Fairytales for Wilde Girls

by Allyse Near

  They bumped teeth with an audible clink. Isola laughed and pulled back. ‘Like what?’

  ‘Like Mordred.’

  ‘Remind me which one he was again?’

  ‘The in-bred little brat who killed his dad, King Arthur.’

  ‘Oh, yeah. But with a name like Mordred, what hope did he have?’

  Edgar bounced out the syllables: ‘Mor – dred. It’s the most evil name of all time.’

  ‘Wonder if Bunny’ll prefer Mordred,’ Isola wondered aloud.

  ‘What?’

  She pulled him into a high-rise kiss. They seemed to float suspended for the longest moment, held up by invisible mannequin strings, gravity loosening its choke-hold.

  Maybe Grape was right. Isola might have been falling sick. She slept most of the weekend, and didn’t feel right; her voice was growing hoarse, and she felt alien in her now sickly-thin body.

  She peeled off her clothes and stood in her underwear before the mirror, eyes narrowing as she critiqued the reflection. A body like Marie Antoinette after her diet of cake and sugar and pretence had been replaced by occasional mouthfuls of moonlight, slitted between prison-barred windows.

  Bunny came scuffling out from under the bed and Isola hastened to cover herself.

  ‘I is hungry now,’ he announced.

  She pulled her shirt down over her head, mussing up her hair, and huffed. ‘Then eat something.’

  ‘Fool get me food.’

  ‘Yeah, and you haven’t eaten anything I’ve offered, except a tonne of sweets. So what do you want?’

  Bunny seemed to be choosing his words carefully. ‘No eat plums,’ he said slowly, ‘not till starving. No eat thyme. Sweets and meats, candies and bloodies, oh yes.’

  ‘Meat?’ Isola repeated, shimmying into her skirt. ‘Okay, I’ll stop at the deli on the way home –’

  ‘Not your icky ucky meats!’ His red eyes gleamed and he ran his tongue along his upper lip. ‘Rare meats . . . Yummy raw delicious wriggly . . .’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘Nimue meats,’ Bunny elaborated. ‘Magical meats, fool girl. Faerie, Fury, goblin, ghostie, I eats them all up, yes . . . Don’t eats much,’ he added, in a tone evidently meant to reassure her. ‘Only little here and there – likes faeries, long as not too much flower in them, and Bunny likes unicorns best, rarest and tastiest, makes I strong to be protector!’

  Isola clasped the ring on her necklace in shock. ‘Let me make this perfectly clear,’ she said through numb lips. ‘I agreed, with Alejandro, to keep you fed and housed. You never said I’d have to kill unicorns for you! That wasn’t part of our deal!’

  ‘Not unicorns!’ snapped Bunny. ‘Unicorn. Just one last for ages!’

  ‘But they’re a dying herd – I never even get to see them! It’s so hard for them to live anywhere, even Avalon’s not safe for them anymore! They’ve just had their first foal in years –’

  ‘Perfect. Foal unicorn is yummy yummy. Keep I strong for ages, girly.’

  ‘Forget it!’

  ‘Then forget deal! Fool is more foolish than Bunny thought. Fool will give up self life for monster baby’s!’

  ‘They’re not monsters!’ shouted Isola. ‘They’re intelligent, sensitive creatures, and they’re alive, and you’ve got no right to choose when their lives end!’

  ‘Then fool chooses her own end.’ He scurried into the cupboard, disappearing into the childhood toys Isola hadn’t had the heart to throw away. After a moment, she heard the crackle of shiny wrappers as he bit open sweets he’d hidden for emergencies.

  ‘And I thought feeding Rosekin was a struggle,’ she muttered.

  ‘I is leaving,’ Bunny announced, like a precocious teen runaway hoping to be begged to stay. ‘I has no power with no foods.’

  Isola ignored him.

  ‘If I leaves, you will be possessed,’ growled Bunny, ‘and she will destroy you.’

  ‘And you’re still gonna leave?’ snorted Isola.

  ‘No matter. You is already possessed.’

  Isola froze.

  ‘You has been for while. She is dark force round you. But you is strong when you has walls – ghosties and mermys and such. Bunny last wall. No more wall . . . No more Isola.’

  He bounded up to the windowsill, nosed it open.

  ‘Bunny, wait!’

  He threw her an ugly look.

  ‘So you can pronounce my name, after all?’

