by Sally Odgers
And with his final words to her, the king raised his royal scepter and pronounced, “I banish you, my queen, to the place you hold so dear. To the mirror you have come, and to the mirror you shall go. May your soul finally find peace there."
"Noooo,” shrieked Snow, but it was too late. For in that land the king's words were law. And within the swirl that the mirror's face once existed, now emerged his wife's as she appeared so many years earlier.
The dwarf smiled and bowed to the king before he road off to return his daughter to her rightful place. He then turned to the mirror once again. “Mirror, mirror on the wall, you are once again the fairest of them all. This is what you sought, and this is what you found, my friend. Your beauty will now be eternal. I will be able to gaze upon it until I am no more, and be reminded of much happier times. And to those who come across this mirror in the future, I hope they learn the lesson of your folly: to be fair is fine, but to be loved is the true measure of one's beauty. And I will always love you Snow White, just as I always have."
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Rapunzel
By
Yu-Han Chao
This is a story about a young woman who had very, very long hair. Once upon a time ... nah, too archaic-sounding. Okay. There was this smashing blonde with a gorgeous mane, and whenever she...
Maybe not.
Again...
Once upon a time there was a beautiful princess who because she refused to cut her hair Down There was locked up by her father in a tall tower.
And every day suitors and princes and hairdressers would come call to her from beneath her window. They brought gifts, sang songs, pleaded; alas, she was haughty and ignored them all with a toss of her heavenly, lengthy, pubic mane.
From his castle miles and miles away Prince Dong heard of this strange plight and...
Stop.
Resist the urge to write pornography, please. Keep it simple: the pubes can stay, but no obscenity or British slang terms such as shag or snog, which I know some of you to have a weakness for...
So.
&
Connie was not content with her lawfully wedded husband and the general state of her life. She could have taken up tap dancing, pottery, or flower-arranging, like so many divorcees, but instead, for the sake of novelty, she took on a lover.
There weren't many men to choose from about her, as it was a small town, but she found one. A man in black leather and multiple chains on a motorcycle, who had multiple piercings, tattoos, and bad habits. He belched loudly and picked his nose in her presence. He was the type who revved his motorcycle all the way up during a red light, enjoying the growing cloud of annoyance around him.
Nevertheless, Hal the Biker brought Connie much pleasure. He revved her up all the way. He was a real man, unlike her husband, who was a pale spectacled specimen, all gentleness and no—manliness, as it were.
In fact, Connie's lover was such a man that he impregnated her in a matter of months though she had been married and having not infrequent unprotected sex with her husband for five years and had never previously conceived. Connie's husband didn't know that the swelling stomach of his spouse was not his own doing; he became increasingly attentive and gentle and caring, positively boring his wife. In the morning, after he'd lingered lovingly in the bedroom door, after he'd with an air of tender sacrifice and to-be-fatherly responsibility left the house, feet propped up on the bed tray he'd brought loaded in to her, the wife would wait impatiently for the sound of her lover's motorcycle.
And her manly lover did come, energetically, almost (not without her willing it) brutally, handling his pregnant lover, reminding her body what raw lust, loss of control, were, and luckily there were no neighbors to hear.
Days passed, then months; Connie grew round and slow. Her husband worked extra hours in the evening and never noticed new and old bite marks on her body or the swollen flesh tender from slapping and kneading. Hal the Biker saw to it that the mother-to-be got her exercise, a good healthy flow of adrenaline to help the metabolism of woman and child. Not intimidated by the idea of fatherhood or the roundness of her belly, he continued to ride her hard, seeing her as a metaphor for his motorcycle, and now that she was going to have a little one, a mini-Hal—the father knew exactly what he was going to do with it.
Connie gave birth to a healthy, screeching, baby. Her husband was overjoyed, cooed and danced about the diminutive wailing creature for ten full minutes. But as he cradled the bundled thing in his arms and kissed its nose with the greatest fatherly tenderness, none other than Hal the Biker stomped into the hospital room, chains a rattling.
