sort of map, that some forms of travel are indeed easier. “Give me a kiss,” Bae says. The wind whips his words back to you. You can almost see the shape of them hanging in the heavy air.

  “I’m not really a reindeer,” he says. “I’m an enchanted prince.”

  You politely decline, pointing out that you haven’t known him that long, and besides, for traveling purposes, a reindeer is better than a prince.

  “He doesn’t love you,” Bae says. “And you could stand to lose a few pounds. My back is killing me.”

  You are sick and tired of talking animals, as well as travel. They never say anything that you didn’t already know. You think of the talking cat that Kay gave you, the one that would always come to you, secretly, and looking very pleased with itself, to inform you when Kay’s fingers smelled of some other woman. You couldn’t stand to see him pet it, his fingers stroking its white fur, the cat lying on its side and purring wildly, “There, darling, that’s perfect, don’t stop,” his fingers on its belly, its tail wreathing and lashing, its pointy little tongue sticking out at you. “Shut up,” you say to Bae.

  He subsides into an offended silence. His long brown fur is rimed with frost, and you can feel the tears that the wind pulls from your eyes turning to ice on your cheeks. The only part of you that is warm are your feet, snug in the robber girl’s boots. “It’s just a little farther,” Bae says, when you have been traveling for what feels like hours. “And then we’re home.”

  You cross another corridor in the white air, and he swerves to follow it, crying out gladly, “We are near the old woman of Lapmark’s house, my mother’s house.”

  “How do you know?” you ask.

  “I recognize the shape that she leaves behind her,” Bae says. “Look!”

  You look and see that the corridor of air you are following is formed like a short, stout, petticoated woman. It swings out at the waist like a bell.

  “How long does it last?”

  “As long as the air is heavy and dense,” he says, “we burrow tunnels through the air like worms, but then the wind will come along and erase where we have been.”

  The woman-tunnel ends at a low red door. Bae lowers his head and knocks his antlers against it, scraping off the paint. The old woman of Lapmark opens the door, and you clamber stiffly off Bae’s back. There is much rejoicing as mother recognizes son, although he is much changed from how he had been.

  The old woman of Lapmark is stooped and fat as a grub. She fixes you a cup of tea, while Bae explains that you are looking for the Snow Queen’s palace.

  “You’ve not far to go now,” his mother tells you. “Only a few hundred miles and past the house of the woman of Finmany. She’ll tell you how to go—let me write a letter explaining everything to her. And don’t forget to mention to her that I’ll be coming for tea tomorrow; she’ll change you back then, Bae, if you ask her nicely.”

  The woman of Lapmark has no paper, so she writes the letter on a piece of dried cod, flat as a dinner plate. Then you are off again. Sometimes you sleep as Bae runs on, and sometimes you aren’t sure if you are asleep or waking. Great balls of greenish light roll cracking across the sky above you. At times it seems as if Bae is flying alongside the lights, chatting to them like old friends. At last you come to the house of the woman of Finmany, and you knock on her chimney, because she has no door.

  Why, you may wonder, are there so many old women living out here? Is this a retirement community? One might not be remarkable, two is certainly more than enough, but as you look around, you can see little heaps of snow, lines of smoke rising from them. You have to be careful where you put your foot, or you might come through someone’s roof. Maybe they came here for the quiet, or because they like ice fishing, or maybe they just like snow.

  It is steamy and damp in the house, and you have to climb down the chimney, past the roaring fire, to get inside. Bae leaps down the chimney, hooves first, scattering coals everywhere. The Finmany woman is smaller and rounder than the woman of Lapmark. She looks to you like a lump of pudding with black currant eyes. She wears only a greasy old slip, and an apron that has written on it, “If you can’t stand the heat, stay out of my kitchen.”

  She recognizes Bae even faster than his mother had, because, as it turns out, she was the one who turned him into a reindeer for teasing her about her weight. Bae apologizes, insincerely, you think, but the Finmany woman says she will see what she can do about turning him back again. She isn’t entirely hopeful. It seems that a kiss is the preferred method of transformation. You don’t offer to kiss him, because you know what that kind of thing leads to.

  The Finmany woman reads the piece of dried cod by the light of her cooking fire, and then she throws the fish into her cooking pot. Bae tells her about Kay and the Snow Queen, and about your feet, because your lips have frozen together on the last leg of the journey, and you can’t speak a word.

  “You’re so clever and strong,” the reindeer says to the Finmany woman. You can almost hear him add and fat under his breath. “You can tie up all the winds in the world with a bit of thread. I’ve seen you hurling the lightning bolts down from the hills as if they were feathers. Can’t you give her the strength of ten men, so that she can fight the Snow Queen and win Kay back?”

  “The strength of ten men?” the Finmany woman says. “A lot of good that would do! And besides, he doesn’t love her.”

  Bae smirks at you, as if to say, I told you so. If your lips weren’t frozen, you’d tell him that she isn’t saying anything that you don’t already know. “Now!” the Finmany woman says, “take her up on your back one last time, and put her down again by the bush with the red berries. That marks the edge of the Snow Queen’s garden; don’t stay there gossiping, but come straight back. You were a handsome boy—I’ll make you twice as good-looking as you were before. We’ll put up flyers, see if we can get someone to come and kiss you.”

  “As for you, missy,” she says. “Tell the Snow Queen now that we have Bae back, that we’ll be over at the Palace next Tuesday for bridge. Just as soon as he has hands to hold the cards.”

  She puts you on Bae’s back again, giving you such a warm kiss that your lips unfreeze, and you can speak again. “The woman of Lapmark is coming for tea tomorrow,” you tell her. The Finmany woman lifts Bae, and you upon his back, in her strong, fat arms, giving you a gentle push up the chimney.

  Good morning, ladies, it’s nice to have you on the premiere Snow Queen Tour. I hope that you all had a good night’s sleep,
because today we’re going to be traveling quite some distance. I hope that everyone brought a comfortable pair of walking shoes. Let’s have a head count, make sure that everyone on the list is here, and then we’ll have introductions. My name is Gerda, and I’m looking forward to getting to know all of you.

  Here you are at last, standing before the Snow Queen’s palace, the palace of the woman who enchanted your lover and then stole him away in her long white sleigh. You aren’t quite sure what you are going to say to her, or to him. When you check your pocket, you discover that your list has disappeared. You have most of it memorized, but you think maybe you will wait and see, before you say anything. Part of you would like to turn around and leave before the Snow Queen finds you, before Kay sees you. You are afraid that you will burst out crying or even worse, that he will know that you walked barefoot on broken glass across half the continent, just to find out why he left you.

  The front door is open, so you don’t bother knocking, you just walk right in. It isn’t that large a palace, really. It is about the size of your own house and even reminds you of your own house, except that the furniture, Danish modern, is carved out of blue-green ice—as are the walls and everything else. It’s a slippery place and you’re glad that you are wearing the robber girl’s boots. You have to admit that the Snow Queen is a meticulous housekeeper, much tidier than you ever were. You can’t find the Snow Queen and you can’t find Kay, but in every room there are white geese who, you are in equal parts relieved and surprised to discover, don’t utter a single word.

  “Gerda!” Kay is sitting at a table, fitting the pieces of a puzzle together. When he stands up, he knocks several pieces of the puzzle off the table, and they fall to the floor and shatter into even smaller fragments. You both kneel down, picking them up. The table is blue, the puzzle pieces are blue, Kay is blue, which is why you didn’t see him when you first came into the room. The geese brush up against you, soft and white as cats.