  The gargoyle snorted derisively and bounded off the windowsill, darting into the forest like a swift night wind. She pitched a caramel after him, one for the road. She didn’t care what a nasty gargoyle said. Isola would build her own walls.

  When Isola dug out the pamphlet from under her bed, rang the Church of the Unlocked Heart and told the receptionist what she wanted, she was first asked, not if she were a lunatic, but her name.

  ‘Lux Lisbon.’

  ‘We’d be happy to help you, Miss Lisbon. You’ve made the right decision in calling us. Now, if you could please answer some questions for me – do you believe wholeheartedly in God?’

  Shiva. Vishnu. Aphrodite. Nimue. ‘Sure.’

  The click of acrylic nails on a keyboard; like ants in metal boots marching down Isola’s spine. She shivered them away.

  ‘Uh-huh. And how old are you, Miss Lisbon?’

  ‘Sixteen.’

  A pause drifted down the current between them.

  ‘Sorry,’ said the receptionist, ‘we don’t do teenage exorcisms.’

  The Seventh Princess – An Instalment

  ‘Finally, there were no more princes to defeat. And yet, there were no other dragons, either, because the princes had done their parts, and they prayed with dead hands and lips their love to their sister. There, asleep in the dragon’s lair, she felt each and every last brother leave this world, and she tasted their final words like magic potions, and upon them she grew quietly stronger.

  ‘The prayers of the eldest prince awoke her from a deep sleep, and she knew they had all left her now, and she had to somehow find the strength to defeat the last and worst dragon.’

  ‘What was it?’

  ‘Loneliness.’

  Teenage Hexorcism

  She salted every windowsill and doorway. She hung charms from doorknobs and filled her drink bottle with holy water she’d taken from the school chapel. She put some holy water in her parents’ things, too – Mother’s bathwater, Father’s beer. She painted protective hieroglyphs on each of her ribs. Anything. Everything.

  All that wasn’t enough.

  It was the witching hour when Florence tapped on the window. Isola longed to break her wishbone fingers.

  She clutched the cross-shaped piece of glass over her heart, her last weapon. There were no brothers left, no Bunny. She couldn’t go to Edgar. She couldn’t risk him.

  ‘You brought her here!’ screamed Florence through the window. ‘You summoned my mother to the only place I thought she couldn’t hurt me!’

  ‘I didn’t!’ Isola yelled, scrambling out of bed. ‘I didn’t do anything. I don’t even know this witch!’

  She ran to Mother, who was in her bedroom and only half-awake. Mother rolled over to make room and muttered a few dreamy words of comfort. Isola burrowed into the goose-down pillows and even from Mother’s safe place, she could hear the one-eyed girl singing.

  Cage, Moon, Stripe

  Then, the worst.

  ‘Eat,’ said Father Wilde gruffly. ‘You’re skinny as a bean sprout.’Her ribs protruded like seashell armour. Father poked her in the side to illustrate his point and his finger seemed to cut between them. She heard a dull clank.

  Edgar had noticed, too. He watched her with a sheen of brittle concern over his creased brow. He didn’t say anything, however, and Isola appreciated his tact, although she took care to wear her loosest blouses while on their bedroom dates.

  When he was picking a film from his stack of DVDs, she spied a sketchbook on the bedroom floor and flicked through it. They all seemed
to be sketches of her: portraits in profile, in deep thought, with straightened hair, golden-cage hair, just-got-out-of-bed hair. Glittery nails, bare blonde eyelashes and the occasional freckle, moon-shaped markings that looked like birthmarks in charcoal.

  And with sudden clarity, she realised she didn’t look like that any longer. Her unbrushed hair curled lankly, the rainbow streaks ran dry, and she was much too thin to be the girl whose smile seemed alight in these drawings.

  She couldn’t reconcile it – the terror and loneliness of Florence and her life without her princes, with the bubbling that Edgar inspired in her belly. How dare she seek out this occasional happiness when everything else in her life was going so very wrong?

  He deserves better, she heard again in the back of her mind, but this time, the whisper came in her own voice.

  She stripped and twisted on the spot before the magic mirror.

  It hardly looked real.

  Black stripes from her thighs to her ankles. A noose-ring of moons around her throat. Worst of all was her torso.

  Her skin seemed translucently pale, and instead of ribs, she could see – feel them – the skeleton of an empty cage. Steel-barred, girl-shaped, like a dressmaker’s doll. Half-mannequin parts.

