Beyond the Woods: Fairy Tales Retold

by Paula Guran

  “What took you so long?” Kay says. “Where in the world did you get those ridiculous boots?” You stare at him in disbelief.

  “I walked barefoot on broken glass across half a continent to get here,” you say. But at least you don’t burst into tears. “A robber girl gave them to me.”

  Kay snorts. His blue nostrils flare. “Sweetie, they’re hideous.”

  “Why are you blue?” you ask.

  “I’m under an enchantment,” he says. “The Snow Queen kissed me. Besides, I thought blue was your favorite color.”

  Your favorite color has always been yellow. You wonder if the Snow Queen kissed him all over, if he is blue all over. All the visible portions of his body are blue. “If you kiss me,” he says, “you break the spell and I can come home with you. If you break the spell, I’ll be in love with you again.”

  You refrain from asking if he was in love with you when he kissed the Snow Queen. Pardon me, you think, when she kissed him. “What is that puzzle you’re working on?” you ask.

  “Oh, that,” he says. “That’s the other way to break the spell. If I can put it together, but the other way is easier. Not to mention more fun. Don’t you want to kiss me?”

  You look at his blue lips, at his blue face. You try to remember if you liked his kisses. “Do you remember the white cat?” you say. “It didn’t exactly run away. I took it to the woods and left it there.”

  “We can get another one,” he says.

  “I took it to the woods because it was telling me things.”

  “We don’t have to get a talking cat,” Kay says. “Besides, why did you walk barefoot across half a continent of broken glass if you aren’t going to kiss me and break the spell?” His blue face is sulky.

  “Maybe I just wanted to see the world,” you tell him. “Meet interesting people.”

  The geese are brushing up against your ankles. You stroke their white feathers and the geese snap, but gently, at your fingers. “You had better hurry up and decide if you want to kiss me or not,” Kay says. “Because she’s home.”

  When you turn around, there she is, smiling at you like you are exactly the person that she was hoping to see.

  “Oh come on,” Kay says. “Give me a break, lady. Sure it was nice, but you don’t want me hanging around this icebox forever, any more than I want to be here. Let Gerda kiss me, we’ll go home and live happily ever after. There’s supposed to be a happy ending.”

  “I like your boots,” the Snow Queen says.

  “You’re beautiful,” you tell her.

  “I don’t believe this,” Kay says. He thumps his blue fist on the blue table, sending blue puzzle pieces flying through the air. Pieces lie like nuggets of sky-colored glass on the white backs of the geese. A piece of the table has splintered off, and you wonder if he is going to have to put the table back together as well.

  “Do you love him?”

  You look at the Snow Queen when she says this and then you look at Kay. “Sorry,” you tell him. You hold out your hand in case he’s willing to shake it.

  “Sorry!” he says. “You’re sorry! What good does that do me?”

  “So what happens now?” you ask the Snow Queen.

  “Up to you,” she says. “Maybe you’re sick of traveling. Are you?”

  “I don’t know,” you say. “I think I’m finally beginning to get the hang of it.”

  “In that case,” says the Snow Queen, “I may have a business proposal for you.”

  “Hey!” Kay says. “What about me? Isn’t someone going to kiss me?”

  You help him collect a few puzzle pieces. “Will you at least do this much for me?” he asks. “For old time’s sake. Will you spread the word, tell a few single princesses that I’m stuck up here? I’d like to get out of here sometime in the next century. Thanks. I’d really appreciate it. You know, we had a really nice time, I think I remember that.”

  The robber girl’s boots cover the scars on your feet. When you look at these scars, you can see the outline of the journey you made. Sometimes mirrors are maps, and sometimes maps are mirrors. Sometimes scars tell a story, and maybe someday you will tell this story to a lover. The soles of your feet are stories—hidden in the black boots, they shine like mirrors. If you were to take your boots off, you would see reflected in one foot-mirror the Princess Briar Rose as she sets off on her honeymoon, in her enormous four-poster bed, which now has wheels and is pulled by twenty white horses.

