by Jane Yolen
But all I remembered of that angel was in my dreams: a dark shadowy figure falling like a bird of prey from the sky in a sharp, perilous stoop. So I never really believed my dad’s story. I mean—who could?
And then, quite suddenly, he quit drinking in a noisy conversion that included a baptism and a church where they did laying-on of hands. He changed his name to Israel because, he told me, it means “wrestles with angels.”
The new name, the new church, didn’t stop him from gabbing endlessly about angels. But these people liked his stories. If anything, he told more stories until, at last, he seemed to have talked himself out. Then he left that church and went back to Saint Mary’s. Mom used to see him there at early Mass, and they would smile at one another, she said. Not old enemies any longer, but not exactly old friends, either. That was where he heard the Te Deum and mentioned it to me, not to prove anything (as if after all these years it could have been called proof), but just as if some curious itch had finally been scratched.
Then one night he was on the back porch of my house in Connecticut, where he’d come for a weekend. We were talking, reminiscing really. About the days when we had been a family on Ninety-sixth Street. Dad and Mom; my sister, Jeanie; and me.
I said, “Did you ever find out what it was that made you think that old Chinese man was an angel?”
“I drank a lot in those days, Jesse,” he said. “I don’t do that anymore.” He said it like an apology. Like a prayer.
The air was suddenly heavy. Fireflies seemed to hang motionless between the porch and the back garden. Inside the house, where my kids were watching a program about dinosaurs, I could hear the TV; and from the kitchen, where my wife was putting the finishing touches on my father’s seventy-second birthday cake, came the sounds of the mixer.
Suddenly something large and dark, like a meteorite, fell across the moon and down, down, down toward earth. Dad reached his arms up as if welcoming an old friend, and the angel’s enormous golden wings enfolded him.
Dark fathomless eyes stared into mine for a second, just as they had so many years ago. And then the Angel of Death took Dad away, leaving only the husk of his body and a single wing feather behind.
How I Fractured These Stories:
Notes and Poems
How to Fracture a Fairy Tale
The Thing About Fairy Tales
The thing about fairy tales
is not the Once, but the After.
We all know about Once.
It is the start of our lives,
the mistaken old woman
of the wood, the one we forgot
to give half our sandwich,
all of our brisket,
most of the chocolate mousse.
It is the fox we did not brush,
the sparrow we did not save,
a lion whose thorny paw
we did not doctor.
The oven into which
we did not push the witch.
It all leads to the After,
which is not death,
but inconsequence;
not dancing in red hot iron shoes,
but living past our sell-by date,
hating the husband,
bored with the wife.
It is the princess growing fat,
the king unfaithful,
and no children write home
to ask us how we are doing,
only a postcard of need.
Snow in Summer
“Snow in Summer” is set in the 1940s in the small West Virginia town my late husband grew up in. Much of the setting is from the memories I have of so many visits there over the years, beginning in the early 1960s. Eventually I turned the short story into a fairy tale novel of the same name. There’s a lot more happening in the novel, of course. And I love the surprise of the ending in my fracture. But it is the ending of the actual folk tale that both fascinates/bothers me because it makes no sense. In the oldest tale, the prince sees the girl in a glass coffin and pays the dwarfs gold for her. And off he goes on his horse, with his men carrying the coffin behind. (In some variants, they put the glass casket with the dead girl on a cart.) And for what reasons does he wants a dead girl in a glass coffin? I have three ideas, each one more disgusting than the last. I used some of those ponderings to make the poem, not the story. The poem was first published in Asimov’s Magazine.
Prince Ever After
He paid the little men in gold,
their grubby hands greedy for more,
but his face remained stern with his refusal.
The casket’s glass was well polished,
he had to give them that. No fingerprints
marred the view of the girl.
Lifting the box up carefully,
his seven chosen men set it on the wagon.
They made no hard steps, no joggles,
their boots—like the cartwheels—cushioned.
The last girl had woken up too soon
and had to be put down.
This one would make it to the castle
or chosen heads would roll. He felt for his sword,
burnished and sharpened in its leather sheath.
No one in the twelve kingdoms
would have a finer casket girl on display.
Of that he was certain.
The Bridge’s Complaint
I was asked to contribute a story from a different POV to a fairy tale anthology and for some reason the idea of writing The Three Billy Goats Gruff from the bridge’s POV came to mind. As an oral storyteller, I had great fun enlarging on the old Norwegian tale. But here it is a short version, perhaps because Bridge obviously has (trigger warning for pun-ophobes) a short attention span. My silly/sweet story became an excuse to be a whiner for a couple of days. Did I enjoy doing it? Of course. I will do anything for my art! So here’s a poem that is a sadder version starring a troll maiden—and yes, they do exist—in Swedish and Norwegian folklore.
