contemporary fairy tales Written and illustrated by Deborah Halsey
contemporary fairy tales
Written and illustrated by Deborah Halsey
Introduction Nursery rhymes and fairy tales are familiar to us all. We heard them as children and, chances are, we will probably repeat them ourselves. Yet the roots of these stories lie in dark tales that have been sanitised to make them suitable for children. œIn fairy tales magic always holds the answer, the evil characters get their comeuppance and everyone else lives happily ever after. Here I have taken the ideas and themes of traditional fairy tales and unravelled them. They have become political satire, tales of woe and, yes, sometimes everything ends well but there are compromises made, magic goes awry and lessons are learned from mistakes. They are fairy tales with an injection of realism to give them a relevance to today’s society. œThis is the way fairy and folk tales would have evolved through the oral tradition if they had not been written down. Instead they are reproduced in exactly the same way for countless generations and cultures. Fairy tales should be an adaptive form of story telling that encompasses the idiosyncrasies of a time, an audience or even a story teller. That is, I hope, what these tales achieve.
I showed her the beauty of music as I shaped her ears. I gave her her first breath as I put my lips to her cold, dry lips and let my own breath flow through her. As I lent over her I felt her skin warm beneath my touch and as I stepped back she opened her eyes.
I remember the exact moment I decided to make her: my hair whipped about my face and my throat dry with a growing thirst for conversation. A-top the hill, on which I live, I can see for miles. I watch the villagers below as they live their tangled lives. I see their children grow. I see some of them leave and the cavernous emptiness that remains. No one comes up the hill save the post carrier but he just leaves letters in the box at the gate and never so much as waves. It is not a new experience, this alienation. I have lived here many years and I think the longer I stay the deeper their fear of me becomes. The children who were told stories of the witch on the hill have had children of their own and passed the stories down in turn. I eat children for my tea: boil them above a huge, roaring fire and lick the bones clean. In the wind you can hear their bones clattering where they hang above my door. In truth I am a lonely woman with a wind chime hanging on the back porch. I have not spoken for so many years that my voice has shrunk and dried to a powdery husk. I read my books, I grow my own food, I make medicines to heal myself and now, in my desperation, I have shaped a block of slick, wet clay into a companion. A friend. I made her female for it is a form I know in detail. I made her young, twenty years perhaps, or thirty, because I could not see that I had aged since I came here. I had frozen. In the cloudy mirror my hair was still dark and shiny, my
eyes bright, my vision crisp. My skin remembered its place when I pinched and released it. Perhaps this was the reason for rumours of witchcraft—my refusal to age. The stories were but the bitter tales of envious women. I will never know. For the first week she was an empty shell. She sat at the window all day and night, unblinking. I held bread dipped in honey to her lips but she refused to eat. Even as I slept she sat staring, waiting. On the seventh night there came a frost. Dusting the hilltop with gleaming crystals and filling the house with a bitter cold. Then she came to me, her hands like ice, and we slept legs entwined. In the bright daylight she helped me clean the house, bake our bread and grow our food. Indeed she was never so happy as when she was plunged, knuckle-deep in the wet clay earth from which she came. I taught her to read, to paint, to dance and in turn she taught me to speak, shout, sing. With her my voice grew strong and rang louder than I had imagined it ever could. Her skin was smooth but for the careless tool marks I had left behind her knees and under her arms. She had an unnatural symmetry for, in my patient sculpting, I had forgotten to allow for the diversity of nature. She was beautiful with an otherworldly quality; she would never be accepted here and she knew it. Not by these simple people and their simple ways. I had created myself a companion and in doing so had created an aching loneliness equal to my own. And so we lived together upon the hill, forever tied to each other by threads of fear. Fear of being alone.
I left a note, a declaration, pinned to the oak of your front door. When I watched you read it, I knew. I knew that words were a drug for you as much as for me. And so I wrote letters. Wove words, like threads, around myself. I wrote a web to catch you in. I wrote up a storm, a tempest, and sent it to you when I felt you stray. When I saw that you loved another I wrote her blood on to your hands. I wrote you bent and broken in a dark cell, calling out my name. I wrote your alibi, wrote the road that brought you here. I wrote you to my door. And now that I have you here I will keep you, pristine, between these smooth white pages, forever.
It is known that Queens and ladies of breeding like to surround themselves with plain maids and, whilst I had been an almost ugly child of eight when I came to her service, in the ten years hence I had changed.
