by Nikita Gill
When I chose to come back for the beast, I was not being brave. I was acting out of devotion and panic at the idea of loss. This being, who had respected my love of books, who was the only one who had ever known the real me and esteemed me for who I am, I came back for him, I could not let them take him from me. We do not abandon those who truly accept us for who we are, and if you could save all the people who accepted you completely, wouldn’t you go back to save them too?
So I’ll tell you a secret
no one wants you to know.
You do not have to be good to be brave.
You just need to know how to love.
You just need to unfold your heart
and recognize where you stand
and who you are.
Cry Wolf
They wrote the story wrong,
the boy was crying wolf, it’s true,
but he didn’t need a saviour.
He was warning them
about what the wolf in him
was about to do.
Jack’s Fable Unfalsified
Everyone in this world
is in the habit of letting
everyone else down.
We write songs about it
and poetry, and sweet stories,
but people hurting each other
will never become pretty.
Every time a heart breaks
and repairs, there are scars.
This is why they call it
heartbreak not just sadness.
To encapsulate the full extent
of the shatter.
Jack’s mother chose the bottle over him every time. And every time she did, she explained it this way, ‘You need to learn to be more self-absorbed, child. Who else will look out for you if you do not look out for yourself?’ And he used this as an excuse for his mother’s cruelty towards him. This was the thing he bit down on when her hatred of his father rained down on him instead. When the bottle spoke through her fists. When she forgot how little he was. When he heard the neighbours quietly speak, clucking their tongues, ‘Poor child, imagine having to live with that,’ and he knew they weren’t wrong.
Children with abusive, alcoholic parents learn excuses and lies to survive. They learn the value of a good lie being the difference between stability and a beating. When you are small enough, your brain works quicker to learn how to keep you alive, and forgiving his mother for her harshness became a thing he did for himself, to save his own mind from realising this was hell.
She wasn’t able to stop him from being kind, though. He got his kindness from his father, and his father never failed to remind him when he was smaller, ‘Son, millions of people die every year, but you are still here and this is because you are doing something right.’
So Jack learned to focus. He thought of the hard-working old farm woman he passed every day on his way to school, who never stopped to wave at him, even though it probably hurt her to do so. He thought of her two tiny grandchildren who had lost their parents too young.
But then his father also said, ‘I’m sorry, I don’t know how I can help you with why your mother is the way she is. Just know this, she loves you, no matter what you think, okay?’ And when the parent who doesn’t hit you backs up the parent that does, that just adds to the layer of betrayal that is already grafting over your heart. This is a fresh wound now.
So Jack tried not to pick at it. Instead he fixated on how happy the old woman he saw every day was, how happy her two grandchildren were, even though they had nothing.
His father died after a brief battle with illness. His mother never stopped cursing him as weak. Given his father’s inability to stand up to her, he couldn’t bring himself to disagree there either. So instead he began to work on himself. He looked at both his parents and thought, I shall take the best parts of you and make a new me from them. This was how Jack became kind and he became strong. That day when his mother gave him the old cow to sell, he practised both these qualities.
He gave the cow to the old farm woman. At the very least, she could give her grandchildren milk. On her insistence, he took what she called magic beans, although he thought they were just the product of someone tricking this naive, hard-working old soul. He took them home to his mother and for the first time in his entire life, he stood his ground. And the storm came, a violent swell, several blows, the beans taken from him and chucked out the window.
But it wasn’t about the beans. It never was. It was about being better than both his parents. It was about not tip-toeing around who he was to please someone else. It was about turning from victim to survivor.
The beanstalk wasn’t the story really.
The abuse always was.
Jack was never foolish.
He just climbed the beanstalk
to get away from his personal demons.
Jack was never silly.
He would rather face giants
than the tragedy of a vicious parent.
Goldilocks
This is what Goldilocks learned
from the bears that day
in the woods by taking
and breaking things
that were not hers;
so many places, people,
and borrowed infinities
we pretend are ours,
all for a snatched second
of happiness,
only to break everyone
and everything
we have ever loved
and watch it all
disappear into the ether.
The Three Times You Rebuilt Your House-shaped Heart
The first time your house-shaped
heart is wrecked
you are too young to realise
love can be a wolf.
They call it puppy love
but there is something
deeply violent in this,
too violent to be that innocent.
