Fairy Tale Review
This Book Belongs To:
FAIRY TALE REVIEW
The Ochre Issue
FOUNDER & EDITOR
Kate Bernheimer, University of Arizona
MANAGING EDITOR
Joel Hans, University of Arizona
POETRY EDITOR
Jon Riccio, University of Arizona
ADVISORY BOARD
Donald Haase, Wayne State University
Maria Tatar, Harvard University
Jack Zipes, University of Minnesota
ASSOCIATE EDITORS
Margaret Chapman, Emily Coon, Jessica C. Malordy, Benjamin Schaefer, Matthew Schmidt
READERS
Adam Al-Sirgany, Jarrett Eakins, Andie Francis, Debora Gravina, Tommy Mira y Lopez
EDITORIAL ASSISTANTS
Wren Awry, Alexandria Bennett, Kelsey Blackman, Samantha Coxall, Adrianna Dasher, Katherine DiChristofano, Jared Hughes, Nathaniel Hurley, Cynthia Kilbourne, Richard Leis, Breanna Manlick, Mia Moran, Justin Morrow, Paige Neely, Paige Osborn, Stavros R. Popoff, Kristin Prinz, Lucy Randazzo, Trisha Smith, Catherine Walker, Corey Watson, Stephanie Williams, Bethany Woll
ORIGINAL PRINT DESIGN
J. Johnson, DesignFarm
COVER ART (INSIDE FRAME)
Kiki Smith, “Born”
COURTESY OF THE ARTIST
LAYOUT
Tara Reeser
FAIRY TALE REVIEW
www.fairytalereview.com
Electronic edition © 2016 by Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan 48201–1309. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without formal permission. Manufactured in the United States of America. Originally © 2016 by Wayne State University Press.
The Ochre Issue (2016) 978-0-8143-4289-3
Fairy Tale Review is devoted to publishing contemporary fairy tales and new translations of fairy tales into English, with an interest in the aesthetics and ethics of fairy tales and in diverse styles and forms. How can fairy tales help us to go where it is we are going, like Jean Cocteau’s magical horse? We hope to discover.
“I know that no one is going to believe any of this. That’s okay. If I thought you would, then I couldn’t tell you. Promise me that you won’t believe a word.”
—Kelly Link, “The Faery Handbag”
FAIRY TALE REVIEW
The Ochre Issue
ANNOTATED TABLE OF CONTENTS
JOEL HANS
Editor’s Note
Ochre is the color of our earliest stories. It is the color we chose when we wanted to make paintings on the walls of caves, in places that never did learn the name of sunlight. By the grace of small fires we etched in ochre; we coughed at the smoke in a confined area but also the absurdity of things we would later call warmth and light and home.
COURTNEY BIRD
The Diamond Girl
The Ochre Issue Prose Contest Winner as judged by Brian Evenson
In your version of the story, the girl is a junkie. She is seventeen, standing on the side of the road with a garbage bag at her feet, and in the bag, she has a teddy bear and a box of Girl Scout cookies that she stole from her niece. Her arm is outstretched, palm facing the sky. She’s hitchhiking but not with her thumb. It looks like she’s asking the sky for rain.
CAROLINE CABRERA
from Apple Hill Farm
Goats are the fleshy fence for alpacas. If the farm is a cell, the farmhouse, its misshapen nucleus, then the farthest rings of goat electrons must go unnamed. Lady goats, it’s not that you aren’t useful, it’s just your use is prey-meat.
CHRISTOPHER CITRO
Saving Myself (For Something) & We’re Actually Fabulous
I walk slowly from room to room
wondering when it will rain in the house.
Both my arms are made of glass.
JAYDN DEWALD
The Rosebud Variations
Round ten o’clock at night, I entered Szechuan Gardens—a cavernous, red-curtained Chinese restaurant—one of our favorites—overcome with the preposterous sensation that I was late, that she was there at one of the shadowy tables, rapping her knuckles, waiting for me…
ZACHARY DOSS
The Season of Daughters
The daughters wake for the first time on his front porch and he will never know where they come from. The first daughter he finds is naked, trembling, and white as paper. She does not cry. When he picks her up she is so small it is like holding an egg that is larger than a regular egg.
JACLYN DWYER
Baby Bird & The Barren Wife Gives Birth to a Girl
Two Essays
I will do the nursing. The suckling and swallowing. He will do the singing. The calling and crooning. We will both do the raising. Hatchling to nestling. Who will do the plucking?
RACHEL EDELMAN
How Humans Use Dead Animals
Now the orchard rows
are frozen streams of ethylene
and he’s selecting
moths from the morgue.
RACHEL CONTRENI FLYNN
Chime
The children smash
the mother’s glass doll
and can never
fix it.
KRISTEN GLEASON
Plumpenthroat
His first week north he caught a case of the ancient plumpenthroat, which swelled his eyes so that he seemed to the ladies and the children on the bus to be both incredulous and diseased.
RODNEY GOMEZ
The Clowns
The first clown appeared in May by a café. He resembled Bozo, but he didn’t smile. His eyes were red, and in those marbles a violence. A little girl sipping chocolate saw him first and screamed. Then others saw him and were cocooned.
