Once Upon a Time: New Fairy Tales Paperback (36 page)

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Retellings are a common approach to the art of writing fairy tales,

but often the tales that get retold over and over are those that

originated from the Grimm Brothers, Hans Christian Andersen, or

Charles Perrault. Other fairy tales exist without having necessarily been classified as such, for a variety of reasons. Sometimes it’s

because of the form they take, like Christina Rossetti’s famous poem,

“Goblin Market,” from which I took my inspiration. When I first

read that poem, it was clear to me that it was a fairy tale, but told in the form of a poem. In my retelling, I transport the poetry into

a prose story form, and also attempt to illuminate a story hidden

within Rossetti’s original version. That’s truly the most beautiful

thing about retellings, I think: the way that one author can illuminate or reveal what the original author either couldn’t see or did their best to conceal.

Christopher Barzak

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Eat Me, Drink Me, Love Me

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Days, weeks, months, years afterwards, when we were both wives

with children of our own, our mother-hearts beset with fears

and bound up in tender lives, I would call the little ones to me and tell them of my early prime, those pleasant days long gone of not-returning time. I would tell them of the haunted glen where I met the wicked goblin men, whose fruits were like honey to my throat but

poison in my blood. And I would tell them of my sister, Lizzie, of how she stood in deadly peril to do me good, and won the fiery antidote

that cured me of the goblin poison. Then, when my story came to

end, I would join my hands to their little hands and bid them cling

together, saying, “For there is no friend like a sister in calm or stormy weather; to cheer one on the tedious way, to fetch one if one goes

astray, to lift one if one totters down, to strengthen whilst one stands.”

And when afterward the children went on their ways to create their

imaginary worlds in the afternoon sunlight, or under the shadows of

the willow tree at the bottom of the garden, I would weep, silently, from where I sat on my bench, for I had lied in telling them the story in that particular fashion. It was told in that way for their own good, really, with a sound moral embroidered within it, but none of it was true. Except the part about the fruit, and the goblins, and how my

sister saved me from a terrible fate.

What I did not tell them was how my sister also destroyed me. A

part of me, I should say. Perhaps the best part. But stories for children

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never hang a broken heart upon the mantle for all to witness and to

fear. Instead it is a lively heart, and it is beautiful, isn’t it? Thudding away like a fine instrument! The stories one tells children always

mean: Life will be happy, my dear ones, even though you will struggle within the world’s fierce embrace.

Perhaps I should begin with the day when everything truly went

awry, the day Lizzie and I were walking down by the brook near

our family’s farm on the outskirts of town, arguing, as we had been

doing for much of that summer, and I first came to spot the goblin

merchants as they erected their marketplace in the glen across

the water. At the time I did not know it was a market they had set

themselves to making in such a hidden place, outside of town, where

the idea of patrons lining up to buy their goods was an unlikely

gamble; but I could hear their voices float toward us, and when I

looked over the swaying reeds by the gently flowing water, I could see their tables laden with fruit so lushly colored it shined like precious gems beneath the waning red sun.

It was their faces, though, that charmed me more than anything. Some wore the features of a red fox with sharp ears, charcoal-tipped. Others had long white whiskers that drooped, like a cat who has just lapped a satisfying bowl of cream. One bore the snout of a pig, another peered through the round golden eyes of an insect. Before I could realize what I was doing, I had stopped my progress on the path and Lizzie, who now stood a few steps ahead of me, had turned back to say, “What is it, Laura?

Why must you always al ow your heart to flap as if it does not belong to you but is possessed instead by the wind?”

I wanted to laugh, and laugh I do now, when I think of Lizzie’s

frustration over my displays of emotion. After all, we had been

arguing that day about how it had been she who had stirred my

emotions like a spoon of milk into a cup of tea. “How can you now

wish that I not be stirred after having stirred me?” I had asked, just before I heard the goblin voices. But Lizzie had only shaken her head with disgust and refused to answer.

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“What is it, Laura?” she asked again, with more concern this time,

as I stood on the path by the river, entranced as if in a waking dream.

“Over there,” I said, lifting my chin in the direction of the goblin merchants as they set about their queer business. Now they had

begun to play music, a bow on a fiddle, with a long reed pipe settled upon the lips of a rat-faced goblin, and as their notes weaved toward us, the other goblins began to dance, arm in arm, with sweat on their brows, circling one another, switching partners.

“They’re horrid,” said Lizzie. “Do not look at them, Laura. Come.

Let us be on our way.”

On our way
. I looked at Lizzie, who stood half-turned to me, half-turned in the direction of home, and blinked. It was not
our
way.

It was
her
way. It had been her way for the entirety of the summer.

It had been her way since she first kissed me in late spring, when

everything was in riotous flower. It was she who held me close in our bed and told me not to say a word of this to her father, for it would break his heart to know his daughter and his oldest friend’s child

had been so twisted from what should have been a sisterly bond, as

they had raised me in my parents’ stead these last few years since my mother and father had died from consumption. It had been Lizzie

who said, “We must never tell anyone what we have done, and we

must stop ourselves from doing it ever again, Laura.”

“But why?” I asked. “It does not feel twisted, as you name it, Lizzie.

