Myth and Magic

by Radclyffe

  But again the giantess of the house waylaid her by bursting through the door. “Put down that silly book of yours, girl!” Her face was covered in some kind of goopy beauty cream. “The widower Thompson has agreed to take a look at you. He’s coming by tonight! Prepare yourself!”

  “But he’s twice my age! And was cruel to his last wife!”

  “He needs a woman. His house is a shambles and he’s been forced to eat nothing but tins of fish and peas.”

  “Would it kill him to pick up a broom? Boil an egg?”

  “I don’t know where you get these crazy ideas! Certainly not from me or your father. It would shame him to do such a thing. That’s women’s work and you know it! Just be ready!” The hag gave Ivy one last menacing look, then charged out of the room and slammed the door behind her.

  Ivy flung her book on the floor, her eyes blazing with anger.

  Jackie took a deep breath. Then another. When there was no courage to be found, she tapped lightly on the window anyway.

  Startled, Ivy whirled around, but when her eyes met Jackie’s her alarm appeared to melt into curiosity. Or Jackie hoped that was what her expression meant.

  She motioned for Ivy to open the window.

  Ivy shot a look to the bedroom door, then quietly walked over to lift the window. It was so large it took all of her body strength to accomplish. When at last she’d managed, all she said was, “This is different.” But those three words wiped Jackie’s mind clear of every single thing she’d planned to say; like sleeping butterflies roused by a ray of sunlight, her thoughts all fluttered away.

  “Well?” the young woman said.

  To Jackie’s utter astonishment, she heard herself say something she had not planned to say: “I think I love you.”

  To Jackie’s further astonishment, Ivy smiled a puckish smile. “In that case, come in. It’s not often I have a woman knock on my window professing her love.” She glanced toward her bedroom door once more before adding, “But be quiet. My parents are on a rampage.”

  Jackie scrambled through the window and did her best to jump lightly down into the bedroom. She was completely unprepared for how insignificant the enormous furniture would make her feel. How did Ivy manage? She noticed a stepstool by the light switch. Another by the dresser. But these concerns were minor compared to what she’d just confessed! Was she in love? Was that the fizzy feeling in her belly?

  “I’m Jackie,” she said, and stretched out her hand, a ridiculously formal move under the circumstances.

  Ivy curtsied playfully and took her hand. “Ivy.”

  Then the two of them just stood there staring into one another’s eyes, two ridiculous grins pasted on their faces, two hopeful hearts beating an unmistakable duet.

  “Wow,” Ivy said, at last. “It’s amazing to be able to look into someone’s eyes.”

  Jackie thought: Amazing to want to look into someone’s eyes.

  “So what are you doing here?” Ivy went on. “And more importantly, who are you?”

  The amazing story of Marta and the bean came out in fits and starts, winding this way and that, like the beanstalk itself. Ivy appeared impressed if not entirely convinced by what she heard. “A giant beanstalk, huh? A place where everyone is my size, and a woman is not required by law to be joined to a man?”

  “Women can be joined to women where I live,” Jackie said, then felt herself flush.

  Ivy raised an intrigued eyebrow. “Reeeeally…”

  “Yup.”

  Unsure what to do next, Jackie picked up the sketchbook Ivy had tossed on the floor and handed it to her.

  “Thanks,” Ivy said. “My parents would kill me if they ever bothered to look at this. All art in Pureland must be sanctioned by the Committee for Moral Uprightness.” An undercurrent of rage rumbled under her words, which Jackie found thoroughly compelling. Equally compelling was Jackie’s ability to shift from the rage to the casual flipping of notebook pages for Jackie to see. She was so fluid with her emotions, flicking from one to another so effortlessly!

  The notebook was filled with portraits, each one beautifully capturing a moment of private sadness.

  “These are immoral?” Jackie asked.

  “Unhappiness is considered immoral.”

  “But a person can’t help if they’re happy or not.”

  “That’s debatable, but it certainly shouldn’t be illegal.”

  “But your mom, your dad, they both seem sooo—”

  “I know. It’s this weird paradox…or denial…or double standard. I haven’t quite figured it out. But it plagues Pureland. Everyone is unhappy, but they pretend not to be.”