KAREN GREEN
from The Willful Ignorance Project
LAURA GROTHAUS
Pinocchio Revisited
I wanted to be floor—
my under-beams, my littlest
knots and private
crannies for toes.
KELSIE HAHN
Trackways
Edmontosaurus is on trial for murder. The crime scene is filled with footprints, long and lean.
CARLEA HOLL-JENSEN
May Queen
Our mothers remind us it is not the worst thing to be ugly. In the morning, they kiss us and say their goodbyes. The lovelier among us are wept over, just in case. The plain, the pockmarked, the unsymmetrical have, at least, the hope of someday growing into our features or finally learning how to properly style our hair.
COOP LEE
The Black Lodge
pacific time: 8:48 and 30 seconds.
glastonbury grove.
jupiter and saturn are in alignment.
we are a go.
MURIEL LEUNG
How to Fall in Love in a Time of Unnameable Disaster
In the beginning, the sight of a Tuesday acid rainstorm was a stunner. From a barred window in an apartment Mal and I shared in Corona, I watched the rainfall. It started in slow drips before turning into crystalline walls that linked ground to sky. A world-house with a gaping hole in the ceiling.
LINDSAY LUSBY
Forestry (Parts 1–3)
The Ochre Issue Poetry Contest Winner as judged by Joyelle McSweeney
The girl with no hands
prefers to imagine herself
a bird:
pink pigeon feet
and tiny holey bones—
CARMEN MARIA MACHADO
The Old Women Who Were Skinned
There once were two sisters, close in age, who had been birthed and loved and became stooped and wise and were now old women together. They lived in a house in a courtyard surrounded by a tall stone wall, meant to keep out most children and all men, though starlings made their nes
ts in the boughs of the elms.
REBECCA MACIJESKI
Death’s Pocket Inventory
Roofing nails. Half-empty prescription bottles.
A lucky rabbit’s foot, gnarled and orange.
Books of matches. A used tea bag.
Thumb tacks. Bobby pins. Mustard packets.
CHRISTOPHER NELSON
Fairy Tale
Father: a branding iron, an ocean—
that’s the end of the poem.
I’m a child againamong the birds, six warblers frustrating
the hedgerow
MARTA PELRINE-BACON
Girls Underground
REBECCA PEREA-KANE
The Kunstkamera, St. Petersburg
Two dogs in the hills above the
Volga circle the farmer in a heavy coat, hooded,
because the lambs come before full sunlight.
AIMEE POKWATKA
Ashes
My dear, I must have been dreaming. I scattered ashes on the path. He tells me his house lies deep in the forest. I follow him, tell him my story, hoping it’s enough to keep me safe. He picks locks, fills his birdcage with trinkets and jewels.
RACHEL RICHARDSON
The Bear’s Wife
Always we Hatfields have lived here. My daddy’s daddy’s daddy Ephraim and his son Ephraim and then there’s my own daddy, Devil Anse, and all of them and all of us to come will forever live here. We now are thirteen altogether, brothers Johnse and Joseph and Cap and Tennis, Elliott, Elias, Troy, Willis, and Robert E. Lee, and my sisters Mary, Betty, and Rosie, all before me, Nancy, called Nan.
BROC ROSSELL
from Alameda
Butchers on the jury dispel
the narrative
tonic
increateCeremony of the glands
bound his own hands
with a thoroughly modern organization.
JASMINE SAWERS
Delicate
My princess turns colors when I touch her. My fingers alight and she whimpers, skin blooming a dappled purple.
CECILY SCHULER
To Meet My Father
Fasten your seat belt. Return tables
upright, and to their locked position.
I am flying to Los Angeles to meet my father.
He has written me a letter.
IRA SUKRUNGRUANG
Family: A Fairy Tale
The boy did not know when he ate the seeds that out from his belly button would grow a vine. He decided to show his mother who was busy with his winged sister. She was always busy with her, a handful of a girl, who took to flight only a few days ago. Now his sister refused to still her wings, the way she refused to still her mouth when she learned speech.
KIM WELLIVER
The Three Bears’ Lesser Known Names for Goldilocks
Girl of trespass
Little One of greedy forage,
porridge scraped bowl-clean
Girl from the house of yes
Girl of palmed pollywogs
GABRIELLE WILLIAMS
Clementine & the Cold Winter
The character dies in this scene but is resurrected each
time they find a new memory. They remember things
before there was anything in writing.
ALLYSON YOUNG
Sedna
Her right hand traces the fjord in her thigh
She counts the things she is afraid of:
Contributor Notes
EDITOR’S NOTE
Ochre is the color of our earliest stories. It is the color we chose when we wanted to make paintings on the walls of caves, in places that never did learn the name of sunlight. By the grace of small fires we etched in ochre; we coughed at the smoke in a confined area but also the absurdity of things we would later call warmth and light and home. Ochre was the color that permeated our lives, slipped into our fingernails, found its way onto all our clothes, our bedspreads, and the skins of lovers. There is evidence of ochre in caves dating back twenty centuries BC: horses and bison and traces of human hands. The places we have touched, tried to remember. Our tongues made middens of ochre even when we couldn’t see.