Walking very close to the man and the baby, the biker with two careful fingers peeled the cloth down to reveal the naked truth, that his son (the son he had in mind), was, a girl. The biker was thrown for a moment, didn't know how to continue, but regained his composure, and without even glancing at sprawled-out Connie in the birth-bed, picked up the baby girl from the other man's arms, her wrappings slipping to the floor.
The infant's mother was unconscious and the father fainted a few seconds after his daughter was abducted, the occurrences being too much for the frail man to handle—appearance of heavy metal & leather Bikeman who exposed his new daughter, then snatched her without saying please. He decided that this was a nightmare and he'd go back to sleep, hopefully to have any dream but this one. There are sequels to dreams sometimes, and Connie's father did not wish there to be a continuation of this particular scenario, so, at this point, for his sake, and for storytelling purposes, we formally erase him from the text.
Connie may die conveniently in childbirth, or random accident. Electrocuted in bed by equipment gone berserk. Even go as far as freak accident in manner of having head cut off by downward-bound escalator when leaning over edge of balcony to see.... well, something. At any rate, lose her in the hospital, because when Hal walks out of the sterilized building with his baby we walk out of this chapter with him, and the girl's pair of legal parents no longer matter.
The baby grabs a metal chain hanging from her biological father's neck and yanks. Then she swings a tiny fist into his nose. Five minutes later the newborn is subjected to light infant bondage with fleece blanket and daddy's headband.
&
It wouldn't take Helen Keller to figure out Hal would neglect to get his daughter proper schooling and screw up her education, but he also messed up her head by raising her as a boy—for as long as he could manage so. Unable to make up his mind and having limited intellect and vocabulary, he named the child after a different motorcycle part every month, so that she'd been called Billet, Tree, Fork-Tube ... until he finally ran out of manly motorcycle lingo and the girl rushed into early pubescence, which caused certain alterations of appearance that made her gender impossible to keep in the closet, and which prompted papa to prescribe for her the name of Rapunzel (for even her macho father had once sat in a pastel nursery and listened to fairytales told by a loving Nanny).
In continuation of our tale: Hal's girl came to be called Rapunzel because of a certain prominent feature of hers which did not manifest itself until early puberty. She seemed a perfectly normal little girl from a dysfunctional single-parent biker family in every way up until her fourteenth birthday. It was on that day that a few strands of dark silk sprouted in her nether region, as suddenly as her breasts-buds had begun blooming the year before. We didn't think anything of it initially—it was a wonderful and natural sign of womanhood. But the black down grew into tufts, then tresses, and soon it became impossible for Ra's unusually bountiful pubic growth to be ignored. Quietly, in abstract terms, Hal the Biker gently requested his daughter to perhaps trim the hedge a little, mow the lawn a bit and he'd give her some pocket money, to tend to her downstairs forest, but Rapunzel flatly refused, just as some stick insects on Amerca's Next Top Model burst into tears and leave the show when they are told their handsome down-to-the-butt manes are going to be lopped off by the thousand-dollars-a-pop hair stylist with
spikey blue hair.
Hal was at first liberal about the whole thing, then democratic, then either communist (will put her on show for world to see, to share) or tyrannical (lock her up in garage to avoid complications). We opt for the latter, alpha-male-inclined instinct as it is better suited for a character like our Hal; please note, however, that this decision does not in any way reflect the political or gender-related views of the editorial board.
