Fierce Fairytales

by Nikita Gill

  A man’s greatest treasure is his children, the only people who will carry forth his name, his memory, into the future. What name is left if those children know that you betrayed them, abandoned them to the wild for a morsel of food?

  I had to become the man my father was too cowardly to be. And now I pass the same to you.

  Be the man I was too cowardly to be.

  Take my mistakes and turn them into something better. Be a better father, a better brother, you are already a better son. This is how we will teach our sons to be more, to ensure a strength of lineage, to enable them to be the very best they can be.

  By telling them, ‘Be a better man than me.’

  Belladonna

  Women who live alone in the woods develop a reputation. Their independence weaves sorcery, as though a woman wanting to be or live alone can only wish to do so because she has harnessed otherworldly powers. A woman without a man must be haunted, or the thing that haunts.

  Before she was Belladonna, she was just Donna. Before she was Donna, she was just a quiet village girl with a strong ability to turn poisons like nightshade into potions. Rumours grow exponentially however, and somehow this quiet woman’s fable became about a false bread house and cake roof, and somewhere along the way, she became a witch crone, not a regular human. Belladonna rose every morning, a woman with long, dark hair, and a soft smile reserved only for the herbs she would pick every day. Her cottage was made of strong wood and plentiful straw, it was sturdy, not as sturdy as a brick house, but this was all she could afford.

  By day she roamed the forest, collecting herbs and creating potion after potion, each one more healing than the next, some to be drunk, and some to be applied to skin like lotions. By night, she was visited by people from the nearby village, the same village she was shunned from as a witch. They stole away into the night to treat what ails them with her healing potions, whilst still talking about her like she nightly entertained demons.

  Human beings are selfish that way. They will gut you and take from you everything precious, and still say terrible things about you even when they slice into your body like you are a meal.

  Still, she tried to stay kind. Even when the wolves howled outside her door and no one even came out to see if she was all right. Even if they continued to make stories about her as though she were disposable, they used to burn witches because of stories, you know. A story is no small thing.

  When the two children came knocking on her door, she took them in. It was the right thing to do.

  She fed them and gave them fresh linen bedsheets to sleep on whilst she slept on the floor. But there is a monster in this tale. A monster she didn’t even realise existed. In the daytime, when she disappeared, a creature would come to her house. Disguised as an old crone, it would wait till darkness fell and eat an errant villager when it left her house. It smelt the children, their young blood made its mouth water. It crept into the house, and when Belladonna returned, she found that it had been baked till it had been slaughtered. The quick-witted children had escaped and taken the story to the nearby village.

  Soon, the villagers would arrive with pitchforks and torches.

  Soon, she will pay the price for non-magic.

  Soon, she will be nothing but ashes.

  The Little Mermaid’s Mother Speaks to Her Unborn Baby

  Listen to me, you are a half-ocean girl,

  with wild that you have still to unlock from your soul.

  No man can help you discover who you are,

  this is a thing you must do on your own.

  Chase your adventures, face your breaking,

  it’s the pain that will teach you

  how to make yourself whole.

  The water and the wild have never forgotten you

  and in them you will always have a home.

  Become the thing your blood demands,

  a Siren Queen ready to take her throne.

  The Sea Witch’s Lament

  To really see what the sea witch had to go through, you must first remember what happens when you get your heart broken for the very first time. People always minimise it, say you’ll get over it, say first loves don’t matter as much as last ones, but that first heartbreak, that’s the death of your innocence. And you’re blindly walking in the darkness that’s trying to absorb you. A darkness that you have no tools or weapons to navigate, that is what the end of first love feels like. Some of us come out of that darkness still mostly whole, and those are the lucky ones.

  Because some of us never come back at all.

  And this was the story with the sea witch, the incredible ample-bodied being who was larger than life as a child, living her life with laughter and magic and joy. She spent her days learning how to look after the forgotten sea creatures that the merpeople considered too ugly or terrifying to tend to. Pilot fish and barracudas and eels were her friends, for they knew it was her they could always look to. Unfortunately for the sea witch, love comes for every woman. Just when we are sure we are safe from its clutches, it moves its way inside our hearts and we give ourselves completely to it, surrender in every way possible. This is why it is said love is to women what war is to men.

  Sixteen-year-old Sea Witch fell in love with the then seventeen-year-old Mer-Prince. And he fell too for this impossible, wonderful, darkly magical girl from a different tribe who he knew his family would never approve of. You would hope it would be that simple, that when two people give each other their hearts, the world falls away and lets them be, but that is rarely the case. Love is as complicated as the truth.