If fairy tales are a language, as Kate Bernheimer argues, then I argue that ochre is the color in which that language must be written.
But then to call ochre a color, and not a catalog, is a disservice: it can come in infinite shades that range from the earthy yellow you find embracing these fairy tales, to the deep reds that adorn those cavern walls and their forgotten oxygen, their stalactite companions. Ochre too is a dynamic color, the yellows able to turn increasingly red as molecules find water in the air and transform themselves into hematite, a sesquioxide (useful hint: sesquioxidizing is the highest-scoring word that can fit on a Scrabble board).
More than a year ago, we sat down with Kate, our professor and guide, and we discussed color. We traipsed with black, chuckled over silver, considered the logistics of rainbow. I had just visited Sedona, Arizona, mere hours from Fairy Tale Review’s home in Tucson: I had knelt down alongside the hiking trail and I had sprinkled ochre into the palm of my hand. I had rubbed it there, let it trace me the rest of the day. So ochre it became, or ochre it oxidized into, if our love for fairy tales is the iron and the water both. If our love for storytelling makes the case in geologic time, the hawing of mountains, hiding some but revealing so much more, beautiful things left hidden until the crust imparts a treasure: both the red basin of Sedona and the caves in which we first tried to make our stories permanent.
I think you will find the works beyond this page like ochre in their catalog of subject and complexity, all gently different shades of much the same question: what is language, what is story? Who are we? What do we make of ourselves, or the others we thought we once were? What I said about the dynamism of ochre isn’t a lie, but I can’t condone dipping this issue in water to see if it turns red; perhaps, instead, you might hold on dear to it after you gallop though its pages, after you read some words aloud, after you speak ochre yourself: maybe you will pull it from your bookshelf in a decade or two and find it has changed the color of its trappings. Maybe you will act like a cave, and keep these ochre stories safe, until just the right other enters, and asks to listen.
—Joel Hans
Managing Editor
COURTNEY BIRD
The Diamond Girl
The Ochre Issue Prose Contest Winner as judged by Brian Evenson
In your version of the story, the girl is a junkie. She is seventeen, standing on the side of the road with a garbage bag at her feet, and in the bag, she has a teddy bear and a box of Girl Scout cookies she stole from her niece. Her arm is outstretched, palm facing the sky. She’s hitchhiking but not with her thumb. It looks like she’s asking the sky for rain.
When a car pulls alongside her, it’s the mother’s boyfriend and he says, Hey sugar. She begins to run. Wheatgrass is scratching her calves and the dryness of it sears her. She is aware of every blade. There is a feeling, spreading from the place just beneath her ribs, that she’s having a heart attack. It’s sharp and contained, blooming. It will eat her. She watches her feet as she runs. She wills them to fly. The veins between her toes look like they came from the soil.
He lies on top of her in the grass. He tangles his hands in her black hair and pulls.
In another version, the girl wants it. She has a gap between her front teeth, but people say it’s striking. When her mother’s in the bathroom, she bites the man’s ear. Crawls under the table and kisses him. If he doesn’t want her back, her heart will break. She can feel it breaking even then, with her head in his lap and his hands in her hair. And later, when he kisses her mother, he’s watching her over the mother’s shoulder. He has one green eye and one blue eye.
When the mother finds them in the shower, he calls the girl a witch and she tries to become one. She locks herself in the bedroom and wills the house to catch fire. The mother and boyfriend leave. They take the couch cushions and the pans. They t
ake the shampoo and the toothpaste and the toilet paper. He’s closing the door behind them when the mother says wait. She takes the girl’s fish from his tank and puts him in the microwave. He pops like a balloon.
The mother’s boyfriend drives the first girl to a motel. She doesn’t know where she is, only that the carpet feels like soggy cereal below her feet and the face in the mirror is not familiar to her. The overhead light is strange. Her cheeks are hollowed out and she looks old. The mother’s boyfriend locks the door. He puts a gun down by the television and turns it on to block out the sounds that the girl makes. Crying sounds. Breathing sounds.
At first the diamonds look like chicken pox. Small red pustules erupting on the girl’s belly. She’s lying on the bed and the man is watching the sores grow. He touches them carefully. He kisses them. They make constellations on her skin and he traces them with his finger. Orion’s Belt. Andromeda. Virgo. His hand is cold and her eyes try to open, but the lids are too heavy. He takes the needle from the pillow by her head and places it on the bedside table. Lays down next to her and says they’re going to be okay.
The gap-toothed girl is lying in the bathtub at home. The house is empty. It smells like burnt fish. The diamonds are so sharp that all she needs to do is touch the skin and it breaks. She collects the stones in a soap dish. The bath water is pink with tiny cataclysms of blood.
Her body says there are a thousand ways to be crushed without dying. She thinks about putting clothes on for the first time in a month. She thinks about going down to the jewelers. She thinks that if her mother had known she could grow diamonds under her skin, she would have never left.