  It’s nice to see women exploring alternative means of travel.

  In the other foot-mirror, almost close enough to touch, you could see the robber girl whose boots you are wearing. She is setting off to find Bae, to give him a kiss and bring him home again. You wouldn’t presume to give her any advice, but you do hope that she has found another pair of good sturdy boots.

  Someday, someone will probably make their way to the Snow Queen’s palace, and kiss Kay’s cold blue lips. She might even manage a happily ever after for a while.

  You are standing in your black laced boots, and the Snow Queen’s white geese mutter and stream and sidle up against you. You are beginning to understand some of what they are saying. They grumble about the weight of the sleigh, the weather, your hesitant jerks at their reins. But they are good-natured grumbles. You tell the geese that your feet are maps and your feet are mirrors. But you tell them that you have to keep in mind that they are also useful for walking around on. They are perfectly good feet.

  Kelly Link is the author of the collections Stranger Things Happen, Magic for Beginners, Pretty Monsters, and Get in Trouble. Her short stories have been published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, The Best American Short Stories, and Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards. She has received a Hugo Award and two Nebula, two World Fantasy, and two Locus Awards as well as a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. She and Gavin J. Grant have co-edited a number of anthologies, including multiple volumes of The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror and, for young adults, Steampunk! and Monstrous Affections. She is the co-founder of Small Beer Press and co-edits the occasional zine Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet. She lives with her husband and daughter in Northampton, Massachusetts.

  Karen Joy Fowler admired the sort of heroism she read of in Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Wild Swans”: “Instead of swordplay and dragon-slaying, it celebrated silent, unselfish endurance.” The Andersen tale also literalized the concept of the “divided self.” Fowler’s lovely re-telling/extension of the story plays beautifully on both these themes.

  Halfway People

  Karen Joy Fowler

  Thunder, wind, and waves. You in your cradle. You’ve never heard these noises before and they are making you cry.

  Here, child. Let me wrap you in a blanket and my arms, take you to the big chair by the fire, and tell you a story. My father’s too old and deaf to hear and you too young to understand. If you were older or he younger, I couldn’t tell it, this story so dangerous that tomorrow, I must forget it entirely and make up another.

  But a story never told is also a danger, particularly to the people in it. So here, tonight, while I remember.

  It starts with a girl named Maura, which is my name, too.

  In the winter, Maura lives by the sea. In the summer, she doesn’t. In the summer, she and her father rent two shabby rooms inland and she walks every morning to the coast, where she spends the day washing and changing bedding, sweeping the sand off the floors, scouring and dusting. She does this for many summer visitors, including the ones who live in her house. Her father works at a big hotel on the point. He wears a blue uniform, opens the heavy front door for guests and closes it behind them. At night, Maura and her father walk on tired feet back to their rooms. Sometimes it’s hard for Maura to remember that this was ever different.

  But when she was little, she lived by the sea in all seasons. It was a lonely coast then, a place of rocky cliffs, forests, wild winds, and beaches of coarse sand. Maura could play from morning to night and never see
another person, only gulls and dolphins and seals. Her father was a fisherman.

  Then a doctor who lived in the capital began to recommend the sea air to his wealthy patients. A businessman built the hotel and shipped in finer sand. Pleasure boats with colored sails filled the fishing berths. The coast became fashionable, though nothing could be done about the winds.

  One day the landlord came to tell Maura’s father that he’d rented out their home to a wealthy friend. It was just for two weeks and for so much money, he could only say yes. The landlord said it would happen this once, and they could move right back when the two weeks were over.

  But the next year he took it for the entire summer and then for every summer after that. The winter rent was also raised.

  Maura’s mother was still alive then. Maura’s mother loved their house by the ocean. The inland summers made her pale and thin. She sat for hours at the window watching the sky for the southward migrations, the turn of the season. Sometimes she cried and couldn’t say why.