  ‘It’s not real,’ she whispered. It was like the bombing of the chapel, all witchcraft – all in her head. She could still hear her heart beating loudly, a disco thump in her ears.

  Killers

  In the potted rosebush, Dame Furlong was dead in her web.

  ‘WINSOR!’

  The faerie appeared almost instantly. Her daisy petal eyepatch was oozing green and she was trembling with fury. ‘What?’

  ‘Did you do this?’ Isola pointed at the shredded spider, who was scattered in pieces through her web-home.

  Winsor’s remaining eye blazed wickedly; she opened her mouth to form the denial. ‘No, I –’

  ‘Don’t you dare lie to me, you monster!’ Isola bellowed.

  ‘Me?’ Winsor flew right up to Isola’s face, her features sharper than usual, her remaining eye bulging madly. ‘ME? You’re the monster, Isola Wilde! You hate me, you always have! You want me to starve, you love those icky insects more than me, you poisoned the flowers so I’d die. You stole my eye and ruined my face and I hate you!’

  ‘Leave,’ said Isola, struggling to keep the furious tears at bay. ‘Leave this garden – leave Avalon – and don’t ever come back.’

  Winsor blazed greener and greener. She was a nuclear meltdown in miniature, and the disfiguring green veins on her face pulsed ugly. Opening her tiny fanged mouth, Winsor shrieked, ‘I HATE YOU! NO WONDER ALEJANDRO LEFT YOU HERE TO DIE!’

  Isola’s hand snapped up, almost of its own accord, and swatted the faerie to the ground. Winsor bounced on the garden path, cried out in pain and shock. Isola brought up her foot, sheathed in its deadly combat boot, and brought it down, crushing the faerie like an autumn leaf.

  A gasp, a swift flash of regret.

  A curious surge of relief.

  She went into the flowerbed to find Bunny.

  Carnivore

  It got easier after that first meal. Dinner was crystallised clumps of fairy limb – a tiny hand here, a Barbie foot there. She tried to pick out all the glossy hair and leaf and petal skirts first. Bunny complained when their bellies were full of blossoms or nectar. The creature who loved candies despised the naturally sweet.

  ‘It hard to catch faeries,’ he explained, munching happily. ‘I is happy Solawile catch them for me.’

  ‘They’ve always hung around this place,’ muttered Isola. She worked to keep the garden beautiful, luring faeries, easy prey.

  ‘Not no more,’ said Bunny, shaking his head, his soft ears flopping. ‘Not now wood witch daughter Florey eats them up.’

  But it wasn’t enough.

  ‘Unicorn would be nice next, yes. Most easy to kill foal,’ he added. ‘Most easy to catch. Strong magic in the meat, strong Bunny to keep you safe!’

  Isola bent down to thumb the fairy wings from his mouth, the ghoulish crumbs of his last meal. ‘I already told you. I won’t kill a unicorn. Especially not a foal.’

  ‘Fool kill Winsor,’ said Bunny slyly. ‘Fool can kill anything.’

  Isola’s stomach was churning. ‘But you’re too small. You’d waste it.’

  ‘Can’t all at once, no.’ Bunny poked out his tongue. ‘Got to bury and nibble at every now and then and again. Weeks and weeks of yummy magic baby flesh.’

  She’d already picked her next target. In her music box was a lighter she’d stolen from James in an effort to force him to kick his smoking habit. Retrieving it, she lit the flame in the fireplace and waited. Soon she heard clacking nails, and ash dribbled down the chimney. The lizard-like dragon came slithering down, sniffing curiously, flicking its tongue. It was no bigger than a dog and had raw-red skin, good-luck golden claws.

  Catching him by his scaly neck, Isola dragged him from the chimney, and with the glass shard stabbed him between the dark jewels of his eyes. He burst open like a piñata, gemstones tumbling from his gaping wound.

  Bunny squealed with joy when Isola brought him the dragon corpse. She didn’t want the jewels, however – which were no doubt collected as ransom for some poor kidnapped princess – and buried them where the plum tree had been, hoping one day a tree would grow sprouting fruits with diamond seeds.

  Upstairs, Isola found the gargoyle playing with the dragon’s gold claws. Bursting fit with Nim-meat, he was contentedly eating sweets again. Now that Isola had upheld her end of the bargain, she hoped Bunny would uphold his.