Troll Maiden on the Bridge
Water, as fleeting
as human life,
flows beneath her feet.
She cannot breathe deeply
because of the sorrow
that dams her soul.
Alone of her clan
she seems a human girl
as long as you do not look closely.
She has a tail, small and black,
that curls like a question mark
above her perfect buttocks
a small oak forest
of unbudded twigs pushing
through the skin of her back.
She is neither troll nor human,
but the bridge between,
which is why she sits there
letting the whole world
walk across her heart,
Her grieving heart.
The Moon Ribbon
“The Moon Ribbon” has a bit of Cinderella in it (stepmother and stepsisters being mean and greedy, plus Cinderella hiding the glass shoe in her pocket). It also has a bit of George MacDonald’s The Princess and the Goblin (the magical grandmother). That book was published in 1892 and remains one of my favorite children’s fantasy novels. But the rest of this fractured fairy tale is really mine. Well, maybe not a fracture but a mash-up? Moon Ribbon was the title story of my second fairy tale collection, published in the late 1970s, almost a hundred years after the MacDonald book. The poem is new and explains my fascination with strong-minded folk tale heroines.
Learning from Those Other Princesses
They are buried, those other princesses,
as deep in their tales, stone embroideries
mired by tradition. Even the folklorists type them
as just another pretty girl in waiting.
But see Rapunzel climbing down her own hair,
claiming the broken prince, as she was once broken.
The Finn King’s daughter, digging through mounds
deep as diamond mines, without dynamite or hard hat.
We no longe
r wait for princes, rescuing ourselves
from those higher prisons, those darker palaces.
We pull on hobnail boots, kick down doors,
even the ceilings of the glass mountains.
Hand me my pickaxe, my pitons, my shears.
Stand out of the way, you gentlemen of leisure.
One princess coming through, one vote,
one tower, one castle at a time.
Godmother Death
This is a folktale (most often as “Godfather Death”) that can be found all throughout Europe. The Irish and Spanish versions are the ones that most influenced this telling. No, scratch that—what began this story was getting an invite from Neil Gaiman to do a short story for an anthology he was editing for Vertigo/DC Comics in which one of the characters from his comic Sandman starred. As I read his invitation, I remembered the folktale and got right to work. I was using Neil’s character Death, in his telling a wonderful, snarky Goth girl who is ageless and endless. I finished the story and really liked it. (This is rare for me.) And Neil really liked it, too. If you read that anthology, you will know the story was never published there. Why? Because when my agent and I read the contract, it said that that DC owned the story till the heat death of the universe. Well, legal words to that effect. I never sell all rights to anything I write. One never knows . . . Watty Piper was the house name for a variety of people at Platt & Munk Publishers. Mostly their young editors wrote the stories for their board books under that name for a flat fee. And one of them (we do not know who) wrote The Little Engine that Could. I filed off the Sandman numbers, changed a few things, and sold the story elsewhere. And the story has been reprinted a number of times, thank you very much, Neil. (He was very understanding and we are still good friends.) The poem is about Death, too. In fact it’s about some actual statues in a cemetery where a couple, long-married but of two different religions, died. And the silly preacher and priest insisted each had to be buried in his/her own religious boneyard. The children and neighbors who knew of the couple’s devotion, erected two stone statues on their graves, which reach across the wall that separates the religious areas, so they can defeat Death for eternity.
Stone Hand in Stone Hand: Norvelt Cemetery
Death could not separate them,
this husband, this wife,
as religion would have dictated,
preacher and priest approving
different heavens for each.
They reach across the wall
between the burial grounds,
going about familial visitations
like prisoners, a touch here,
a grasped hand there,
enough for stone,
enough for eternity.
Happy Dens or A Day in the Old Wolves’ Home
Originally, I thought of this as a young children’s chapter book with illustrations. Over time I came to see it was a gloss on wolves in fairy tales that—to a somewhat aging writer at the time (even older now)—also spoke to the warehousing of our elder citizens. So maybe not for little kids after all. But maybe a short story for adults, which is how it was first published, but then republished in both adult and young adult collections. Go figure. As for the poem, it is very political (I lean left) and not only has been published in one of my collections (Last Selchie’s Child) but will also be in the upcoming CD from my band, Three Ravens. It’s from a performance we do with music and poetry called “The Infinite Dark.” I wrote the lyrics to the majority of the songs. My son Adam, who is the real musician in our family, told his kids, “Nana is in a band and she’s seventy-nine!” His son asked, “What does she play?” And Adam answered quickly, “The audience.”