I had not noticed it at first; how the courtiers looked after me as I passed; ladies pretended not to see me when I brought messages to them from my Queen. Truth is I still see an awkward child in the mirror. But everyone else sees porcelain skin, sky blue eyes and careless spirals of hair the colour of corn before the harvest.
She doesn’t see me approach: she is standing at the window, her look one of distraction, her hands weaving nervous concertos in the air. I have never seen my Queen so unsettled and it disturbs me in turn.
“Ah, Kat,” She begins, “pour me some tea will you?” I have always felt myself blessed that my Queen speaks to me with such compassion. I know some girls who are ordered about and struck by their Ladies. Indeed I am blessed.
Her teacup sounds an uneasy rattle against its saucer. As her hand shakes, barely perceptibly, I ask her if anything troubles her. A pause.
There is silence as she searches for words. In my mind I am looking for a place I may go to that would feel as safe and familiar as here. I can think of none.
There is another pause. Longer. Seconds stretch to minutes and the longer she waits to speak, the more deafening the silence becomes. It is ringing in my ears. Perhaps it is my turn to speak. I remember a time three years since:
She is standing in her dressing room, my Queen. I have been her dresser this past year. I have seen her at her most vulnerable. Foolishly, I thought my future secure as I had been so taken into her confidence.
“My Queen,” I dip a curtsy but do not miss the way my voice startles her from her thoughts. As she turns to face me she brushes a stray curl of ebony hair from her eyes. As I recall how carefully I had pinned every one of those stubborn curls just this morning I must have smiled. For that instant the look of grave concern fell from her face like an autumn leaf and my smile was returned.
As she sips at her tea, daintily as a lady should, she bids me sit beside her. This is not so unusual. Many evenings I might sit darning or cleaning a jewel beside my Queen whilst she tells me of her day. I have been in her service for ten years and sometimes, when it is just her and I, she calls me friend.
“The Ladies, my Ladies in waiting, advise that I should send you away, Kat,” She does not look at me but fixes her gaze on some unseen point before her. “They say your beauty surpasses my own and that you should not be permitted to my presence…”
There comes a sharp intake of breath from my Queen and she continues. “But Kat, it is your beauty I cherish as much as your friendship.” She says in a precise and careful manner. She is a woman who is accustomed to being in control. This uncharacteristic trepidation is as unsettling for her as it is for me.
“My, you are becoming a beautiful girl,” I blushed. She continued, “I must watch for you around the courts lest some young man would steal you from me.” “But my Queen,” I stuttered, “there is no man who would dare take anything from you.”
“Besides,” I fumbled, “I am but a child. Yours is a far greater beauty than mine.” “Child, your words are kind, but how can I believe one who is in my service. It is your duty to flatter me, is it not?”
I am shocked back to the present by a sudden movement from my Queen. She has turned towards me and her face is inches from mine. Her eyes searching. “Where do you go, my little one?” She whispers. I feel her breath on my cheek. “I think of the past, my Queen. I remember how things were.” I tell her in earnest.
I do not know what could have made me do it—perhaps her tone, perhaps her palpable loneliness—but as the tear rolled gently down her cheek I kissed where it fell.
And from there, I suppose, my position in the court was secured. I was Her Majesty’s dresser, her lover, her friend. Rumours must have circulated through the court, for I know how the courtiers talk, but no one questioned her. How could they: she is their Monarch. They had hoped she would make a political match; royalty from France or Spain. That the Queen would choose love, and that of a lowly servant, over her political responsibilities horrified them. But she is their Queen, and they fear for their lives, so they nod politely in her company and reserve their protestations for the privacy of their own chambers.
“Step into the light, Child, so I may look at you,” my Queen had said to me. I obediently stepped towards her and stood fused to the spot whilst she, finger under my chin, tilted my face up to hers.
She laughed.
My youthful shoulders gave a shrug but I had spoken honestly. For years I had seen my Queen’s face before me as I slept. Her dark hair shining, the green pools of her eyes bewitching me. Indeed, had she not been royalty, I fancy she might have been called a witch such was her power over men and women alike.
Wistfully, she smiles. The light catches the glint of a tear in her eye as she sighs, “I too escape to the past. Before my Father died. Before my sister too. Before my advisers pushed me daily towards marriage. When I could think of such trivial things as love.”
She tasted of rouge and of salt, and the faintest hint of tobacco. I recoiled, suddenly aware of myself. I slowly opened my eyes expecting a look of shock or anger upon the face of my Queen. Instead she met my lips with her own urgent, searching lips.