Slowly, you rebuild it.
With confidence
you make it out of straw,
sturdier than no protection.
And again, it is wrecked.
Huffed and puffed into nothingness
by this dangerous thing
no one wants to call a wolf.
Again, you collect
from the wreckage,
promise yourself stronger,
make a wooden shelter.
But even this proves
futile, for the dark thing
that relishes destroying
your soft, wanting heart.
It takes you so much longer
to feel and trust again,
you build walls made of brick.
You think, Not this time.
This time it will not find
a way to destroy me,
I have built stronger walls
than it can possibly handle.
Still the wolf comes.
Still the house-heart,
sturdy as you make it,
finds a way to crumble.
Take Back Your Fairytale
Await no princes to save you
through their lips touching yours
whilst you are in unwilling slumber.
Meet each other in the womb
of your enchanted dreams,
Snow White and Sleeping Beauty.
Rely on no man to save you,
he will awaken you to a new prison
and take you, for this is the hunger of men.
Darkling magic is coursing through those veins,
turn it into kindling, my resourceful girls,
find one another in the fog realm,
wake each other up instead.
The Dragon Witch’s Daughter
As a child,
in every book she ever reads,
the dragon witch’s daughter chooses
the side of the dragon,
the witch, the evil sorcerer,
because from an early age she knows
that just becau
se other people
may say someone is bad,
it does not mean there is not
some good in them too.
As a teenager,
she learns how inheritance is
a cold creature and how children
sometimes inherit their parents’
troubles and heartache
and other times their parents’
flaws and mistakes.
She learns how intimate
she must be with loss
to grow up as her mother’s child.
She learns how to adore
her own gifts,
exquisite yet terrible things
her mother gave her.
And only then
does she realise
how the daughter
of a villain in hindsight
can sometimes be
the luckiest of them all.
You see, where others
were only taught love to defend
themselves and had to learn
the hard way how to survive,
her mother taught her
how to breathe fire
so that if they ever
threw her to the wolves
she could set their
hearts aflame.
Waking Beauty
We know how the fairytale goes. Once upon a time in a faraway land, a childless king and queen are finally blessed with a daughter. So happy are they there is a joyous feast where they invite a whole frolic of fairies but always end up forgetting one. The reason for the forgetfulness varies. Whether they just didn’t know of her existence, or whether she isn’t invited because she is evil, no one can really remember. Either way, this fairy takes offence and curses the child to die before her sixteenth birthday, and then disappears, conveniently before anyone can plead with or question her.
Fortunately, one young fairy’s blessing for the princess partially undoes the death wish and turns it to a century-long slumber. The only thing that will finally awaken her is true love’s kiss. But what if there was another way? What if her parents had never hidden the curse from her and told the princess what was going to happen to her and this caused in her a deep, sinking depression? What if the princess could awaken herself and didn’t have to rely on a stranger planting his lips on hers, in her sleep, without her permission?
In this story, Sleeping Beauty is a quiet girl with demons in her mind, but one who does whatever she wants. She has a kind heart but a fire in her soul, and she does not adhere to regular princess customs as her parents want. She dislikes the false niceties of meeting other wealthy people, and keeps to herself during balls. She values her solitude and spends time with people who do not drain her, like her father, whilst discussing policies and administration. She spends more time in plain clothes, out in the villages, hidden, learning about her people, even if her parents out of fear for her life have made this strictly forbidden.
A girl like this is not used to relying on other people, she has always been very sure of herself. So when she finally does fall into a slumber, trying to aid an old woman with a spindle that pricks her instead, her very last thought is not of seeking help, but of how she is going to save herself.
Her mother hasn’t hidden the truth of her curse from this inquisitive child, you see, and she has been devising a plan since she was four. She knows inside her heart the truest love she can find is the love she has kept inside herself all along.
This well-read princess, who spent her time actually researching the curse that has befallen her, realises that there the solution is inside her mind. From early on in her childhood, she has fought the monster we call depression, thinking that she is living on borrowed time. She does not want to awaken as a prince’s soon-to-be wife. Instead, she wants a choice in who to love and in how to live her life.
She has been strengthening her mind every day by incanting magic spells she has found. Every night she goes to war with depression, a demon most foul.