  So when his father presented him with an ultimatum, with a choice to give up his future kingdom and Ursula, Triton chose his kingdom. A part of him was too cowardly and too haughty to live the way she did, simply and protecting everything the merpeople threw away.

  So the sea witch was left to wander this darkness alone. And she never ever came out of it. To save herself from destruction, she blindly grabbed at her only lifeline, that which armoured what was left of her ruined heart by choosing the destruction that her mother, the sea, had given to her in her blood. The sea witch was never born evil, she became that way because she couldn’t let loose her emotions. Instead, she buried them deep and let them fester and turn into poison. This, this is the damage not grieving properly for first love can do. It can consume and destroy and harden all the goodness inside of you.

  In the sea witch’s story, she had no one to turn to. But you, my darling, have an army of all of the stars, to fill your grief-filled days with the comfort you can hold onto.

  You are not alone. With this endless universe above you that has given you the gift of existence. You are not alone.

  An Older and Wiser Little Mermaid Speaks

  There are so many ways to lose a voice.

  An uncomfortable laugh, don’t make a scene

  what will people say about you

  what will people say about us.

  I ask you now,

  do women pray to softer-spoken gods than men do?

  Do men pray louder and more

  unapologetically than women ever have?

  We are taught not to speak and if we do

  be pliant, be passive, be soft, be sorry.

  You are better as water anyway.

  Water is supposed to simply adapt.

  I ask you now, as the granddaughter of Poseidon

  who gave up her fins and voice for love,

  not to trade your magic in for anyone.

  Do not make sacrifice the ritual of your womanhood.

  I teach my half-sea girls that their voices

  are the most powerful things they can use,

  to let the word ‘no’ become the charm

  they need to help them take up space often.

  Now the mermaids are becoming sirens,

  for sirens are monsters who never feel compelled

  and monsters, unlike girls and mermaids,

  know how to protect themselves well.

 
Lessons from the Not-So-Wicked Witch for Dorothy

  I once knew a girl like you, and if someone had told her these things, she too would get the kind of fairytale ending where she was happy. Instead she got the fairytale ending of a villain. She turned out, you see, to be me.

  When they tell you how unkind I was, how cruel I was, how ready they were to get rid of me and how much of a kindness you had done by getting rid of me, I want you to know that I once was a girl just like you, full of dreams and ambitions. I became this way because of malicious lies, the stories other people told about me, not a single one of them was true. They called me wicked because I refused to become a pretty little thing that simply entertained them, like they wish for all women to do.

  Don’t let them judge you by your appearance. Your appearance will change over time, dearie, and you do not want people in your life who fell in love with your vivid blue eyes when they turn a faded blue, because those are the kind of people who will leave you.

  Remember that your heart and your brain are far more important than the way you look, they will stop the wrong people from guiding you – your heart will see lies in their souls and your brain will be able to hear the lies when they spill from their tongues. You are better than that. With the mind and heart full of bravery that helped you set free the lion, the scarecrow, and the tin man, you are more valuable and important to this world than you will ever know.

  You have such softness in your smile, it shows me your true heart. Don’t let anyone take that from you. They took from me and they made me hard, all it ever did was bring me sadness. Your softness will only bring you smiles.

  Let no one ever reduce you to your prettiness, no matter how good of a friend, partner, soulmate, parent, teacher, friend they are. Definitions of you are for you to make and for you alone.

  Beauty without kindness and bravery is just a pretty, empty shell, my dear. And you can find plenty of those on the beach. People use them to decorate their rooms. So I hope you aspire to be so much more than just beautiful. I hope you aspire to be so much more than a pretty little thing that decorates the room you walk into.

  Rapunzel, Rapunzel

  Rapunzel, Rapunzel, ask yourself why you let down your hair. Ask yourself, would anyone who truly loves you ever allow it to be subject to such wear and tear?

  Sometimes the person who raises you from root is not a person you can trust, even though every sign around you says you are supposed to. Sometimes the roots start rotting long before the tree notices. Sometimes all it takes is watching a mother bird teaching a baby bird how to fly to remind us what our parents are supposed to do: teach us to fly into the world and learn how to look after ourselves in it. Not give you away for the sake of selfish love. Not lock you away in a tower and rob you of the freedom of who you are.

  Rapunzel, Rapunzel, she began to rethink how and why she really let down her hair.

  For Rapunzel it was realizing that no one who truly loved her would use any part of her body, not even her hair, as a ladder. No one who truly loved her would hide her from the whole world in a tower. When toxic love is finally recognised for the painful, deep wound that it is, all of us must do the drastic and the painful to cut away the poison thread that binds you together.

  So Rapunzel, Rapunzel, she cut off her own hair, she used it as a rope, climbed down from the tower, and ran away to find her own freedom, to make her own fortune, like a bird finally free of her shackles and without so much as looking back.

