How to Fracture a Fairy Tale: 2

by Jane Yolen

  The air was suddenly heavy. Fireflies seemed to hang motionless between the porch and the back garden. Inside the house, where my kids were watching a program about dinosaurs, I could hear the TV; and from the kitchen, where my wife was putting the finishing touches on my father’s seventy-second birthday cake, came the sounds of the mixer.

  Suddenly something large and dark, like a meteorite, fell across the moon and down, down, down toward earth. Dad reached his arms up as if welcoming an old friend, and the angel’s enormous golden wings enfolded him.

  Dark fathomless eyes stared into mine for a second, just as they had so many years ago. And then the Angel of Death took Dad away, leaving only the husk of his body and a single wing feather behind.

  How I fractured these Stories:

  NOTES AND POEMS

  How to Fracture a Fairy Tale

  “The Thing About Fairy Tales”

  The thing about fairy tales

  is not the Once, but the After.

  We all know about Once.

  It is the start of our lives,

  the mistaken old woman

  of the wood, the one we forgot

  to give half our sandwich,

  all of our brisket,

  most of the chocolate mousse.

  It is the fox we did not brush,

  the sparrow we did not save,

  a lion whose thorny paw

  we did not doctor.

  The oven into which

  we did not push the witch.

  It all leads to the After,

  which is not death,

  but inconsequence;

  not dancing in red hot iron shoes,

  but living past our sell-by date.

  hating the husband,

  bored with the wife.

  It is the princess growing fat,

  the king unfaithful,

  and no children write home

  to ask us how we are doing,

  only a postcard of need.

  Snow in Summer

  “Snow in Summer” is set in the 1940s in the small West Virginia town my late husband grew up in. Much of the setting is from the memories I have of so many visits there over the years, beginning in the early1960s. Eventually I turned the short story into a fairy tale novel of the same name. There’s a lot more happening in the novel, of course. And I love the surprise of the ending in my fracture. But it is the ending of the actual folk tale that both fascinates/bothers me because it makes no sense. In the oldest tale, the prince sees the girl in a glass coffin and pays the dwarfs gold for her. And off he goes on his horse, with his men carrying the coffin behind. (In some variants, they put the glass casket with the dead girl on a cart.) And for what reasons does he wants a dead girl in a glass coffin? I have three ideas, each one more disgusting than the last. I used some of those ponderings to make the poem, not the story. The poem was first published in Asimov’s Magazine.

  “Prince Ever After”

  He paid the little men in gold,

  their grubby hands greedy for more,

  But his face remained stern with his refusal.

  The casket’s glass was well polished,

  he had to give them that. No fingerprints

  marred the view of the girl.

  Lifting the box up carefully,

  his seven chosen men set it on the wagon.

  They made no hard steps, no joggles,

  their boots—like the cartwheels—cushioned.

  The last girl had woken up too soon

  and had to be put down.

  This one would make it to the castle

  or chosen heads would roll. He felt for his sword,

  burnished and sharpened in its leather sheath.

  No one in the twelve kingdoms

  would have a finer casket girl on display.

  Of that he was certain.

  The Bridge’s Complaint

  I was asked to contribute a story from a different POV to a fairy tale anthology and for some reason the idea of writing The Three Billy Goats Gruff from the bridge’s POV came to mind. As an oral storyteller, I had great fun enlarging on the old Norwegian tale. But here it is a short version, perhaps because Bridge obviously has (trigger warning for pun-ophobes) a short attention span. My silly/sweet story became an excuse to be a whiner for a couple of days. Did I enjoy doing it? Of course. I will do anything for my art! So here’s a poem that is a sadder version starring a troll maiden—and yes, they do exist—in Swedish and Norwegian folklore.

  “Troll Maiden on the Bridge”

  Water, as fleeting

  as human life,

  flows beneath her feet.

  She cannot breathe deeply

  because of the sorrow

  that dams her soul.

  Alone of her clan

  she seems a human girl

  as long as you do not look closely.

  She has a tail, small and black,

  that curls like a question mark

  above her perfect buttocks

  a small oak forest

  of unbudded twigs pushing

  through the skin of her back.

  She is neither troll nor human,

  but the bridge between,

  which is why she sits there

  letting the whole world

  walk across her heart,

  Her grieving heart.

  The Moon Ribbon

  “The Moon Ribbon” has a bit of Cinderella in it (stepmother and stepsisters being mean and greedy, plus Cinderella hiding the glass shoe in her pocket). It also has a bit of George MacDonald’s The Princess and the Goblin (the magical grandmother). That book was published in 1892 and remains one of my favorite children’s fantasy novels. But the rest of this fractured fairy tale is really mine. Well, maybe not a fracture but a mash-up? Moon Ribbon was the title story of my second fairy tale collection, published in the late 1970s, almost a hundred years after the MacDonald book. The poem is new and explains my fascination with strong-minded folk tale heroines.