  Jackie stared down at the ankle-high yellow carpet pile. “I used to think I’d never be happy.”

  “What changed?”

  Jackie almost had the courage to tell her, but returned to the portraits instead. “Theses are wonderful.” She worried that Ivy would notice her sudden shift of focus.

  Ivy just laughed. “Of course you would say that. You came to me on a magic beanstalk professing your undying love.”

  “I just—” But the rest of Jackie’s thought was kidnapped by a new one: She hadn’t said undying, had she?

  Ivy placed a hand on Jackie’s chest. “Please don’t apologize. Don’t ruin this.” Her hazel eyes were flecked with gold, her skin a sumptuous olive, her nose a small nut waiting to be… Unable to stop herself, Jackie leaned in to—

  The sound of the front door crashing open thundered through the house.

  Ivy stiffened. “My father. Back from his morning workout. He’ll want breakfast.”

  “Can’t he get it himself?”

  “Just go.”

  “But…”

  “Please. Go!”

  “Ivy!” Her father’s bellow shuddered through the house. “Where’s my triple latte?”

  Ivy bolted for the door, then spun around, took the few steps back, and cradled Jackie’s face in her hands. “Thank you,” she said, softly. “You’ve made today a much nicer day.” Then she planted a whisper of a kiss on Jackie’s lips. By the time Jackie regained composure, Ivy was slipping out the door, leaving Jackie to go out the way she came in.

  She slunk around Ivy’s neighborhood all morning, occasionally returning to the shrub outside Ivy’s bedroom window, but alas, the room remained empty. She decided to do a little exploring and took one of the many moving sidewalks into the city. There she saw things that both thrilled and frightened her: beautiful mirrored skyscrapers next to alleys of trash and impoverished people, gorgeous store windows full of lavish merchandise but featuring live models whose lips and breasts were hideously augmented. But by far, the most puzzling thing was a torture device in the city’s center that secured the offender’s head, hands, and feet in a thick wooden block. Apparently it was used for punishing anyone deemed unhappy. A nearby broadside defined unhappiness as everything from failing to laugh at the mayor’s jokes to sharing intimacy with one’s same sex. Truly, the more Jackie saw of these giant people, the more she understood Iris’s drawings. These people were unhappy—but they made great efforts to appear as if they weren’t.

  She returned to the suburb dispirited and just in time to witness the giant children returning home from school, giant backpacks slung over their giant shoulders, giant lollipops clutched in their giant fists. Their giant mothers herded them along like gaggles of unruly hippos, passing each other on the street gushing forced niceties—“Great day, huh?” “Doesn’t get much better than this!”—their faces contorted into painful-looking smiles. The children taunted each other with cruel insults, but none of them ever dared cry.

  Jackie was about to climb up the shrub when a melon-faced boy, as wide as he was tall, said, “Hey, you! I could squash you like a bug! Hey, Ronnie! Eno! Look what I found!” She tried to dissuade the bullies from their plan, but then one of them called over their dog, a mean, snarling thing; and Jackie, her depression now paramount, soon found herself trudging back to her own world at the bottom of the
beanstalk. Only now her depression had a twinge of something new: anger. Not at the world, or Pureland, her usual practice, but at herself. How could she have given up on Ivy so easily? Was she really such a coward? Too wimpy to step up for someone she…loved?

  Outside the pods were swelling with beans, some of them even bursting open and dropping their precious seeds to the ground. Anyone could tell there wasn’t much time before the magical plant began to die back, before she’d be cut off from Ivy forever.

  She messaged the crone, Marta. I have seen a place that lies beyond Utonia. It frightens me.

  You again? Marta messaged back.

  Please tell me why you gave me that bean.

  You needed perspective.

  I can see that now. But I think I have also fallen in love.

  Marta did not message back right away, which only added to Jackie’s sense of urgency. When Marta did finally write back all she said was: One does not “think” one has fallen in love. Either one has or one hasn’t.

  Jackie knew that Marta was right. She also knew, as strongly as anyone can know anything, that she had fallen in love. She messaged this to Marta, adding the question: How should I proceed?