  No one is coming to save you, my love. No prince, no saviour, no knight in shining armour. But don’t you worry about a thing. You’ve already got what should save you, hiding in the marrow inside your own powerful spine, your own bones.

  Rapunzel’s Note Left for Mother Gothel

  Loving in moderation

  and with hidden intentions

  is like showing outstretched palms

  that hold mere crumbs of your heart,

  whilst jealously demanding

  someone’s full heart

  in return for your crumbs

  If you cannot

  love someone completely,

  it’s better and kinder

  not to love them at all,

  instead of giving someone else

  crumbs that make them feel small.

  Baba Yaga

  When they tell you a woman becomes more erased, more faintly drawn than a human being, easier to ignore the older she gets, smile and remind them of me.

  Remind them of this old crone who lives in the forest, travelling on mortar and pestle, daring to be no one’s old widow, no one’s grandmother with a house that stands comically on chicken legs but still more feared than knights and emperors and sorcerers in all of this land.

  I turned my wrinkles into badges of honour, welcome their labels of ‘monster’ and ‘madness’ with pride. My mane of silver hair is as good as a thousand soldiers’ swords because not a single man has the courage to face me alone, the woman who tames fires and snakes and savours bones.

  They have made up a hundred stories about me to tell children at night. About an old carnivorous witch who will eat them at sight if they do not tuck themselves in and fall asleep as quick as they like. I’ve let them, because you cannot stop people’s tongues from spewing lies, but you can stop listening to them by paying them no mind. You see, I am too busy playing cards with dragons and turning drizzle into storms at whim. And I love this body that defies society and this aged skin that I am in.

  Tell them if they keep practicing erasure, I will keep teaching a million women to become old like me. Turn the meaning of a wrinkle into the same thing as the beautiful rings on an old oak tree. Remind each woman how empowering her age can be. Remind each and every girl out there that youth and beauty are not her shackles, nor her only currency.

  Why the Sun Rises and Sets

  Once upon a time, cinnamon people were sky-born. They lived within the clouds, and the browner their skin was, the longer they lived because they were so beloved by the sun. No one ever slept because no one ever needed to, and the sun stayed high in the sky all day. Night did not exist. It did not need to. Boys wearing burnt-sienna skin with pride would play in the sky, mahogany mothers watched their chestnut children fly away from them unafraid, because they always came back and no one feared anything—no one ever had to.

  Until the day the earth men came. They saw the sky people and wanted what they had. Joy. But the earth men didn’t know that joy was not a commodity and thought the sun’s rays were the secret gold that made these people so happy. The earth men hunted every little brown boy, girl, mother, father. They cut off their wings. They took them from the sky. They brought them to the earth and put them on ships as slaves, and took their sun, their homes, and even their bodies from them. Still, the sky people sung. Still, they held on. Still, they performed survival magics and proved so powerful in their spirit. You see, beings that are beloved by the sun do not get destroyed so easily. The sun, upon losing his people, turned the whole sky black in mourning, leaving his sister moon and his friends the stars in his stead. And till his people are restored to their former glory, he rises every morning to search for them, to hope them home, but every day he hears about how they are still targeted, injured, put into the ground, their children still murdered, so he paints the sky black again with his sadness, leaving his sister moon in charge again.

  The sun has never given up hope that one day, they will find their joy again. And until they do, he will paint the whole sky black to let them know he rises and sets for them.

  Why the Leaves Change Colour

  The first girl who was ever born with amber skin was Mother Nature’s own child. Her birth was from a seed Mother Nature planted in the darkest, purest, most fertile soil, and soon there was a flower, and the flower opened up to show the most beautiful little girl imaginable.

  One day when the little girl was playing, the Sky, who was her brother, jealous of how lovely she was and how happy and distracted their mother
had been since she was born, stole her and placed her upon a star so far away from the earth, Mother Nature could not get to her.

  In her grief, Mother Nature took every leaf that existed on Earth and turned them amber.

  The baby girl raised herself on this star—after all, she was her mother’s child, fortitude became her. She became majestic, and independent, and knew how to cope with anything alone because she had always only known alone. When the girl was finally old enough to explore the universe by itself, she travelled across the stars, finding beauty in thousands of planets, but none where she really felt at home. Until, that is, she came upon a beautiful blue planet with amber leaves. Walking through golden leaves, she remembered who she was, and who her mother was, for this is the magic of the bond children have with their mothers. They will remember them even if they are millions of miles away; why do you think good mothers can say things like ‘I love you all the way around the universe’ and you just know they mean it and know not to question it?