  “Learning from Those Other Princesses”

  They are buried, those other princesses,

  as deep in their tales, stone embroideries

  mired by tradition. Even the folklorists type them

  as just another pretty girl in waiting.

  But see Rapunzel climbing down her own hair,

  claiming the broken prince, as she was once broken.

  The Finn King’s daughter, digging through mounds

  deep as diamond mines, without dynamite or hard hat.

  We no longer wait for princes, rescuing ourselves

  from those higher prisons, those darker palaces.

  We pull on hobnail boots, kick down doors,

  even the ceilings of the glass mountains.

  Hand me my pickaxe, my pitons, my shears.

  Stand out of the way, you gentlemen of leisure.

  One princess coming through, one vote,

  one tower, one castle at a time.

  THIS IS AN UNCORRECTED PROOF THIS IS NOT FOR SALE

  Godmother Death

  This is a folktale (most often as “Godfather Death”) that can be found all throughout Europe. The Irish and Spanish versions are the ones that most influenced this telling. No, scratch that—what began this story was getting an invite from Neil Gaiman to do a short story for an anthology he was editing for Vertigo/DC Comics in which one of the characters from his comic Sandman starred. As I read his invitation, I remembered the folktale and got right to work. I was using Neil’s character Death, in his telling a wonderful, snarky Goth girl who is ageless and endless. I finished the story and really liked it. (This is rare for me.) And Neil really liked it, too. If you read that anthology, you will know the story was never published there. Why? Because when my agent and I read the contract, it said that that DC owned the story till the heat death of the universe. Well, legal words to that effect. I never sell all rights to anything I write. One never knows . . . Watty Piper was the house name for a variety of peo
ple at Platt & Munk Publishers. Mostly their young editors wrote the stories for their board books under that name for a flat fee. And one of them (we do not know who) wrote The Little Engine that Could. I filed off the Sandman numbers, changed a few things, and sold the story elsewhere. And the story has been reprinted a number of times, thank you very much, Neil. (He was very understanding and we are still good friends.) The poem is about Death, too. In fact it’s about some actual statues in a cemetery where a couple, long-married but of two different religions, died. And the silly preacher and priest insisted each had to be buried in his/her own religious boneyard. The children and neighbors who knew of the couple’s devotion, erected two stone statues on their graves, which reach across the wall that separates the religious areas, so they can defeat Death for eternity.

  “Stone Hand in Stone Hand: Norvelt Cemetery”

  Death could not separate them,

  this husband, this wife,

  as religion would have dictated,

  preacher and priest approving

  different heavens for each.

  They reach across the wall

  between the burial grounds,

  going about familial visitations

  like prisoners, a touch here,

  a grasped hand there,

  enough for stone,

  enough for eternity.

  Happy Dens or A Day in the Old Wolves’ Home

  Originally, I thought of this as a young children’s chapter book with illustrations. Over time I came to see it was a gloss on wolves in fairy tales that—to a somewhat aging writer at the time (even older now)—also spoke to the warehousing of our elder citizens. So maybe notfor little kids after all. But maybe a short story for adults, which is how it was first published, but then republished in both adult and young adult collections. Go figure. As for the poem, it is very political (I lean left) and not only has been published in one of my collections (Last Selchie’s Child) but will also be in the upcoming CD from my band, Three Ravens. It’s from a performance we do with music and poetry called “Awa’ with the Fairies.” I wrote the lyrics to the majority of the songs. My son Adam, who is the real musician in our family, told his kids, “Nana is in a band and she’s seventy-nine!” His son asked, “What does she play?”And Adam answered quickly, “The audience.”

  “Once Upon a Wolf”

  Once upon a time, there was a wolf.

  But not a wolf.

  An Other.

  Whose mother and father were others

  Who looked not like us—

  Republican or Dem,

  in other words:

  THEM.

  They were forest dwellers,

  Child sellers.

  Wife beaters,

  Idol makers,

  Oath breakers,

  In other words:

  WOLF.

  So, Happy Ever After means

  We kill the wolf,

  Spill his blood,

  Knock him out,

  Bury him in mud.

  Make him dance

  In red—hot—shoes,

  For us to win

  The Wolf—must—lose.

  Granny Rumple

  I first thought about the character of Rumpelstiltskin being a Jew when teaching a children’s lit course (for seven years) at Smith College. Eventually I wrote an essay about it: how in the old tale the only character who does what he promises and isn’t lying is Rumpelstiltskin. The miller and his daughter lie, and the king is motivated by greed alone. But the small man with the unpronounceable name who lives outside the walls of the kingdom and is allowed only one job—spinning straw into gold—does not lie. Plus he helps the miller’s daughter out of a desperate position. So of course he must be a demon who wants to use the (as yet unborn) baby prince in some disgusting blood rite. Blood rite. That’s was when I realized the “demon” was a stand-in for a Jew. Someone with an unpronounceable name who is forced to live outside the city walls. Is allowed only one job inside the kingdom—that of moneychanger. Plus the canard that was current at the time of the fairy story in both Germany and Russia: that Jews stole Christian babies to kill them and use their blood to make matzo. So, I did what any reasonable academic did—I published a paper/essay. But as I am also a fiction writer (and poet), I wrote “Granny Rumple,” which was snapped up by a Datlow/Windling anthology. The poem was written to be used with this story.