So instead of waiting for a prince, the minute she falls asleep she starts a journey into the depths of her own wicked mind to find the root of the curse. She walks through deserts, goes to battle with monsters, and from there it only gets worse. Over 99 years Sleeping Beauty toils until she finds the very root of the curse. It is hidden in the deepest chamber of her mind under lock and key, only redeemable if she remembers her own heart’s verse.
She recites for 3 nights and 3 days the love she truly has for herself and everything her hundred battles have taught her. Finally, she is let into the chamber and finds a version of herself in a deep, deep slumber.
Sleeping Beauty kisses her own forehead and awakens herself, smiling at what she has won. After all, the deepest love you can ever have is the love you have for yourself. And from a sleeping beauty, she becomes a woken princess, rules her father’s kingdom with precision and kindness, till in old age, her day is finally done.
Seven
There were seven of them. Call them what you will. Sins. Dwarves. Sharks. It doesn’t matter. What matters is where this story goes after happily ever after.
Glut visited to tell me I would have to watch you have too much, and a man with too much is careless, he loses things, he had seen your tables laden with food just for you, heavier than that of the entire castle where I come from would eat.
Lust came to say I would see your eyes mistake the purity of my slumber for something else, something poisoned, something silly, fleeting, and small. And I will be unable to tell you that you are wrong.
Envy called to say, long after our ‘happily ever after’, you will replace me with someone else, someone younger, who looked the way I used to; snow-white skin, hair as black as ebony, lips as red as blood.
Avarice is the way you want both me and her: one to nurture you, one to save you from your own aging.
Sloth woke me. We should have been. I was too soft, too lost in taking care of your children, too slow in understanding that one day I would lose you; the older ex-princesses get, the more we find ourselves in a cautionary tale instead of a fairytale.
Pride spoke. It returned to me when I realised how I was the power of the entire forest. Where you were just a mere human, secret magic from the forest womb lies within me.
Wrath has become me. Did you really think I would let you get away with turning me into an aged and worthless thing after you made a bed-worn queen and got an heir out of me? My stepmother was right to become a dark witch, how else does an older woman protect herself? Watch now, as I turn your ships to wrecks, your armies into nothingness, how I bring a tidal wave of magic down onto your forest, how I take this love you left to rot inside me and turn it into a savage thing from my own happily ever after’s treasury.
The Evil Queen
Oh dearie me,
did you come here
looking for a damsel in distress?
A queen patiently waiting
for a dashing knight
to save her from herself?
Did you really think
this was going
to end with you
playing the hero by bringing
the kindness out
of the evil queen?
Look again, love,
someone has lied to you
about my hidden virtue.
I have always loved
being the beast.
Gretel After Hansel
Did anyone ever tell you what happens
if you kill a witch before you grow up?
That you leave a part of yourself in that storybook place,
saccharine sweet with bitter memories?
You are half fairytale, half girl,
with parents who chose to abandon you,
a brother who swore he would never leave
then found a wife and left you.
And here you are, picking yourself apart
breadcrumb by breadcrumb,
trying to learn how to swallow survival,
but a p
art of you never left the witch’s door.
You still have the grit and determination
that stopped a child-eating monster
in her tracks; that wasn’t Hansel, that was you.
And damaged though you are, that girl is still there.
Our stories don’t begin and end
because men we once trusted have left them,
we were made whole to start with,
independent tales of strength and madness.
What I am trying to say is, Gretel,
you define yourself, without your brother;
you define yourself with your courage,
which was already imprinted on your bones.
No one taught you how to survive,
darling, you did that on your own.
Even without him, you can bring down monsters.
Believe me. You can still bring down monsters.
Hansel’s Letter to His Son
Now that you are of an age when promises can be made, I need you to promise me something, and promise it true.
Promise me that you will become a better man than me.
Men often try to mould their sons into versions of themselves. My father was a hatchet job of a man and he tried to make me a version of him. Three times he left me and my sister in the woods to die. Men who leave their children to die are worse than witches that try to eat children, and don’t you forget it. They’ll tell you stories about how your grandfather mourned for your Aunt Gretel and I, but he had choices. He made bad ones. He chose my stepmother over us and I have never forgiven him for it. He chose water over blood, words over love, the kind of mistakes no father should ever make, he made them all.
