Fairy Tale Review Read online

  They send the mother too, because why should they continue to pay for her rent? And what use is the mother without the daughter? The girl is young. She needs a mother. They’re kind enough, at least, to know that.

  There are two windows through which Little Mina can hear the swollen water and smell the salt. On the first day, she stands at the window and watches the water move. It puts her in mind of something haunted, as if the sea were a great basin containing everything that was already dead and everything still living. She is wearing silk the color of lilacs and an ermine shawl. It is softer, even, than the milkweed dress. If you’d ever worn a dress that soft, you would miss it too. You would think about it every night.

  The princes promised they would bring desserts. The youngest one said he would visit. He said he was sorry and embarrassed that things turned out the way that they did. He said he would try to find her a dress made of the sea.

  They think it’s something to do with sadness, the mother says. So be sad. Think of your sister. Think of that orphanage that was burnt to the ground last week. There are so many things to be sad about. Why can’t you be sad in a palace? Why can’t you be sad when you are loved? You are a selfish little girl.

  A diamond needs desperation to grow, the witch says. It needs to suffocate. In the castle, she could walk the grounds whenever she wanted. She had her choice of playmates. What more does a child need?

  She would be more grieved without me, the mother says. If they want more diamonds, they should let me return to my business.

  Your only business was being mother to the diamond maker.

  The mother throws a stone from the floor of the cave into the water below. The splash is too small to see.

  Little Mina turns to the witch. Why did you do it? Did you know it would turn out this way?

  The witch rolls her eyes. People always think I know what will happen. You’re the diamond maker. I’m just the one with the scalpel.

  When your girl dies—an overdose, a heart attack, a wish coming true—the man is beside himself. He pulls every diamond from the drawers and counts them. There are four hundred and seventy six. But what will he do when the money runs out? What will he do now, with no one in the world to call his own? He is sweating, shaking, pacing the room from open window to open window. He can smell her there on the bed. He can smell the sea and it smells like she does. Like the belly of a ship. He takes her shoulders and shakes her. Throws her head down on the pillows. He scratches her skin with his fingernails but nothing comes out.

  At night, he mutters to himself. He opens the kitchen drawer and fits the blade into the electric knife. He will get the diamonds. He cuts into her thigh, but the only thing he finds is blood and damp tissue. He looks everywhere. Blood leaks as he draws the blade through her shoulder. Pieces of bone fly and at first, he sees the white and thinks diamonds! But no. They’re only the dry, sad underthings of a human.

  I believe you when you say that’s the way it happened. But in my story, no one has an electric knife. No one could look at another body and butcher it.

  It only takes three weeks for the sores to come back. The mother and the witch are bickering every day, and the door to the cave locks from the outside. No one can leave. Well, the witch can leave. She can unbutton her skin and slither through the crack in the wall, but when she does she looks bald and burnt, bare muscle and fat without skin to contain it. The skin puddles sadly on the floor of the cave until she comes back. Its eyes watch the mother.

  The mother is going insane. She resents the other two. She can barely look at Little Mina. Tells Little Mina again and again that it should have been Kate who lived.

  By the time Mina is fifteen, she’s a regular diamond mine. The youngest prince sends books, but he does not visit. Mina reads. She draws on the walls. She pretends to be Kate and that makes the mother happy. Most of the time, the mother believes her.

  I had a daughter once, the witch says. I took branches from the ash near my house, a handful of snowberries, a calla lily—a couple of small things from around the living rom, a clam shell, this old leather drum, a piece of rotten bread. A piece of coal. I buried the coal where her heart would be. And then I had a daughter.

  What’s coal? the mother says.

  It is something like a diamond, but black.

  What happened to her? Little Mina says.

  I put her in a basket and fed her to some wolves. But I meant well.

  One night when the witch is wandering along the beach below them, the mother steals her skin. She pulls it on over one foot and then the other. She buttons it up from her left heel to the nape of her neck. She wraps the braids around her head. She tries to become the witch. She wants to disappear. When the witch gets back, the mother refuses to return it.

  I don’t want to kill you, the witch says. But I will.

  You don’t need it, the mother wails. It’s beautiful and young and you don’t need it.

  Little Mina wishes that her mother would keep the skin on. She wishes her mother would turn into the witch. But in the end the mother gives the skin back. No one is happy but everyone is alive.

  In one version of my story, the youngest prince is engaged to a beautiful girl from the east. On the night before the wedding, he clasps a diamond necklace around her neck—a thin chain of diamonds with the big yellow diamond cut and polished at its center. They stand together in front of the silver mirror. She touches the diamond and sighs. He watches her eyelids flutter, the veins in them hungry and frail.

  The next morning he packs a bag. He pays the guard beside his door to keep quiet and then he flees. He takes a key with him and he rides all day until he reaches the sea. He climbs the long staircase, running two steps at a time. When he flings the door open, he sees Little Mina lying on her back with her breasts to the ceiling. She is naked and bleeding. The witch leans over her with a scalpel in her right hand. In her left, she holds tweezers. The girl is crying silently. In the corner, the mother babbles to herself. She says isn’t this always the way with children, they want and they want and when they get what they want, they’re bored. When they get the life they want, it’s just a façade. Because didn’t Little Mina want the diamonds? Didn’t she keep them a secret from the mother for all those months before the princes came? Didn’t she want them and hoard them and love them?

