Beyond the Woods: Fairy Tales Retold

by Paula Guran

  And I’m still dreaming.

  I’m standing here, up to my waist in the smelly water, with a hazel twig in my hand and a stone in my mouth, and I stare up at that big full moon until it seems I can feel her light just singing through my veins. For a moment it’s like being back in the barn with Jeck, I’m just on fire, but it’s a different kind of fire, it burns away the darknesses that have gotten lodged in me over the years, just like they get lodged in everybody, and just for that moment, I’m solid light, innocent and newborn, a burning Midsummer fire in the shape of a woman.

  And then I wake up, back home again.

  I lie there in my bed and look out the window, but it’s still the dark of the moon in our world. The streets are quiet outside, there’s a hush over the whole city, and I’m lying here with a hazel twig in my hand, a stone in my mouth, pushed up into one cheek, and a warm, burning glow deep inside.

  I sit up and spit the stone out into my hand. I walk over to the window. I’m not in some magical dream now; I’m in the real world. I know the lighted moon glows with light borrowed from the sun. That she’s still out there in the dark of the moon, we just can’t see her tonight because the earth is between her and the sun.

  Or maybe she’s gone into some other world, to replenish her lantern before she begins her nightly trek across the sky once more.

  I feel like I’ve learned something, but I’m not sure what. I’m not sure what any of it means.

  11

  “How can you say that?” Jilly said. “God, Sophie, it’s so obvious. She really was your mother and you really did save her. As for Jeck, he was the bird you rescued in your first dream. Jeck Crow—don’t you get it? One of the bad guys, only you won him over with an act of kindness. It all makes perfect sense.”

  Sophie slowly shook her head. “I suppose I’d like to believe that, too,” she said, “but what we want and what really is aren’t always the same thing.”

  “But what about Jeck? He’ll be waiting for you. And Granny Weather? They both knew you were the Moon’s daughter all along. It all means something.”

  Sophie sighed. She stroked the sleeping cat on her lap, imagining for a moment that it was the soft dark curls of a crow that could be a man, in a land that only existed in her dreams.

  “I guess,” she said, “it means I need a new boyfriend.”

  12

  Jilly’s a real sweetheart, and I love her dearly, but she’s naive in some ways. Or maybe it’s just that she wants to play the ingénue. She’s always so ready to believe anything that anyone tells her, so long as it’s magical.

  Well, I believe in magic, too, but it’s the magic that can turn a caterpillar into a butterfly, the natural wonder and beauty of the world that’s all around me. I can’t believe in some dreamland being real. I can’t believe what Jilly now insists is true: that I’ve got faerie blood, because I’m the daughter of the Moon.

  Though I have to admit that I’d like to.

  I never do get to sleep that night. I prowl around the apartment, drinking coffee to keep me awake. I’m afraid to go to sleep, afraid I’ll dream and that it’ll all be real.

  Or maybe that it won’t.

  When it starts to get light, I take a long cold shower, because I’ve been thinking about Jeck again. I guess if my making the wrong decision in a dream would’ve had ramifications in the waking world, then there’s no reason that a rampaging libido shouldn’t carry over as well.

  I get dressed in some old clothes I haven’t worn in years, just to try to recapture a more innocent time. White blouse, faded jeans, and hightops with this smoking jacket overtop that used to belong to my dad. It’s made of burgundy velvet with black satin lapels. A black hat, with a flat top and a bit of a curl to its brim, completes the picture.

  I look in the mirror, and I feel like I’m auditioning to be a stage magician’s assistant, but I don’t much care.

  As soon as the hour gets civilized, I head over to Christy Riddell’s house. I’m knocking on his door at nine o’clock, but when he comes to let me in, he’s all sleepy-eyed and disheveled and I realize that I should’ve given him another couple of hours. Too late for that now.

  I just come right out with it. I tell him that Jilly said he knew all about lucid dreaming and what I want to know is, is any of it real—the place you dream of, the people you meet there?