  “Spinning Straw”

  His hand moves so quickly

  she cannot tell the wheel

  from the wish.

  Gold pours from somewhere,

  already refined into coins,

  enough to refinance a kingdom.

  She tries counting them,

  though her education ended at twenty.

  Gold spills past that number.

  She dreams of crowns like plates

  on the heads of angels,

  shoes the color of the sun.

  But her small dreams

  are barely adequate to the fortune

  the money-changer spins.

  The counting house in her head

  has no way to know a hallmark

  from a hatch mark.

  Real gold from fool’s gold.

  Angel plates from gold plate.

  A truth from a lie.

  One Ox, Two Ox, Three Ox, and the Dragon King

  “One Ox, Two Ox, Three Ox, and the Dragon King” is based on the fact that Chinese dragon stories (and the old beliefs about dragons) are much more positive than western dragon stories. The Eastern dragons are gods of rain and abundance, though they can occasionally (like any gods) act unpredictably if you do not follow the rules and do not have a good heart. In order to write this, I read several books of Chinese folklore, notably Eberhard’s Folktales of China and Hackin’s Asiatic Mythology. I worked on and off on the story for almost a year. This story takes various bits and pieces of Chinese folk characters and lore, but the way the Ox brothers solve their problem is really very Western and that is the real fracture. This was first published in my collection Here There Be Dragons, as was the poem.

  “‘Story,’ the Old Man Said,”

  looking beyond the cave to the dragon tracks.

  “Story is our wall against the dark.”

  He told the tale: the landing, the first death, the second.

  They heard the rush of wind, the terrible voice,

  a scream, then another.

  Beyond the wall the dragon waited

  but could not get in.

  Brother Hart

  “Brother Hart” is based on the Russian/Grimms story of “Little Brother, Little Sister” in which the two children are forced out of their castle by their wicked stepmother, a witch. Their escape route takes them through an enchanted woods. The fracturing here is twofold—the point of view and how I inserted the love and protective nature that I had for my brother Stevie, who was four years younger than I. Of course we lived in a happy home, and didn’t have wicked forests to travel through, though until we were fourteen and ten, we lived across the street from Central Park in New York City and usually I was in charge out there. Not a lot of actual wolves, but still occasionally a place where we needed to be careful. The original tale is one of my all-time favorite fairy tales. The poem is about another brother/sister pair out in the wilds, only time fairy children were brought into the world of humans. Based on an old English legend and published in my small book of fairy poems, The Last Selchie Child.

  “Green Children”

  Dazed they were, and scared

  lying on the cold stones,

  their arms and legs green.

  Not the dark green of ivy,

  not the yellow-green of apples,

  ripe on the summer bough,

  nor the deep green of the ocean

  where it leans against its bed.

  They were the green of leeks,

  of new-furled feather fern,

  of the early leaf breaking soil.

  When they ope
ned their eyes,

  their eyes were green, too.

  And the little hairs on their arms

  were inchworm green.

  They spoke a green language

  which the trees and flowers knew,

  but which we did not.

  The boy died of a wasting,

  the girl did not,

  eating broadbeans,

  forgetting her green tongue,

  growing whiter with each day;

  till she christened

  and married and all, all white.

  Not the white of milk

  after the cream has been skimmed off,

  nor the white of October snow,

  nor the white of a spring lily,

  waxen and still,

  nor the white of sea pearls

  formed within the shell.

  She was the white of the old moon

  that shines over the hall.

  Sun/Flight

  “Sun/Flight” is clearly a short fracturing of the Icarus story, done in two important ways—told from Icarus’s point of view, and Icarus saved and pulled from the sea without memory instead of dying, as in the original Greek myth. Or at least I save him for a while. The gods cannot be fooled. This story—and the poem below—make four times I have used the Icarus myth in my writing: I also did a picture book, Wings (with the most achingly beautiful illustrations by Dennis Nolan), and a very short poem (six lines) published in Parabola magazine in 1977.

  “Icarus Fall”

  On feathered dreams,

  sky his limit,

  he was a child when he flew.

  He fell as an adult,

  down to the earh

  to plow, and sow, and make do.

  Yet still at night,

  exhausted by seeding,

  he feels the air

  On his face, his arms,

  under his feathers,

  tangling his whitened hair.