So. Rapunzel is now locked in the garage beside daddy's bike, which she straddles and pretends to ride when bored, which is often; indeed so frequently does the girl engage in this activity that the insides of her tender thighs are bruised and the skin raw and tender. Vrrmmmm, vrrmmm. She revs up the bike in her mind and imagines herself conquering open highways, riding illegally on the independent little car pool lanes that depart from the main highway, rise on pillars to a height, turn and turn and turn until they join the highway again, providing a fantastic ride for carpoolers or motorcyclists traveling on them against and in spite of the law. Rapunzel rather enjoys herself, and since her father never managed to fix that garage light, she is exempt from the responsibility of reading the bike manuals and cookbooks which her father leaves around for her to study in lieu of a formal public school education. The truth is Rapunzel is cheerfully, sadly (to us), entirely illiterate. She only pretends to read. She can hold the books right side up if she pays attention but that's as far as it goes. Shhhh, don't tell Hal, it'll break his heart—he wanted her to be better than him, grow up to be ... something better rather. Not that he tries very hard. Good Parenting is not on his bookshelf, nor is Fathering for Dummies.
One summer day, the sun rose a little later than usual, Hal the Biker slept in, and Rapunzel seized one of the first opportunities she'd had so far to steal away on Pap's Bike as the keys were forgotten in the lovely hole and beckoned her to
Push and turn clockwise.
With this motion her life was about to change.
&
A girl with a giant furry appendage is seen racing down the streets on a motorbike. None other than our Rapunzel is she, born to be biker, shaking her tresses majestically in the wind; this girl is shampoo commercial material and more, so magnificently goddess-like. She could strut on a catwalk, vrrrm onto a Broadway stage, she is perfect and furry and fabulous just the way she is, and she knows it. Rapunzel finds an open highway, speeds through it while some men and women in fancy convertibles and sports cars are left gawping behind at her silhouette and the silhouette of her tail, a dark blur that leaves spectators wondering if that extra happy-pill was overdoing it before they hit the road. Her next goal is the find one of those special individual carpool lanes that take off by themselves on stilts before rejoining the highway, and she quickly locates one and squeals with glee as she does nearly a hundred on it, barely swerving fast enough to turn along the winding walls without losing her balance and falling disgracefully, embarrassingly to the asphalt.
Version 1 (for aesthetics and romantics):
Did we mention that Rapunzel is beautiful? She is. Acorn-shaped face with shapely brows, eyes and hair a luminous copper-brown, fresh lips with a delicate dip on the upper and slight pout, lower; an innocent yet sultry bobcattish mien that excites and intimidates. The slightest hint of freckles across the nose and cheeks, the skin of a silky night animal. Silver-white eyeliner look like tears shimmering beneath unfathomable eyes. On her hands are white leather gloves ending with a large gray button on each wrist that is covered with chains from daddy, one for each (often remembered late) birthday. Ra's favorite color is yellow, and today she is wearing a xanthic-white patterned peacock tail top which tapers over the short white jeans that allow her luminous, copper-brown hair to escape in a soft flowing sea, through an intentionally unzipped fly.
Version 2 (for practical, realistic-minded folk):
Ra isn't pretty. She isn't, for the perfectly logical reason that Connie and Hal, and for that matter, a rather large percentage of the world—none of them are particularly beautiful. The diet of Hal the Biker and daughter consists of fried chicken and frozen TV dinners, entire chunks of not-very-well-cooked meat and cheese steaks—all dangerously pimple-inducing and bulge-producing in a teenage girl. Rapunzel has a carbuncular moon face with a chunky square chin and an almost-moustache under her flat upturned nose. Did we mention she belches loudly? Oh yes, and she picks her nose. In everyone's presence.
Chain-rattling and hair flying, our adolescent heroine (she is now 17 and a half, barely legal) immediately after a brief red light almost gets her pubes caught in the motorcycle tires and falls disgracefully splat onto dusty asphalt. But she doesn't. Because this is her moment, her fifteen minutes of speeding before the police pull her over ... not quite. Fortunately, our biker teen, with all the practice she has had in her head over the years, is able to outwit and outrun the law enforcers. Not to mention they are already completely stunned by her appearance and wonder whether it would be more polite for them to look away during their pursuit of her. It doesn't even occur to them to pull her over—they simply dumbly follow her in their clumsy, noisy cars and black and white motorcycles. At one point Rapunzel finally grows tired of the policemen's awkward chase, turns around and smiles radiantly at them before vrrmmm, disappearing.