  Even when winter came, she was unhappy. She felt the lingering presence of the summer guests, their sorrows and troubles as chilled spaces she passed through in the halls and doorways. When she sat in her chair, the back of her neck was always cold; her fingers fretted and she couldn’t stay still.

  But Maura liked the bits of clues the summer people left behind—a strange spoon in a drawer, a half-eaten jar of jam on a shelf, the ashes of papers in the fireplace. She made up stories from them of different lives in different places. Lives worthy of stories.

  The summer people brought gossip from the court and tales from even farther away. A woman had grown a pumpkin as big as a carriage in her garden, hollowed it out, and slept there, which for some reason couldn’t be allowed so now there was a law against sleeping in pumpkins. A new country had been found where the people had hair all over their bodies and ran about on their hands and feet like dogs, but were very musical. A child had been born in the east who could look at anyone and know how they would die, which frightened his neighbors so much, they’d killed him, as he’d always known they would. A new island had risen in the south, made of something too solid to be water and too liquid to be earth. The king had a son.

  The summer Maura turned nine years old, her mother was all bone and eyes and bloody coughing. One night, her mother came to her bed and kissed her. “Keep warm,” she whispered, in a voice so soft Maura was never certain she hadn’t dreamed it. Then Maura’s mother walked from the boarding house in her nightgown and was never seen again. Now it was Maura’s father who grew thin and pale.

  One year later, he returned from the beach in great excitement. He’d heard her mother’s voice in the surf. She’d said she was happy now, repeated it in every wave. He began to tell Maura bedtime stories in which her mother lived in underwater palaces and ate off golden clamshells. Sometimes in these stories her mother was a fish. Sometimes a seal. Sometimes a woman. He watched Maura closely for signs of her mother’s afflictions. But Maura was her father’s daughter, able to travel in her mind and stay put in her body.

  Years passed. One summer day, a group of young men arrived while Maura was still cleaning the seaside house. They stepped into the kitchen, threw their bags onto the floor, and raced each other down to the water. Maura didn’t know that one had stayed behind until he spoke. “Which is your room?” he asked her. He had hair the color of sand.

  She took him to her bedroom with its whitewashed walls, feather-filled pillows, window of buckled glass. He put his arms around her, breath in her ear. “I’ll be in your bed tonight,” he said. And then he released her and she left, her blood passing though her veins so quickly, she was never sure which she had wanted more, to be held or let go.

  More years. The capital became a place where books and heretics were burned. The king died and his son became king, but he was a young king and it was really the archbishop who ruled. The pleasure-loving summer people said little about this or anything else. Even on the coast, they feared the archbishop’s spies.

  A man Maura might have married wed a summer girl instead. Maura’s father grew old and hard of hearing, though if you looked him straight in the face when you spoke, he understood you well enough. If Maura minded seeing her former suitor walking along the cliffs with his wife and children, if her father minded no longer being able to hear her mother’s voice in the waves, they never said so to each other.

  The hotel had let her father go at the end of the last summer. They were very sorry, they told Maura, since he’d worked there so long. But guests had been complaining that they had to shout to make him hear, and he seemed with age to have sunk into a general confusion. Addled, they said.

  Without his earnings, Maura and her father wouldn’t make the winter rent. They had this one more winter and then would never live by the sea again. It was another thing they didn’t say to each other. Possibly her father didn’t know.

  One morning, Maura realized that she was older than her mother had been on the night she’d disappeared. She realized that it had been many years since anyone had wondered aloud in her presence why such a pretty young girl wasn’t married.

  To shake off the sadness of these thoughts, she went for a walk along the cliffs. The wind was bitter and whipped the ends of her hair against her cheeks so hard they stung. She was about to go back, when she saw a man wrapped in a great black cape. He stood without moving, staring down at the water and the rocks. He was so close to the cliff edge, Maura was afraid he meant to jump.

  There now, child. This is the wrong time to go to sleep. Maura is about to fall in love.

