Once Upon a Time: New Fairy Tales

by Goss, Theodora

  Don’t worry, I didn’t hate you. That’s funny, me telling you not to worry. As if you would.

  It took the girl about three years to get over that one. She felt pretty dumb for having tried in the first place, but eventually—you know how resilient kids are—she decided to try again.

  By this time (you won’t have known this either), she’d got a job. It wasn’t much of a job, and it wasn’t a legal job, but a kid has to have some cash on hand, you know? You won’t remember Mr. Spinner. He was the janitor at the middle school. He used to tell these great stories to any kid who would listen. This girl was pretty starved for attention and interaction, so she listened. And maybe he listened to all the things she didn’t say, because, one day, he offered her a job helping him mop and buff the floors after all the other kids had gone home.

  I saved up every penny I earned for a whole year. I realized my mistake, see, with the ribbon. It was too cheap for your tastes. I knew this time I had to do better. So when the girl—yeah, that’s still me, in case you’d forgotten—had saved up enough money, she went into town again.

  Quit squirming. I know there’s no action in this story. What do you expect? Not much can happen when the main character is just standing there.

  The girl thought she was on the right track with the hair thing, even though the first time she’d got it wrong. And maybe she was feeling a little guilty for having thrown her mother’s good hairbrush at the mirror. That hairbrush was like something out of the court of some French king. Unbelievably ornate, with bristles tough as the day they were plucked from the boar. So very you. What I wanted was to find a matching comb. That, I thought, would bring you out of your stupor. Because sometimes, if I stayed up late enough at night, I’d catch you brushing your hair.

  The girl found a comb, a perfect, silver comb that maybe wasn’t as ornate as the hairbrush, but was still eye-catching and breathtaking in its beauty. She didn’t even know they made stuff like that. It cost her every cent she had, but she didn’t care. Her mother would have to be blind to ignore this gift, she was certain.

  This time she didn’t take silence as an answer. She held the comb out to her mother, and nothing happened. She waved it in front of her mother’s face, and nothing happened. She started shouting, “Mom, look! I brought you this comb! Look at it, take it, will you?” and nothing happened. Her mom just stood there with that dead look on her face, staring into the mirror.

  The girl wanted to cry, she wanted to sit down on the floor right then and there and wail her heart out. Do you remember what she did instead? No? She moved around behind her mother, and started combing her mother’s hair. That’s what she did. Gently, so as not to pull on the tangles, she combed out every strand until they lay, soft and shining, against her mother’s back. Then she put the comb on the dressing table with the brush and left the room.

  Getting bored, are you? I bet. All right well, I’m nearly done. I’ll pick up the pace a little, if that will help.

  Fast-forward two years; the girl is now sixteen. Sweet sixteen, and her mother is still there, in front of that mirror. Do you know how awful puberty is when you have to go through it alone? At sixteen the girl, now a young woman really, was in the throes of it. All sorts of stuff was going on in her body and in her mind. All sorts. She’s trying to achieve some kind of independence, to be her own person, that kind of thing, and here she’s got this monster in the closet, right, this dirty secret that she can’t share with anyone. Because how, really, do you tell someone that your mother has been standing in front of a mirror for years on end? It’s ridiculous. No one would believe you anyway even if you did tell. They’d think you were making it up.

  That’s what you’d become to me by then. A monster. A horrible dragon clutching its treasure in a dark room. I had to do something. Anything, I thought, would be better than this.

  But what? I didn’t know. I didn’t know until one day, who knows why, Mr. Jonet—he was the English teacher that year—started talking about apples. All of a sudden, out of nowhere, apples. He went through every story that ever had an apple in it, he went on and on about the health properties of apples, the symbolism of apples, all of this stuff about apples. It drove the class nuts. Rumor had it that he’d fallen in love with Miss Hayton, the biology teacher. We made jokes about him bringing her an apple, like some pet schoolboy. We got sick of hearing about apples.