It is not that my Queen does not love her country, her kingdom and her people. For in her eyes I see that it is her country she is wed to. I am just a mistress: an excursion from the obligations of state into the sensuous pleasures of the flesh.
but it seemed so familiar to me that I would not have given it a second thought. I used to consider myself beautiful but now I cannot remember what beauty is. I can name it: a rose unfurling in the seductive sunlight, the crimson sunset or the soaring grace of a bird in flight. But nothing grows in the shadow of the tower in which I am entombed (I say entombed for it feels like a sort of death). The tower is all that is left of my Father’s mill. The sails have rotted to nothing and the millstones have long lain redundant. Years ago the supply of flour switched from mills such as ours to suppliers overseas with cheap labour and lax safety standards. When my father and brother left the mill in search of a venture to renew their fortunes I was a child of six: precocious and unafraid. My father left me under the supervision of a neighbour for fear my care would hinder his efforts. The neighbour was not kind and I was forced to stay in the mill where a meagre meal was brought to me each evening. At six, my brother had been taught to fish, to shoot, to ride a bike but my father had said it was different for girls. He told me I was to be careful, to never climb trees or skim stones, to always find a nice man to walk me home. Not that this was a situation I had found myself in of late, what with my literal imprisonment. Years of neglect weakened both my will and the structure I lived in. When the stairs and lower floors of the mill collapsed I was left stranded on the upper most floor. The neighbour would tie a bag of food to the end of a thin string I had unravelled from my clothing and I would carefully haul up to my home. In these last twelve years my hair has grown to be four times my height from root to tip. I keep it wrapped up and tied with twine but its weight tires me and makes my neck ache. I fancy one end would reach almost to the ground outside the tower if I were to let it fall from the window. But what good would that do me? The window is but a slit in the wall that lets in more rain than it does light. There is barely enough space to pull
a bag of food through. And even then I have no tools to cut my hair with and I could hardly climb down it whilst still attached to my scalp. So I sit. I can see the sky but it makes me lonely to think of all the other people who live under it too. I have drawn pictures and written stories on the chalky walls with a burnt stick. The older ones, stories I wrote years ago, have smudged to a dirty grey but those I added this morning are still crisp and fresh. I once asked the neighbour for a book to read or paper and a pen to write. She scoffed and told me I had no need of such things in my tower as she walked away. Disheartened, I hadn’t the strength to argue. My stories are of freedom, I suppose. Of great oceans and high mountains. I have never seen these things but I can still recall the images I conjured as my mother told me stories as a child. Sometime I dream I can fly and for a moment I am elated but then I realize I am a caged bird. The ability to fly means nothing to a creature who is unable to spread her wings. On my eighteenth birthday, just a week since, the neighbour sent up a scrap of paper with my food. I could see it poking through the top of the bag as I carefully hauled it through the slit of a window. It was a letter. Daughter, Your brother and I have found a little work here and there but none that bring the riches we crave and so we have a solution. We have spread word of a beautiful princess trapped in a tower who is in need of an affluent suitor to rescue her. Daughter, that princess is you. Soon you will be married to a rich man and able to support your old hardworking father in his dotage. Your Father I sat down suddenly on the edge of the wooden crate that was my bed. For years I had
dreamt of escape but I had never hoped of rescue. It suddenly seemed so simple to me. I would not be robbed of the opportunity to exact my freedom. How great a surprise that would be for my hard working father and any rich suitor who might arrive – to find me already rescued and by my own hand. I snapped, from the wooden crate, a long thin splinter of wood and used it to scrape away the crumbling lime mortar between the bricks around the window. Whilst the wind blew strong enough to blow the powdery mortar into my eyes as I worked I switched my task. It became that of chewing through my hair and winding the severed coils into a strong rope down which I could make my escape. Soon the window opening was large enough for a thin girl like myself to squeeze through and I could taste my freedom on my hungry tongue. Each night I slid the bricks back into their original positions so as not to alert the neighbour of my escape. I set about recording my escape on the walls of the mill with the last of my burnt shards of wood, the tears of my freedom in my eyes. In the clouded mirror I could see my eyes were reddened by crying but it seem
med so familiar to me that I would not have given it a second thought. Had it not been this night.