Once Upon a Wolf
Once upon a time, there was a wolf.
But not a wolf.
An Other.
Whose mother and father were others
Who looked not like us—
Republican or Dem,
in other words:
THEM.
They were forest dwellers,
Child sellers.
Wife beaters,
Idol makers,
Oath breakers,
In other words:
WOLF.
So, Happy Ever After means
We kill the wolf,
Spill his blood,
Knock him out,
Bury him in mud.
Make him dance
In red—hot—shoes,
For us to win
The Wolf—must—lose.
Granny Rumple
I first thought about the character of Rumpelstiltskin being a Jew when teaching a children’s lit course (for seven years) at Smith College. Eventually I wrote an essay about it: how in the old tale the only character who does what he promises and isn’t lying is Rumpelstiltskin. The miller and his daughter lie, and the king is motivated by greed alone. But the small man with the unpronounceable name who lives outside the walls of the kingdom and is allowed only one job—spinning straw into gold—does not lie. Plus he helps the miller’s daughter out of a desperate position. So of course he must be a demon who wants to use the (as yet unborn) baby prince in some disgusting blood rite. Blood rite. That was when I realized the “demon” was a stand-in for a Jew. Someone with an unpronounceable name who is forced to live outside the city walls. Is allowed only one job inside the kingdom—that of moneychanger. Plus the canard that was current at the time of the fairy story in both Germany and Russia: that Jews stole Christian babies to kill them and use their blood to make matzo. So, I did what any reasonable academic did—I published a paper/essay. But as I am also a fiction writer (and poet), I wrote “Granny Rumple,” which was snapped up by a Datlow/Windling anthology. The poem was written to be used with this story.
Spinning Straw
His hand moves so quickly
she cannot tell the wheel
from the wish.
Gold pours from somewhere,
already refined into coins,
enough to refinance a kingdom.
She tries counting them,
though her education ended at twenty.
Gold spills past that number.
She dreams of crowns like plates
on the heads of angels,
shoes the color of the sun.
But her small dreams
are barely adequate to the fortune
the money-changer spins.
The counting house in her head
has no way to know a hallmark
from a hatch mark.
Real gold from fool’s gold.
Angel plates from gold plate.
A truth from a lie.
One Ox, Two Ox, Three Ox, and the Dragon King
“One Ox, Two Ox, Three Ox, and the Dragon King” is based on the fact that Chinese dragon stories (and the old beliefs about dragons) are much more positive than western dragon stories. The Eastern dragons are gods of rain and abundance,though they can occasionally (like any gods) act unpredictably if you do not follow the rules and do not have a good heart. In order to write this, I read several books of Chinese folklore, notably Eberhard’s Folktales of China and Hackin’s Asiatic Mythology . I worked on and off on the story for almost a year. This story takes various bits and pieces of Chinese folk characters and lore, but the way the Ox brothers solve their problem is really very Western and that is the real fracture. This was first published in my collection Here There Be Dragons, as was the poem.
“Story,” the Old Man Said,
looking beyond the cave to the dragon tracks.
“Story is our wall against the dark.”
He told the tale: the landing, the first death, the second.
They heard the rush of wind, the terrible voice,
a scream, then another.
Beyond the wall the dragon waited
but could not get in.
Brother Hart
“Brother Hart” is based on the Russian/Grimms story of “Little Brother, Little Sister” in which th
e two children are forced out of their castle by their wicked stepmother, a witch. Their escape route takes them through an enchanted woods. The fracturing here is twofold—the point of view and how I inserted the love and protective nature that I had for my brother Stevie, who was four years younger than I. Of course we lived in a happy home, and didn’t have wicked forests to travel through, though until we were fourteen and ten, we lived across the street from Central Park in New York City and usually I was in charge out there. Not a lot of actual wolves, but still occasionally a place where we needed to be careful. The original tale is one of my all-time favorite fairy tales. The poem is about another brother/ sister pair out in the wilds, only this time fairy children were brought into the world of humans. Based on an old English legend and published in my small book of fairy poems, The Last Selchie Child.
Green Children
Dazed they were, and scared
lying on the cold stones,
their arms and legs green.
Not the dark green of ivy,
not the yellow-green of apples,
ripe on the summer bough,
nor the deep green of the ocean
where it leans against its bed.
They were the green of leeks,
of new-furled feather fern,
of the early leaf breaking soil.
When they opened their eyes,
their eyes were green, too.
And the little hairs on their arms
were inchworm green.
They spoke a green language
which the trees and flowers knew,
but which we did not.
The boy died of a wasting,
the girl did not,
eating broadbeans,
forgetting her green tongue,
growing whiter with each day;
till she christened