  Then he told a story about a woman named Eve. She was apparently the first woman, ever, on earth. She was good, pure good, no evil in her at all. Kind of like you used to be, before the mirror came. Or at least how I remember you to be. Rose-colored glasses and all that. So anyway, this Eve lady was brought low by an apple. The fruit of evil, it was, and she took a bite and then she wasn’t so good any more. Cast out of the garden, I think it was a garden, by a serpent or something. But basically, Mr. Jonet said, what had happened was that Eve’s eyes had been opened to everything that was around her, to all of the nuances of life, to all of the little details that she couldn’t have seen before, because pure good can’t see anything but good, and that’s unhealthy. That, he said, is what leads us to a fall. When we can’t see and appreciate the bad in something as well as the good, we’re in trouble. Rumor had it Miss Hayton had turned him down.

  And the girl thought, maybe if I take my mother an apple, her eyes will open, too, and she’ll look at something other than that mirror.

  It couldn’t be just any apple, though, could it? It had to be the best apple, the ripest apple, the reddest apple, because for her mother, only the best would do. The girl didn’t really know anything about apples, which were good for what, which were sweet, which were sour, none of that. She’d just eaten whatever apples were offered her. But she learned, and that autumn she went into town again and brought home the best apples she could find.

  Oh, right. I said I’d speed it up. You do look a little uncomfortable. You can probably guess what happens next.

  The girl takes her mother the apple, and the woman doesn’t blink an eye. Doesn’t acknowledge the girl standing there beside her with an apple in her hand. The girl can’t take it any more, she starts shouting and cursing and crying and making a real scene. She throws the apple against the wall and slams the door on her way out of the room. The next morning, she packs a bag and is gone.

  What happened to you anyway? The doctor said the delivery boy found you lying on your bedroom floor. I didn’t even know you let those kids have a key to the house, but I guess the groceries had to come from somewhere. One year I’ve been gone, and not a word from you. Not a call, not a question about how I was doing, and then the next thing I know Mr. Spinner is crying and telling me you’re in the hospital. I called the hospital and they told me you wouldn’t be going home. They told me I’d better get here as soon as I could.

  I know, finish the story already. Okay. The girl hears that her mother is in the hospital, right, and her first reaction is good, let her rot. Then she thought, the house is empty, here’s my chance.

  I went to the house yesterday, Mother, to collect a few things. Do you know what I found? I could hardly believe it. You picked that apple up after I left, didn’t you? You picked it up and put it on your dressing table. It’s still there, all rotten, right beside the tarnished comb. I saw that apple and how you’d moved it, and I finally figured out what I could do.

  Here. I brought you something. This is the story you wouldn’t let me tell, and this is how it ends. I smashed your mirror, Mother. I brought one of Mr. Spinner’s hammers with me to the house, was going to break open the door of the shed and get some stuff out of there. Instead, I used it to break your mirror. Don’t be mad, there was no way I could have carried the whole thing.

  Here, mom. Uncurl your fingers, let me put this in your hand. Be careful, I taped the edges but they might still be sharp.

  Look. It’s a piece of your mirror. I brought it for you. That’s right, take it. Can you hold it up? Okay, good, now you can see yourself. Surprised, aren’t you. W
ell, I told you, Mother. This is a story about love.

  Erzebet YellowBoy was born in America, but now lives in a tumbledown cottage in rural France with her husband and a posse of wild cats. She is the co-founder and long-time editor of Cabinet des Fées, an online journal of fairy tales, and the founder of Papaveria Press, a micro-press specializing in hand bound, limited editions of mythic prose and poetry. Her work has appeared in Fantasy Magazine, Not One Of Us, Electric Velocipede, and Clarkesworld Magazine, and in the anthologies Japanese Dreams, Running with the Pack, and Haunted Legends. Her novel Sleeping Helena was released by Prime Books in 2010, and she has several novellas forthcoming from Masque Books. Erzebet is also an artist and a bookbinder. Her work can be found at www.erzebet.com.