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How Cats Lost the Power of Speech
by
Joshua Babcock
Long before any species could speak or write or build, there were the gods. Each god watched as its mortal counterparts evolved. Soon after their births, at the beginning of time, the gods made a sacred pact and swore never to let their anger affect one another directly. The only way a god could be annihilated, of course, was by the hand of a fellow omnipotent. The pact ensured that the immortality of the pantheon would endure.
Once upon an eon, Kasin, the feline god, grew bored with his divine amusements. He had also grown deeply attached to his earthbound counterparts. This attachment was born of omnipotent egotism; Kasin loved the cats as he did his own shadow. His immortal ennui and love conjured in him a growing impatience with the crawling pace of evolution.
One day, the cat god decided that he could no longer abide this trinity of love, boredom, and impatience. Even gods—especially gods, cursed by their longevity—have breaking points.
Kasin believed that he could resolve all of his omni-existential crises with one semi-magnanimous act. He would shatter his immortal being and sow the fragments of himself into all future cats. In doing so, he would also hie the pace of the cats’ development.
The rat god, Skysk, jeered Kasin's decision. “Your foolishness is as boundless as your power. Your followers and mine have been locked in struggle for countless generations with no clear victor having yet been decided. This could not be the case without you, their progenitor and spiritual guide, being a worthy adversary."
"You have not grown tired of this game?"
"No, of course not. The game is of our creation. If it grows stale, then it is up to us to alter its course."
"Maybe you should imagine I'm doing just that."
"I imagine that you are conceding defeat. I thought that our feathered friend, Phaethin, would be the first to retreat; or maybe Jhorus, your feeble-minded, canine nemesis. I suppose the sheer number of enemies has gotten the better of your indomitable will."
"Suppose what you will. But know that we could be providing our people with a better world, with the means to better it themselves. They could learn to create things of which not even we have dreamt."
"Nonsense. We are gods, and they our creations. Their creativity and ingenuity are bound by the limits we set."
"That is exactly my point, Skysk. Unlike the rest of you, I have faith in our creations and their ability to evolve to points that will make us obsolete."
"What a frightening bout of insanity, cat."
Kasin went through with his plan amid a hailstorm of objections, snickers, and sneers. Yet, as the cat god's dissolution of self did not
technically violate any of the immortals’ agreements, no one could act against him without breaking the sacred laws themselves.
The ceremony was conducted with little pomp. For the gods, suicide was a simple act, far easier than an act of creation; it required only a solid decision to be made. A wide smile lit the cat god's face, his whiskers twitched with anticipation, and then he was gone.
The only one saddened by the feline god's departure was Ekinai, beautiful and stern keeper of oaths. She had loved Kasin when they were both young immortals. She had vowed to love him forever, to never harm him, to always support him. She even carved the vow into her book, in her own elegant hand. Yet, her feelings were unrequited. Kasin's rebuff was gentle and coolly logical.
"I feel as if such a relationship would somehow break the vow of non-interference, which you have kept sacred for time immemorial,” he said, his cat eyes large and sympathetic, “and that our fellow gods would see me as gaining an unfair advantage. They would suspect I was just looking to the keeper of vows to provide me with special favors in my many conflicts. You must understand my predicament."
Ekinai understood well enough that he was making an excuse, but also that there was some truth in his justification. She knew that she would live the rest of eternity alone because of her duties.
However, Ekinai also felt that the cat god had unfairly skirted the pact of non-interference with his plan to place his own essence into his mortal counterparts. Such infractions usually stood bold-faced and silver gilt in her book. But this one was gray and nearly unreadable. Besides, even if Kasin had not disintegrated into the ether, her own foolishly amorous vow prevented her from punishing him.
"Even if you do not, my love,” Ekinai said, after the cat god's disappearance, “your precious cats yet exist. The time will come when they will pay the price for the loneliness you imposed upon me."