  Maura walked toward the man, carefully so as not to startle him. She reached out to touch him, then took hold of his arm through the thick cape. He didn’t respond. When she turned him from the cliff, his eyes were empty, his face like glass. He was younger than she’d thought. He was many years younger than she.

  “Come away from the edge,” she told him and still he gave no sign of hearing, but allowed himself to be led, step by slow step, back to the house.

  “Where did he come from?” her father asked. “How long will he stay? What is his name?” and then turned to address those same questions to the man himself. There was no answer.

  Maura took the man’s cape from him. One of his arms was an arm. The other was a wing of white feathers.

  Someday, little one, you’ll come to me with a wounded bird. It can’t fly, you’ll say, because it’s too little or someone threw a stone or a cat mauled it. We’ll bring it inside and put it in a warm corner, make a nest of old towels. We’ll feed it with our hands and protect it, if we can, if it lives, until it’s strong enough to leave us. As we do this, you’ll be thinking of the bird, but I’ll be thinking of how Maura once did all those things for a wounded man with a single wing.

  Her father went to his room. Soon Maura heard him snoring. She made the young man tea and a bed by the fire. That first night, he couldn’t stop shaking. He shook so hard Maura could hear his upper teeth banging against his lower. He shivered and sweated until she lay down beside him, put her arms about him, and calmed him with stories, some of them true, about her mother, her life, the people who’d stayed in this house and drowsed through summer mornings in this room.

  She felt the tension leave his body. As he slept, he turned onto his side, curled against her. His wing spread across her shoulder, her breasts. She listened all night, sometimes awake and sometimes in dreams, to his breathing. No woman in the world could sleep a night under that wing and not wake up in love.

  He recovered slowly from his fevers and sweats. When he was strong enough, he found ways to make himself useful, though he seemed to know nothing about those tasks that keep a house running. One of the panes in the kitchen window had slipped its channel. If the wind blew east off the ocean, the kitchen smelled of salt and sang like a bell. Maura’s father couldn’t hear it, so he hadn’t fixed it. Maura showed the young man how to true it up, his one hand soft between her two.

 
Soon her father had forgotten how recently he’d arrived and began to call him my son and your brother. His name, he told Maura, was Sewell. “I wanted to call him Dillon,” her father said. “But your mother insisted on Sewell.”

  Sewell remembered nothing of his life before, believing himself to be, as he’d been told, the old man’s son. He had such beautiful manners. He made Maura feel cared for, attended to in a way she’d never been before. He treated her with all the tenderness a boy could give his sister. Maura told herself it was enough.

  She worried about the summer that was coming. Sewell fit into their winter life. She saw no place for him in summer. She was outside, putting laundry on the line, when a shadow passed over her, a great flock of white birds headed towards the sea. She heard them calling, the low-pitched, sonorous sound of horns. Sewell ran from the house, his face turned up, his wing open and beating like a heart. He remained there until the birds had vanished over the water. Then he turned to Maura. She saw his eyes and knew that he’d come back into himself. She could see it was a sorrowful place to be.

  But he said nothing and neither did she, until that night, after her father had gone to bed. “What’s your name?” she asked.

  He was silent awhile. “You’ve both been so kind to me,” he said finally. “I never imagined such kindness at the hands of strangers. I’d like to keep the name you gave me.”

  “Can the spell be broken?” Maura asked then, and he looked at her in confusion. She gestured to his wing.

  “This?” he said, raising it. “This is the spell broken.”

  A log in the fire collapsed with a sound like a hiss. “You’ve heard of the king’s marriage? To the witch-queen?” he asked.

  Maura knew only that the king had married.

  “It happened this way,” he said, and told her how his sister had woven shirts of nettles and how the archbishop had accused her of witchcraft, and the people sent her to the fire. How the king, her husband, said he loved her, but did nothing to save her, and it was her brothers, all of them swans, who encircled her until she broke the spell, and they were men again, all except for his single wing.