Is it not love we are feeling?”

“My father would not call it love,” said Lizzie. “And if your mother and father were still here instead of with the angels, they would not call it love either.”

“What do
you
call it?” I had whispered in the dark of our room, my hand resting near hers, my fingertips barely brushing her tender

wrist.

But Lizzie would not answer. She simply turned her back to me, as

she did now on the path, turning to lead us the rest of the way home.

“No,” I whispered, and turned toward the music instead, turned

toward the goblins and the fruits they had assembled upon their

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tables under the trees in the glen. “This is my way,” I said, and stepped off the path to join them.

Behind me, Lizzie gasped. I could imagine her hand, too, delicately

flying to cover her mouth as it did whenever she was shocked or

frightened. “Laura!” she said, but I continued on my way. At the edge of the brook, I took off my shoes, parted the reeds with my hands,

and stepped down into the water. It was ever so cold, but on a day as hot as that one had been—both from the sun and from the strong

words we’d exchanged—I welcomed the shiver.

The water rose no higher than my knees, and it took only nine

or ten strides before I had reached the other side and could release my dress, which I had bunched within my fists as I crossed over.

Immediately, as I came to stand on the other side of the brook, the

goblin’s music came to an abrupt halt, and they all turned in unison to stare at me.

At first I worried they would not welcome my intrusion, so I

began to apologize profusely for interrupting, but even as I unrolled my pleas for forgiveness like a long scroll before their strange faces, the cat-whiskered goblin man lifted his palm and said, “My lady,

no apologies! You are our first patron of the evening, and you are

welcome to our party. Come, look at our fruits, so succulent, and so deliciously dripping with juices! You will not find such fruits sold in any town. Will you try a pear or an apple or a melon? Won’t you taste this peach?”

He produced a perfectly golden peach in his hand, and stretched

it across the space between us. At first, he had seemed to be standing too far away to reach me, but in the next moment he stood inches

before me, the peach already lifted halfway to my mouth. I could

smell its ripeness, and my mouth watered, hungering for its juices.

“I have no money to buy your fruit, sir,” I said, turning my face to the ground to hide my embarrassment. Here I had come in order to

hurt Lizzie, here I had come to join the goblin festivities, and yet I was not prepared to purchase their goods at all.

The cat-whiskered goblin’s fingertips found my chin, and lifted

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ever so gently, so that I stared up into his yellow-green eyes, which seemed to sparkle in the fading light, and in that moment I saw that his whiskers and his fur were no more than a mask he had placed

upon his face. “You need no money here, my lady,” he said. “That is

the currency of humans.”

“Are you not human, then?” I asked, and could not help but hear

a quiver enter my voice.

The cat-masked goblin shrugged, pursing his lips as if he’d tasted

something sour. “I have not lived as those in towns live for a long

time now, and I do not miss their ways. They are ever so proper, don’t you think? And ever so dull-witted with their cordial and celebrated proprietary agreements.”

He sighed, grinning with only one corner of his mouth as he

removed his fingertips from my chin, and offered me the peach

again. “I would take a lock of your hair as payment,” he said, almost breathless. “No coin could contain the value of the gold in those

locks.”

I blushed, for more reasons than I would have liked to. I blushed

because he had found a way into my center, into the soft and tender

part of me that wished others to see me as valuable, as something

beautiful, as something that could not be ignored or forgotten as

Lizzie ignored and forgot me. And I blushed because I had let him

see my weakness. No woman who sets her sights on a better life

should be so visibly vulnerable, yet there I was, blushing as though I were worth nothing.

A tear fell from my eye as I stood there. He caught it on the edge

of his finger, then lifted it to his lips to sip at it.

“Exquisite,” he said, after swallowing the tear in a theatrical gesture, and I laughed a little in nervousness, but his eyes never strayed from mine during our entire exchange. Not even when he put out his hand

to offer me a pair of scissors, and said, “One lock, my dear, and you may join us.”

I took the cold metal in my hands and lifted it to my head, pinched

a long strand between thumb and forefinger, then slid the blades of

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the scissors closed. The lock shorn, I dropped it into his outstretched palm, and he closed his hand upon it.

“Your peach, fair maiden,” he said, and then placed the fruit into

my palm. He held my hand between his own for a long moment,

lingering, still holding my gaze steady. Eventually he lifted my hand, and the fruit with it, up to my mouth for me.

I hesitated, but then opened my mouth to take the fruit between my

teeth, and when I bit through the downy skin, juice sweeter than any honey from the rock, juice stronger than any man-rejoicing wine, juice clearer than any water flowed into me. Within a moment I was dizzy,

but I could not resist the taste, and so sucked and sucked and sucked at the peach, until only its wrinkled pit remained, which I let fall to the ground as I turned toward the cat-masked goblin man’s table, to pluck up another and another and another of his fruits, sucking and tearing at the flesh, swal owing as if my life depended upon it, and could not tel night from day any longer, as strange lights filtered through the canopy of the trees, spreading leafy shadows across the masked faces, and the goblins again struck up their music and began to dance around the glen.

One took me by the arm and twirled me into the center of them,

where yet another took me up and I gasped to see her long yellow