  He stands there in the doorway, blinking like an owl, but I guess he’s used to stranger things, because after a moment he leans against the doorjamb and asks me what I know about consensual reality.

  It’s where everything that we see around us only exists because we all agree it does, I say.

  Well, maybe it’s the same in a dream, he replies. If everyone in the dream agrees that what’s around them is real, then why shouldn’t it be?

  I want to ask him about what my dad had to say about dreams trying to escape into the waking world, but I decide I’ve already pushed my luck.

  Thanks, I say.

  He gives me a funny look. That’s it? he asks.

  I’ll explain it some other time, I tell him.

  Please do, he says without a whole lot of enthusiasm, then goes back inside.

  When I get home, I go and lie down on the old sofa that’s out on my balcony. I close my eyes. I’m still not so sure about any of this, but I figure it can’t hurt to see if Jeck and I can’t find ourselves one of those happily-ever-afters with which fairy tales usually end. Who knows? Maybe I really am the daughter of the Moon. If not here, then someplace.

  Charles de Lint is a full-time writer and musician who makes his home in Ottawa, Canada. This renowned author of more than seventy adult, young adult, and children’s books has won the World Fantasy, Aurora, Sunburst, and White Pine Awards, among others. Modern Library’s Top 100 Books of the 20th Century poll, voted on by readers, put eight of de Lint’s books among the top 100. De Lint is also a poet, artist, songwriter, performer, and folklorist. He writes a monthly book-review column for The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.

  Veronica Schanoes uses a fairy-tale framework to tell the tragic story of Nancy Spungen. Best known for her relationship with punk rocker Sid Vicious of the Sex Pistols, Spungen was a troubled little girl who really never grew up. Like Nancy, the fictional Lily’s chances for a traditionally happy ending are slim because she is plagued with inner agony and mental pain. Schnanoes wrote this unflinching story because she was angry with how “coffee-table histories of punk seem to have no problem demonizing” Spungen—“a dead, mentally ill, teenage girl.”

  Rats

  Veronica Schanoes

  What I am about to tell you is a fairy tale and so it is constantly repeating. Little Red Riding Hood is always setting off through the forest to visit her granny. Cinderella is always trying on a glass slipper. Just so, this story is constantly re-enacting itself. Otherwise, Cinderella becomes just another tired old queen with a palace full of pretty dresses, abusing the servants when the fireplaces haven’t been properly cleaned, embroiled in a love-hate relationship with the paparazzi. Beauty and Beast become yet another wealthy, good-looking couple. They are only themselves in the story and so they only exist in the story. We know Little Red Riding Hood only as the girl in the red cloak carrying her basket through the forest. Who is she during the dog days of summer? How can we pick her out of the mob of little girls in bathing suits and jellies running through the sprinkler in Tompkins Square Park? Is she the one who has cut her foot open on the broken beer bottle? Or is she the one with the translucent green water gun?

  Just so, you will know these characters by their story. As with all fairy tales, even new ones, you may well recognize the story. The shape of it will feel right. This feeling is a lie. All stories are lies, because stories have beginnings, middles, and endings, narrative arcs in which the end is the fitting and only mate for the beginning—yes, that’s right, we think upon closing the book. Yes, that’s the way. Yes, it had to happen like that. Yes.

  But life is not like that—
there is no narrative causality, there is no foreshadowing, no narrative tone or subtly tuned metaphor to warn us about what is coming. And when somebody dies it is not tragic, not inevitably brought on as fitting end, not a fabulous disaster. It is stupid. And it hurts. It’s not all right, Mommy! sobbed a little girl in the playground who had skinned her knee, whose mother was patting her and lying to her, telling her that it was all right. It’s not all right, it hurts! she said. I was there. I heard her say it. She was right.