  ‘I’m being possessed. Like you said,’ she whispered. She rapped her fingers against a cold steel bar that had replaced a rib.

  ‘Yes. Ghostie Florence is taking over,’ said Bunny. ‘She go deep and deeper until there’s no Solawile left, only ghostie there in the flesh.’

  Isola crouched down, lifted him into her lap. ‘How do I make it stop?’

  ‘Slowly,’ he said, and gently nipped the tip of her finger. She’d never seen him this kind or reassuring. She wondered how frightened she must look or how much he had appreciated the meal. ‘With Bunny’s help. Bunny go up high!’ he added, rearing up on his stout hind legs. ‘Up high, like the churchy-stone gargoyles, yes.’

  The Seventh Princess: An Instalment

  ‘The seventh princess awoke in a cave, weak and thin but alive. She could hear her brothers calling to her on the wind, and first thought it a dream, until she heard it anew – their voices echoing down from the top of the mountain. She left the cave, determination stimulating her bones, and she climbed the cliff-side, breathless and exhausted. Her brothers didn’t let her stop, and she struggled to the top, and there the last dragon sat, curled and sleeping, surrounded by sweets and treasures, long scraps of blonde hair, and the piled bones of the Six Princes.’

  Isola hid her face in her hands dramatically; Mother ploughed on.

  ‘Some were charred black. The dragons had obviously enjoyed a great feast. Without waking the dragon, the Seventh Princess, sobbing silently, took a rock and cut off all her golden hair – and used it to lash the sharpest bones together, making a great sword as big as herself: a weapon to defend herself with.’

  Hair, Meat, Flower

  She got up an hour earlier than usual – it wasn’t as though she was sleeping, anyway – and spent the time in front of the magic mirror. The mirror hardly spoke anymore, and when it did, only in written whispers, tiny words in dead languages. All the intelligible things it said – ‘DON’T GO INTO THE WOODS’, ‘DON’T TRUST THE NIMUES’ – were fair warnings given unfairly late.

  Isola spent the extra time on her hair, spraying and teasing it up into a big blonde cage, a hollow hive. She showed it to Bunny, who sat imperiously on the vanity.

  ‘How’s that?’

  He grunted, and she lifted him into the makeshift nest. She felt his warm weight shifting, and it was surprisingly comforting.

  ‘Victorian girlies put
I in their bonnets,’ he complained. ‘Lotsa room.’

  ‘Where did the boys put you?’ she asked, styling her cage of hair closed around him.

  ‘Their soup. Well,’ he added, snickering, ‘they tried, oh yes. But Bunny can’t be caughts, missy clever girl!’

  ‘Unfortunately, it’s the twenty-first century and they’ll notice if I wear a bonnet.’

  ‘And won’t notice hair?’

  ‘Oh, they’ll notice,’ said Isola grimly, ‘but they’ve never not noticed me, no matter what I do.’

  ‘I can’t see the board past her hideous hair,’ hissed Bridget, who sat behind Isola in French class.

  ‘What is that bird’s nest?’ muttered Bridget’s neighbour. ‘She looks completely mad.’

  ‘Like her mother,’ said Bridget.

  ‘Folie,’ whispered Isola over her shoulder. ‘That’s the French word for “mad”.’ She turned back to the front of class.

  Bridget and Friend were too shocked to reply.

  Teeth pricked at her scalp, little Excaliburs. ‘Good girl,’ came an approving mumble from the depths of her hair. ‘Who is fool now?’

  It was raining when Father dropped Isola off at the gate the next day. Throwing her school bag over her head, she sprinted up the garden path, skidding mud down the convent halls and ignoring the glares of her schoolmates.

  She took him to the third-floor bathroom that no-one ever used and plopped him under the hand dryer. He looked adorable but extremely bothered, his fur flattened under the warm air. He was only slightly damp, and when he was dried, he was as fluffy as a long-haired cat. Isola did her best to stifle her laughter but it came out as little snorts, and an unamused Bunny bit her finger when she picked him up to return him to his golden perch.

  He usually got restless around fourth period, yawning, clamping his little teeth into her hairline, chewing on the bars of his golden cage. She started putting sweets in her hair, things for him to suck on. On Monday, she wore a candy cane, stuck like a chopstick in a geisha’s topknot. Its stripes reminded her of Florence’s stockings and she was unsettled, but for once Bunny was content.