  I don’t have the dress made of water, the prince says.

  Little Mina draws a sheet over herself. She’s horrified to be caught like this, so vulnerable, so liminal. Half the diamonds have already been removed. Half are still in their pockets of skin. It’s been so long since anyone has seen her as a girl. Has seen the skin as anything other than hard-packed earth and now it’s on display and not only the skin, but the blood beneath it.

  Even now, even with the kingdom rolling in diamonds, no one ever visits.

  There are places we could go, the prince says. I can make you happy. We’ll make a life together and you’ll never grow another diamond again.

  But everyone will know you stole me, Little Mina says.

  He looks at the mother and at the witch. The witch shrugs. Do what you want, she says. Just leave the door open so I’m not stuck here with that woman.

  And Little Mina wants to believe him, so she says yes. He cuts the rest of the diamonds out himself. The sores heal immediately under the soft print of his fingers. She feels desire like a dragon in her belly. No one has ever touched her so softly. The witch looks away. She is ashamed of the hardness of her own hands. She is ashamed, maybe, of what she did to the girl.

  In this version, the girl and the prince live happily ever after in a faraway place. Little Mina has a daughter and when the daughter cries, her tears hit the floor and become frogs. They hop all over the house. The prince laughs when a frog jumps into a bowl of soup. Little Mina laughs the hardest. She tells her daughter that she’s lucky and the daughter laughs too because the frogs are funny. No one will ever want a girl who cries frogs. Not for the frogs, at least. That’s not the w
ay the world works.

  Your endings are lonely. The thing about Chloe is that her skin never stops making diamonds. Her skin never stops being sharp. So when she curls her body into the crook of a man, she cuts him. Even a good man. Even a man who she loves. The thing about the other girl, the dead girl, is that she died. Heaven is the loneliest place on earth, you say. Your stories are cruel. They exploit. They isolate. They make it impossible to be human.

  You think I’m childish. You think I don’t understand them.

  But I do.

  Let’s say the prince marries the other girl. She is more beautiful than Little Mina. Her hair grows thick and blonde. She comes with an entire kingdom and three chests of gold. Let’s say the prince isn’t who we want him to be. He isn’t as strong as we want him to be.

  But then, neither is Little Mina. No one is fighting hard enough.

  One night when the mother is asleep, the witch takes Little Mina into her arms and rocks her. She apologizes. She says she wanted so badly to give her a good life, but she didn’t know how. She says that if she could remove the mother’s skin and step into that mortal body, she would. But a mortal body won’t survive if you skin it, and the skin won’t survive either. There’s a way for the mother to become the witch, but not for the witch to become the mother.

  It’s confusing, she says, but that’s just the way the world works.

  Maybe what she means is that she is the mother already, and Little Mina is the girl in the basket.

  It’s too bad, Little Mina says, no one would miss my mother.

  I can give you freedom, the witch says. I can, at least, give you that.

  The girl is laden with heavy sores. She is fit to burst, so valuable in that exact moment that she could sink to the bottom of the sea and not be found until her ribs float to the surface. She squeezes one of the sores on her elbow. It’s almost ready.

  If freedom is dying, she says, I don’t want it.

  It isn’t dying, the witch says.

  The witch digs into her purse and brings out the folded piece of sky that was her roof. It is a sunny day, the sky a frosted blue. It lights up the interior of the cave even though there is no sun and outside, it is night. Little Mina runs her fingers along the edge of it.

  Take it, the witch says. Wrap it around yourself.

  And then what? Little Mina says. She is sick with the weight of the diamonds. She is like an old dog that has had too many litters. She is like a mine whose sides are worn with too many pick-axes. There are canaries inside of her, and they all say to run.

  You’ll be too big for this room, the witch says. You’ll break the walls down and the sky will take you back into itself. I have a long ladder. I will visit you.

  Little Mina drapes the sky over her shoulders. She wraps it around her naked waist and pulls it tight. Coolness descends over every inch of her. She feels like a child again. She feels like she did before her sister died, before she realized that her hair would never be pretty and her skin was scarred and that nobody loved her in the whole wide world. She is her father and her mother and her sister. She is the witch. She is you and she is me.

  Little Mina says goodbye to the witch, and thank you. Then she tugs the sky over her head and bursts from the cave. She flies to the edge of the earth and pins herself back into place along the horizon, her body an absence, with stars in every imaginable color blinking roughly against the black night.

  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.

  On the farm everything lows, is spun and woven. You can paint the farm by numbers, the numbers a scale from one to ten, beige to brown to browner. If you plan to stay the night on the farm, be prepared to weave yourself a fold in the loft, or to ruminate.