  To which Marta messaged: You’re on your own with that one, dearie. Now I’m going back to my nap.

  Jackie stared out her window. The late-afternoon sun was turning the shadows long; the stalk showed signs of withering. It was now or never. So once again she forced her now-aching muscles up the beanstalk, which was beginning to shrivel and flake; and once again, she jogged down the road.

  The shepherd shouted, “You? Again? Where are you off to now?”

  “To rescue my love!” she yelled back, brazenly.

  He smiled a snaggletoothed grin. “Good luck!”

  “Thanks!” she yelled, and kept on.

  When she returned to Ivy’s house she was out of breath and her calves were burning, but she barely took note of these things, and slipped behind a tree while a couple of giant children on giant bicycles sailed past. Careful no one was watching, she mounted the shrub and peeked into the window only to find Ivy’s room still empty. Her heart sank. Then she noticed the window was ajar. Determined to risk whatever it took to rescue Ivy, she wedged it open further and climbed in. Voices were coming from the interior of the house, one of them Ivy’s. “I should warn you, I will make a very bad wife.”

  “Ivy!” her mother replied. “Manners!”

  A man, the widower, Jackie supposed, chuckled and said, “I see I will have to teach you to be a good one.”

  “Show him the joining gown I made you,” her mother said. “And the shoes.”

  A strange ka-thunk ka-thunk came toward the room. Jackie dove into the closet. The door opened and a weary, stilt-wearing Ivy stepped inside. Or that was what Jackie assumed, for Ivy was now close to ten feet tall and wearing one of the ankle-binding dresses of the Purelanders. The vision broke her heart.

  She waited for Ivy to shut the door, then slipped from her hiding place.

  Ivy recoiled, holding herself steady on the door frame. “What are you doing here?” she whispered. She ran her fingers self-consciously through her hair.

  “I’ve come to rescue you.”

  Ivy laughed a numb laugh. “There’s no rescuing me, my friend. My father has just signed the papers to hand me off to the Widower Thompson, a cruel man with bad breath and flaking skin.”

  “Then come with me! Down the beanstalk!”

  Ivy sank down on the bed. “You’re kidding, right?”

  “No! I know it sounds crazy, but—”

  “Ivy!” her mother called. “Are you almost ready?”

  “Yes, Mother!”

  Jackie hoisted herself unto the bed and knelt beside Ivy. “Didn’t our kiss mean anything to you?”

  Ivy’s eyes pooled with tears. She blinked them back. “You have no idea…”

  “So come with me.”

  “Ivy!” her mother yelled again. “Widower Thompson is growing impatient! And so am I!”

  “Please,” Jackie said. “I can’t promise I’ll always make you happy—but I know I can do better than this.” She waited, aware that she was asking a lot. But she couldn’t—wouldn’t—doom Ivy to a life of unhappiness. Not if she could help it. She took a breath and played her last card: “I’m not going back without you.”

  Ivy met Jackie’s gaze with such intensity if felt to Jackie as if her innards were being ripped from her belly. “You would forsake this wonderful world you speak of just to save me?”

  Jackie nodded.

  Ivy looked around her room once, then began lifting the heavy gold dress to wrestle off the hideous metal stilts. “Okay. Take me to this magic beanstalk of yours, this magic world.”

  Heart crashing in her chest, Jackie helped Ivy release the clasps, helped her wrestle off the gold dress and put on a short tunic. “Is there anything you want to bring? You won’t be able to return.”

  Ivy thought for a moment, then said, “Nothing. Let’s just get out of here.”

  “Ivy!” the giantess yelled.

  Once on the road they ran side by side, matching one another stride for stride. It was getting dark and the streets were mostly empty of people. They hugged the shadows, Jackie praying that the beanstalk would be strong enough to hold them, worried what would happen if it weren’t. At the outskirts of the city, an ear-shattering siren began to blare.

  “They’ve found us out,” Ivy said, breathlessly. “If they catch us we’ll be stoned.”

  Jackie grabbed her hand and picked up the pace. She was having trouble telling how much farther they had to go—if they were even on the right road.

  “Hey!” she heard a voice yell out from the shadows. “Where do you think you’re going?”