  “Blanchefleur” was inspired by one of my favorite fairy tales, Madame D’Aulnoy’s “The White Cat.” In D’Aulnoy’s version, or the translation of it that I read as a child, a king wishing to pass his kingdom to his sons asks each of them to find the smallest dog, the finest linen, and the most beautiful woman in the world. Each of the princes goes on this quest, but of course it is the youngest who succeeds, with the help of a mysterious white cat who rules a cat-kingdom. She gives him the small dog and the fine linen in walnut shells, and in the end, she herself becomes the most beautiful woman. They are happily married and go back to rule over her kingdom, where all the cats have turned back into her subjects.

  I’m not sure how that fairy tale turned into mine: I only know that the Lady of the Forest and Blanchefleur were both inspired by the cat queen, and that I was more interested in writing about a miller’s son than a prince. Of course he had to go through three ordeals and gain a kingdom in the end. The modern—and what I hope are humorous—touches came from E. Nesbit, another one of my favorite fairy-tale tellers, who often included such touches in her versions. We often associate fairy tales with male writers such as Charles Perrault and the Brothers Grimm: I’m rather proud, in this story, of having been influenced by two important female writers in the fairy tale tradition.

  Theodora Goss

  Blanchefleur

  Theodora Goss

  They called him Idiot.

  He was the miller’s son, and he had never been good for much. At least not since his mother’s death, when he was twelve years old. He had found her floating, facedown, in the millpond, and his cries had brought his father’s men. When they turned her over, he had seen her face, pale and bloated, before someone said, “Not in front of the child!” and they had hurried him away. He had never seen her again, just the wooden coffin going into the ground, and after that, the gray stone in the churchyard where, every Sunday, he and his father left whatever was in season—a bunch of violets, sprays of the wild roses that grew by the forest edge, tall lilies from beside the mill stream. In winter, they left holly branches red with berries.

  Before her death, he had been a laughing, affectionate child. After her death, he became solitary. He would no longer play with his friends from school, and eventually they began to ignore him. He would no longer speak even to his father, and anyway the miller was a quiet man who, after his wife’s death, grew more silent. He was so broken, so bereft, by the loss of his wife that he could barely look at the son who had her golden hair, her eyes the color of spring leaves. Often they would go a whole day, saying no more than a few sentences to each other.

  He went to school, but he never seemed to learn—he would stare out the window or, if called upon, shake his head and refuse to answer. Once, the teacher rapped his knuckles for it, but he simply looked at her with those eyes, which were so much like his mother’s. The teacher turned away, ashamed of herself, and after that she left him alone, telling herself that at least he was sitting in the schoolroom rather than loafing about the fields.

  He learned nothing, he did nothing. When his father told him to do the work of the mill, he did it so badly that the water flowing through the sluice gates was either too fast or slow, or the large millstones grinding the grain were too close together or far apart, or he took the wrong amount of grain in payment from the farmers who came to grind their wheat. Finally, the miller hired another man, and his son wandered about the countryside, sometimes sleeping under the stars, eating berries from the hedges when he could find them. He would come home dirty, with scratches on his arms and brambles in his hair. And his father, rather than scolding him, would look away.

  If anyone had looked closely, they would have seen that he was clever at carving pieces of wood into whistles and seemed to know how to call all the birds. Also, he knew the paths through the countryside and could tell the time by the position of the sun and moon on each day of the year, his direction by the stars. He knew the track and spoor of every animal, what tree each leaf came from by its shape. He knew which mushrooms were poisonous and how to find water under the ground. But no one did look closely.

  It was the other schoolboys, most of whom had once been his friends, who started calling him Idiot. At first it was Idiot Ivan, but soon it was simply Idiot, and it spread through the village until people forgot he had ever been called Ivan. Farmers would call to him, cheerfully enough, “Good morning, Idiot!” They meant no insult by it. In villages, people like knowing who you are. The boy was clearly an idiot, so let him be called that. And so he was.