  But this is a fairy tale and so it is a lie, perhaps one that makes the stupidity hurt a little less, or perhaps a little more. You must not expect it to be realistic. Now read on . . .

  Once upon a time.

  Once upon a time, there was a man and a woman, young and very much in love, living in the suburbs of Philadelphia. Now, they very much enjoyed living in the suburbs and unlike me and perhaps you as well they did not at all regret their distance from the graffiti and traffic, the pulsing hot energy, the concrete harmonic wave reaction of the city. But happy as they were with each other and their home, there was one source of pain and emptiness that seemed to grow every time they looked into each others’ eyes, and that was because they were childless. The house was quiet and always remained neat as a shot of bourbon. Neither husband nor wife ever had to stay at home nursing a child through a flu—neither of them ever knew what the current bug going around was. They never stayed up having serious discussions about orthodonture or the rising cost of college tuition, and because of this, their hearts ached.

  “Oh,” said the woman. “If only we had a child to love, who would kiss us and smile, and burn with youth as we fade into old age.”

  “Oh,” the man would reply. “If only we had a child to love, who would laugh and dance, and remember our stories and family long after we can no longer.”

  And so they passed their days. Together they knelt as they visited the oracles of doctors’ offices; together they left sacrifices and offerings at the altars of fertility clinics. And still from sun-up to sundown, they saw their faces reflected only in the mirrors of their quiet house, and those faces were growing older and sadder with each glance.

  One day, though, as the woman was driving back from the supermarket with the trunk of the station wagon, bought when they were first married and filled with dewy hope for a family, laden with unnaturally bright, unhealthily glossy fruits, vegetables, and even meat, she felt a certain quickening in her womb as she drove over a pothole, and she knew by the bruised strawberries she unpacked from the car that at last their prayers were answered and she was pregnant. When she told her husband he was as delighted as she and they went to great lengths to ensure the health and future happiness of their baby.

  But even as the woman visited doctors, she and her husband knew the four shadows were lurking behind, waiting, and would come whether invited or not, so finally they invited the four to visit them. It was a lovely Saturday morning and the woman served homemade rugelach while the four shadows bestowed gifts on the child growing in her mother’s womb.

  “She will have an ear for music,” said the first, putting two raspberry rugelach into its mouth at once.

  “She will be brave and adventurous,” said the second, stuffing three or four chocolate rugelach into its pockets to eat later.

  But the third was not so kindly inclined—if you know this story, you know that there is always one. But contrary to what you may have heard, it was invited just as much as the others were, because while pain and evil cannot be kept out, they cannot come in without consent. In any case, there is always one. This is the way the story goes.

  “She shall be beautiful and bold—adventurous and have a passion for music and all that,” said the third. “But my gift to your child is pain. This child shall suffer and she will not understand why; she will be in pain and there will be no rest for her; she will suffer and suffer and she will always be alone in her suffering, world without end.” The third scowled and threw a piece of raisin rugelach across the room. Some people are like that. Shadows too. The rugelach fell into a potted plant.

  Sometimes cruelty cannot help itself, even when it has been placated with an invitation and excellent homemade pastry, and then what can you do?

  You can do this: you can turn for help to the fourth shadow, who is not strong enough to break the evil spell—it never is, you know; if it were, there would be no story—but it can, perhaps, amend it.

  So as the man and woman sat in shock, but perhaps not as much shock as they might have been had they never heard the story themselves, the fourth approached the woman, who had crossed her hands protectively over her womb.

  “Now, my dear,” it began, spraying crumbs from the six apricot rugelach it was eating. “Uncross your hands—it looks ill-bred and it does no good, you know. What’s done is done, and I cannot undo it: you must bite the bullet and play the cards you’re dealt. My gift is this: your daughter, on her seventeenth birthday, will prick herself on a needle and find a—a respite, you might say—and after she has done that, she will be able to rest, and eventually she will be wakened by a kiss, a lover’s kiss, and she will never be lonely again.”