  Jackie breathed a sigh of relief. It was the shepherd. “Someplace better than this!”

  “Lucky you!” he shouted.

  A huge flying machine sputtered up behind them. “Turn back! Now!” an amplified voice commanded. In the distance dogs began to bark.

  Jackie spotted the hole in the road and came to a halt. The tip of the beanstalk was drooping a good six feet away from the road.

  “We’re going to have to jump,” she said.

  Ivy leaned over and peered down the hole. Her eyes grew wide. “There really is a beanstalk.”

  “Yes. And if we don’t jump now, our chance will be gone.”

  Ivy’s eyes locked on Jackie’s. “I don’t know a thing about you…” was all she said. But it was enough. The two of them leapt, hand in hand, onto the top leaf of the beanstalk. It was brittle and dry, and Jackie worried it would disintegrate. But it held, the stalk bending gracefully downward and showering them in a downpour of confetti-like leaf flakes until it finally placed them gently into the weedy patch in front of Jackie’s studio where they stood, gasping for breath, in the moonlight.

  After a few rigid moments, Ivy released her vise grip on Jackie’s hand and did a slow three-sixty. “Holy cats! You weren’t kidding. Everything is my size!”

  “I told you.”

  “I know, but—Look at that house! That tree! That…that”—she took Jackie’s face in her hands—“that you!”

  Ivy’s touch lit Jackie up like a comet, the very air around her changing from dark and brooding to pure effervescence. Or, as the Utonians would later put it, “turned her from bulb to flower.” The kiss that followed was long and lingering and bursting with promises of happily ever after.

  Two elderly gentlemen on their evening constitutional stopped to take in the spectacle of the giant beanstalk dropping the two young women to the earth. Standing in the shadows, hand in hand, watching them kiss, the one said to the other: “That Marta, she sure knows how to cast a spell.” His companion then kissed him on the cheek, and together they continued strolling down the magical, moonlit street of Utonia.

  Allison Wonderland is one L of a girl. Her lesbian literature appears in the Cleis collections Best Lesbian Romance 2013 and 2014, as well
as Girl Fever, Girls Who Score, and Wild Girls, Wild Nights. Besides being a Sapphic storyteller, Allison is a reader of stories Sapphics tell and enjoys everything from pulp fiction to historical fiction. Find out what else she’s into and up to at aisforallison.blogspot.com.

  This story is based on “Cinderella.”

  SWF seeks FGM

  Allison Wonderland

  Single White Female Seeks Fairy Godmother

  for shoe shopping companion and sappily-ever-after.

  Must be able to work family-unfriendly magic with wand.

  Checks have mates. Glass slippers have mates. Even that repulsively scintillating stepdaughter of mine has a mate. Me, I’ve got bupkes.

  As you know, I’m a widow. No, not a black widow—magenta is my color, I’ll thank you to remember.

  At heart, I’m a simple, vitriolic vixen in search of an animated sorceress who has the power to make my dreams come shrew.

  That is to say, true.

  I believe what we have here, my dear, is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Once upon a way to pass the time, I married Cinderella’s father. We were not even on a first-name basis. I called him My Little Meal Ticket and he called me The Wicked Stepmother, the definite article of which I most definitely found flattering.

  In spite of my bad reputation, I made him think my moniker was a misnomer. Damn, I’m good. So when he proposed marriage, I accepted. After all, if I put my mind to it, I could chateau the line.

  Everything was Luciferric, until my husband croaked like the Frog Prince of a man that he was. Gone were the days of living it up. On the upside, I could once again live up to my nickname.

  And did I ever. I looked at that looker Cinderella and thought: I’ll terminate her, too. Oh, please don’t misunderstand me—while my name is Lady Ptomaine, I am by no means a murderess. A villainess, sure, but I can assure you that every one of my husbands departed on good terms.

  When Cinderella left—this palace, not this earth—we also parted amicably. I had been so uncouth to the youth, to understate the obvious, yet on her way out of her misery, she opted to hug me instead of slug me. If kindness could kill…Let’s just perish the thought, shall we? With all the sincerity I could summon, I wished Cinderella a fond farewell, all the while hoping she would not fare well at all.