  Where men go, beasts follow. Hoof in heel. Alpaca necks craning, woolen periscopes. Any movement can be tracked and is.

  All your childhood toys have been updated or discontinued. Your play now is work. Your work, symbiosis. You are one mechanism, one animal on the farm. Some animals stand guard, some die, some are tended, some tend. Your hands and moving joints make a place for you. Your place can be absorbed into the greater fabric of the farm, the woolen masterpiece. You save your place with your use.

  If you leave the farm for a while, even in a dream, upon your return you will find the farm unmoved. Farms maintain a stubborn hold where they land.

  A donkey, Annie Oakley is taken away for a twilight-sleep excision. Her sister Athena wanders the pen, unsettled.

  Lady goats cycle in and out, are re-delivered at the rate of canned goods. On the farm you can pray for the nameless but you must maintain a nature-film sensibility to wash your hands clean at night with basil-scented soap. You must remember, the coyotes, they must eat someone.

  CHRISTOPHER CITRO

  Saving Myself (For Something) & We’re Actually Fabulous

  Saving Myself (For Something)

  I walk slowly from room to room

  wondering when it will rain in the house.

  Both my arms are made of glass.

  That is why I cannot pick up the telephone.

  When I cough, starlings come out

  from between my teeth. You remarked

  at the milk bar how carefully I seemed

  to breathe. That was me

  keeping the starlings from getting out.

  Once two thousand years ago

  when I was 18, I parked a white convertible

  on Christmas Eve, opened and

  read some of The Brothers Karamazov,

  Tampa flashing in the distance.

  Several circular Band-Aids ranged about

  my body behind my clothes, each one

  concealing a section of me.

  When a sundog appeared in the sky

  I raised my camera with one arm,

  took a picture with black and white film.

  We’re Actually Fabulous

  Everyone’s turned into these colorful beetles

  with bright carapaces of soft material

  inside of which is their lunch. If trundling

  is still a word, they’re trundling off into

  the wet morning on their way to wherever beetles go.

  Some employ hoods to keep the damp from

  the tiny strings of themselves clumped

  at the top of their head. Some wear knee-high

  leather boots to keep the parts of themselves

  folded over for direct contact with the planet

  dry. If a stranger arrived here from an unknown

  land and saw a project manager walking down

  the street holding an umbrella in one hand

  and a hot cup of coffee in the other, his head

  would explode. If he had a head. If he only

  had tentacles, those would explode.

  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… Outside, a light rain slanted through the floating orange-brown orbs of the streetlamps and, walking under them, repeating to myself the sentence, For me, my mother made up fairy tales—a passing, spur-of-the-moment addition to the sniveling eulogy I’d delivered, early this afternoon, over my mother’s casket—repeating this sentence, I had at some point lowered my umbrella and just let it bounce dumbly against my leg. I must have looked hideous, standing there in the dark-veined marble foyer of the Gardens, mascara-streaked, dripping wet, like a little battered rowboat come to port. But who the hell cares, really? I needed our meal: wonton soup, pan-fried dumplings, Kung Pao chicken, a pot of oolong tea
. Clanking my wet umbrella into the aluminum bucket just inside the door, four red-shirted waitresses playing cards at a table across the room glanced up at me, then back down at their hands. Slowly, a chair was scraped back. I raised my index finger. I said—I wanted to try out the phrase—I said: “Just one.”

  The minute I’d been seated at our familiar small round Formica table, I began to ferret around in my purse. I was certain my mother’s fairy tales, if I did not write them down, would be lost forever. Why did I also think of our trip to Bogotá almost a decade earlier, where, on the banks of Lake Guatavita, our tour guide had explained over his cheap, squawking loudspeaker that Muisca chieftains, sprayed with gold dust, once paddled out to the middle of this lake and there, glistening as though with urine or clarified butter in the first purple-gray light, as offering to a golden goddess, dove in and washed themselves in the dawn-reflecting water? Possibly because the tradition proved ephemeral. Possibly because my mother (smoothing my hair in our flower-wallpapered hotel room) repeated to me one of her tales over a bottle of Aguardiente, a soccer match playing on the TV. Or possibly because I once thought death was like that: one lost one’s sheen, one’s idol-like luster, but was reborn humbler and truer and more revealed. Anyway, I was certain there was a little black dime-store notebook in here somewhere—ahh, here it is. And a pen? Yes, my cheap blue Bic pen from Bank of America: perfect. Now let’s see. There was, I remembered, a particularly memorable fairy tale about a fisherman’s daughter—a variation, I would later discover, reading at a patio table outside Boudin Bakery, dipping slices of toasted French baguette into my clam chowder—a variation of a fairy tale called “The Rosebud,” which the Brothers Grimm and a slew of others have transcribed or translated, often with significant liberties. But truth be told, I had little to no interest in transcriptions, translations, variations, liberties, or even quality. However romantic or naïve or sentimental it may be, I simply wanted to live inside my mother. I wanted to feel what she felt, think what she thought, know what she knew, dream what she dreamed, in the act of composition.