That is not what she did, although I’m certain she knew how. No, she sang songs of velvet and silk. Songs that wrapped warm around me, and felt like a drowning of sorts. Her songs were like a drug: made my heart swell, limbs weak, head light. She could take my knees out from under me with the merest parting of her lips. I would crawl home, helpless, and still return for more. Whilst she sang I was held aloft; threads bound around my arms and legs, fixing me vertical. And when the songs had finished I was left crumpled on the ground, exhausted. For those songs made me feel more than I think a man is entitled or able to feel. I could feel the blood in my veins, see the light that emanated from her. She must have been some kind of angel, or sorceress, for days would pass before I could return to the tower in which she sat, singing. Tantalisingly close, yet unreachable. But I was a brash, spoilt young man. I would not accept that I could not have her, although I see now that no man could ever possess such a woman. In freeing her from her tower (and I am sure you are familiar with the method I used by now) I introduced her to a whole world of men and woman who, equally intoxicated by her voice, her songs, wanted her as much as I did. But Rapunzel had been a captive all of her life – this freedom was her
drug. She wandered for years, singing for whomever pleased her. I heard stories of her conquests but I chose to ignore them. I met up with her many years later, two children in tow. She wept as she held me and I felt a clarity return to me that I had not known to be lost. She said the children were mine but I could see only their mother in them: a twin girl and a boy. I took them back to my house and let them live there with me. At first, by their silence, I had assumed them both mute. It made a kind of sense to me that a woman with such a voice would birth children who had none. But one night, I returned late and inebriated to my castle. I heard the most beautiful sounds ringing through the house. I admit at first I believed Rapunzel returned to me and staggered, drunken with lust, to the point from which that miraculous sound came. And in my own bed I found not Rapunzel but her daughter who had grown to become such a likeness of her mother that it mattered not to me. And so it is through guilt and disgust at my weakness and depravity that I stand here, a-top the highest turret of my castle. I intend to step over the parapet momentarily and it has just occurred to me that those sailors and I are not so very different after all‌
and that I do not know it only adds to the appeal: the beauty of possibility and the ugliness of truth.
He was a sculptor. I imagined his rough, heavy hands moving across the keyboard but his words were soft threads, gently woven. Perfect. We spoke carefully in the early days. Our subjects safe, pedestrian almost; books we had loved, books we had hated, movies we had laughed at, the weather. I trusted him instantly but I felt that it took him longer, unfurling gradually like the petals of a rose. From the start he had refused to discuss appearance. He didn’t speak of his, nor did he ask me about mine. This relieved me no end for I had spent my formative years first in the shadow of my older sisters and then revered for my own beauty. That I had a mind as sharp as a tack was of little consequence to the men I met. They didn’t require me to be articulate, merely decorative. The Beast was different (I hasten to add that this was his screen name, not one I dubbed him with). From his wit I imagined a sharp nose and bright piercing eyes, from the wisdom in his words I pictured the softness of age upon his face and from his occupation I determined he must be strong and capable. I did not love him from the first In his email last week he spoke of a book he had finished reading. I instant. I am not a fickle girl who found his passion and enthusiasm intoxicating and felt compelled to read would give her heart to the first it too. This might give me more insight into what makes him so mysterious man who showed her intelligence and intriguing, I thought. In his messages he had mentioned the library in and respect (although I must admit the city with its domed roof and mezzanine floors. I decided that I would it was a novel experience). Yet he go there and read the same copy of the same book he had read. I would intrigued me, made me hungry hold the pages between my finger and thumb that he had held between for his conversation. I spent days his own. This thought excited me. It was the closest I had ever knowingly waiting for word from him. The come to the Beast. Contact. Each morning I reassuring pulse from my computer that signified I had Yet what did I know? The Beast pillows: the tingling received a message followed by the deflating realisation could have been the man on the the Beast did not that the mail was an advertisement or similar. train, the driver who stopped at I did not like this part of myself: the side that craved traffic lights as I crossed. He could be walking past my and longed for his attention. It made me feel weak, these thoughts. The Beast could be anywhere. frustrated. But my actions could not influence him— One place I knew I would find the Beast was in the he would talk to me in his own time. dreams. There he lurked, partially obscured by shadow, to me to follow him. As he took my hand in his larger, I felt a shot of electricity that shot through my body and of my stomach. The Beast pulled me forwards, onwards, reach him; to catch a glimpse of him. Yet even when I stood hand cradling my face or his fingers in my hair, I could face for it was the face of a stranger.
awoke from such a dream I found the sheets wound around themselves and my hair in disarray across the of electricity still surging through me. What’s more, I could not swear that I was alone those nights: that somehow gain entrance, undetected, stealthy in his movements. house as I have darkness of my beckoning calloused hand, settled at the pit and I ran to before him, his never see his