  No one noticed that under the dirt, and despite the rags he wore, he had grown into a large, handsome boy. He should have had sweethearts, but the village girls assumed he was slow and had no prospects, even though he was the miller’s son. So he was always alone, and the truth was, he seemed to prefer it.

  The miller was the only one who still called him Ivan, although he had given his son up as hopeless, and even he secretly believed the boy was slow and stupid.

  This was how things stood when the miller rode to market to buy a new horse. The market was held in the nearest town, on a fine summer day that was also the feast-day of Saint Ivan, so the town was filled with stalls selling livestock, vegetables from the local farms, leather and rope harnesses, embroidered linen, woven baskets. Men and women in smocks lined up to hire themselves for the coming harvest. There were strolling players with fiddles or pipes, dancers on a wooden platform, and a great deal of beer—which the miller drank from a tankard.

  The market went well for him. He found a horse for less money than he thought he would have to spend, and while he was paying for his beer, one of the maids from the tavern winked at him. She was plump, with sunburnt cheeks, and she poured his beer neatly, leaving a head of foam that just reached the top of the tankard. He had not thought of women, not in that way, since his wife had drowned. She had been one of those magical women, beautiful as the dawn, slight as a willow-bough and with a voice like birds singing, that are perhaps too delicate for this world. That kind of woman gets into a man’s blood. But lately he had started to notice once again that other women existed, and that there were other things in the world than running a mill. Like his son, who was a great worry to him. What would the idiot—Ivan, he reminded himself—what would he do when his father was gone, as we must all go someday? Would he be able to take care of himself?

  He had saddled his horse and was fastening a rope to his saddle so the new horse could be led, when he heard a voice he recognized from many years ago. “Hello, Stephen Miller,” it said.

  He turned around and bowed. “Hello, Lady.”

  She was tall and pale, with long gray hair that hung to the backs of her knees, although she did not look older than when he had last seen her, at his wedding. She wore a gray linen dress that, although it was midsummer, reminded him of winter.

  “How is my nephew? This is his name day, is it not?”

  “It is, Lady. As to how he is—” The miller told her. He might not have, if the beer had not loosened his tongue, for he was a proud man and he did not want his sister-in-law to think his son was doing badly. But with the beer and his worries, it all came out—the days Ivan spent staring out of windows or walking through the countryside,
how the local farmers thought of him, even that name—Idiot.

  “I warned you that no good comes of a mortal marrying a fairy woman,” said the Lady. “But those in love never listen. Send my nephew to me. I will make him my apprentice for three years, and at the end of that time we shall see. For his wages, you may take this.”

  She handed him a purse. He bowed in acknowledgment, saying, “I thank you for your generosity—” but when he straightened again, she was already walking away from him. Just before leaving the inn yard, she turned back for a moment and said, “The Castle in the Forest, remember. I will expect him in three days’ time.”

  The miller nodded, although she had already turned away again. As he rode home, he looked into the purse she had given him—in it was a handful of leaves.

  He wondered how he was going to tell his son about the bargain he had made. But when he reached home, the boy was sitting at the kitchen table whittling something out of wood, and he simply said, “I have apprenticed you for three years to your aunt, the Lady of the Forest. She expects you in three days’ time.”

  The boy did not say a word. But the next morning, he put all of his possessions—they were few enough—into a satchel, which he slung over his shoulder. And he set out.

  In three days’ time, Ivan walked through the forest, blowing on the whistle he had carved. He could hear birds calling to each other in the forest. He whistled to them, and they whistled back. He did not know how long his journey would take—if you set out for the Castle in the Forest, it can take you a day, or a week, or the rest of your life. But the Lady had said she expected him in three days, so he thought he would reach the Castle by the end of the day at the latest.

  Before he left, his father had looked again in the purse that the Lady had given him. In it was a pile of gold coins—as the miller had expected, for that is the way fairy money works. “I will keep this for you,” his father had said. “When you come back, you will be old enough to marry, and with such a fortune, any of the local girls will take you. I do not know what you will do as the Lady’s apprentice, but I hope you will come back fit to run a mill.”