  And the soon-to-be parents had to be content with that.

  After the woman gave birth to her daughter she studied the baby anxiously for signs of suffering, but the baby just lay, small, limp, and sweating in her arms, with a cap of black fuzz like velvet covering her head. She didn’t cry, and hadn’t, even when the doctor had smacked her, partially out of genuine concern for this quiet, unresponsive, barely baby, and partially out of habit, and partially because he liked to hit babies. She just lay in her mother’s arms with her eyes squeezed shut, looking so white and soft that her mother named her Lily.

  Lily could not tolerate her mother’s milk—she could nurse only a little while before vomiting. She kept her eyes shut all day, as if even a little light burned her painfully. After she was home for a few days, she began to cry, and then she cried continuously and loudly, no matter how recently she had been fed or changed. She could only sleep for an hour at a time and she screamed otherwise, as though she were trying to drown out some other more distressing noise.

  One afternoon, when Lily was a toddler, her mother lay her down for a nap and after ten or fifteen minutes dropped the baby-raising book she was reading in a panic. Lily’s crying had stopped suddenly, and when her mother looked into her room, there was Lily smashing her own head against the wall, over and over, with a look of relief on her two-year-old face. When her mother rushed to stop her, she started screaming again, and she screamed all the while her mother was washing the blood off the wall.

  She had night terrors and terrors in the bright sunshine and very few friends. She continued to hit her head against the wall. She tried to hit herself with a hammer and when she was prevented from doing so she lay about her, smashing her mother’s hand. When her mother went to the emergency room to have her hand set and put in a cast the nurses clucked their tongues and told each other what a monster her husband must be.

  When she got home she found Lily curled in a ball under the dining-room table, gibbering with fear of rats, of which there were none, and she would allow only her mother to speak to her.

  Lily did love music. She snuck out of the house late at night and got rides into the city to see bands play, and she loved her father’s recordings of Bach and Chopin as well. Back when she was three or four, Chopin had been the only thing that could get her to lie down and sleep. Chopin and phenobarbital. She wrote long reviews of new records for her school paper which were cut for reasons of space. As she got older, she got better and better at forcing the burning gnawing rats under her skin on the people around her. But she still felt alone because they could just walk away from her but she could not rip her way out of her skin her brain her breath although she tried so hard, more than once, but her mother caught her, put her back together, sewed her up, every single time but not once could she clean Lily so well that she didn’t feel the corro
sion and corruption sliding through her veins, her lymph nodes, her brain, so that she didn’t feel the rats burrowing through her body.

  Lily ran away to New York City when she was sixteen and a half and in what her parents loathed, she found a kind of peace, in the neon lights and phantasmagoric graffiti that blotted out what was in her eyes and especially in the loud noises and the hard fast beats coming from CBGB that drowned out the rats clawing through her brain much better than her own screaming ever had, it was like banging her head against the wall from the inside. She knew there was something wrong with her—she talked to other people who loved the bands she saw because the fast and loud, young and snotty sound wired them, jolted them full of electricity and sparks, but Lily just sped naturally and all she wanted was to make it stop.

  On her seventeenth birthday, Lily went home with a skinny man who played bass and shot heroin. Lily watched him cook the powder in some water over his lighter and stuck her arm out. “Show me how,” she told him.

  “You have easy veins,” he told her, because her veins were large and close to the surface of her skin, fat and filled with rats. They showed with shimmering clarity, veiled only by the fleshy paper of her lily-white skin.

  He shot her up and just after the needle came away from her skin—it stopped. It really stopped, not just the rat-pain that she knew about, but the black tarpits of her thinking and feeling—they stopped too. It stopped, and God, it felt so good and free that she didn’t mind the puking, it even felt fine, because everything else had stopped, and she could finally get some sleep, some real sleep.

  The next morning she woke up and felt like shit again. And it was worse, because for a while she’d felt fine. Just fine.