I based my story, in part, on the Russian fairy tale “Sivka Burka.” (You can find a version here: www.artrusse.ca/fairytales/sivka-burka.htm.) This is the premise: The father became ill, and he ordered his sons: “When I am dead, bring me bread to my grave three nights in succession.” Horrifying! I tried to imagine what sort of a man would demand such a thing, and what sort of bread would be best for a dead man.
Kaaron Warren
Born and Bread
Kaaron Warren
There was once a baby born so ugly her father packed his bags in fury when he saw her.
“Who did you lie with, the baker or his dough?” he called over his shoulder as he left. Already he was planning to surprise his girlfriend who always smiled when she saw him and asked for nothing.
“Only you!” the mother called back. She held her baby in a soft brown blanket, though she had to lean against the wall for support.
The baby was as heavy as a calf and the size of the award-winning pumpkin at the fair five years earlier, a pumpkin that had never been matched before or since. Yet the baby had slid out sweetly, like dough through a piping bag.
And yes, she was pale, pasty, and fleshy.
“Don’t leave her in the sun,” Mrs. Crouch, the cruelest woman in the village said. “Or you’ll have a loaf of bread for a daughter.” (In her defense, her husband spat brown juice wherever he stood, beat her with a stick when he felt so inclined, terrified the children with ghost tales, and never, ever spent a dollar when a cent would do.)
Still, the mother loved the daughter very much, especially once she learned how to laugh. Chuckles bubbled out of her like the froth in fermenting yeast, and anybody close by couldn’t help but join in. She was so gentle and sweet they called her Doe, and that suited the way she had grown to look as well, like risen dough waiting to be baked into bread or sweet rolls.
Children loved to make her laugh, because her whole body quivered with it and it was beautiful to watch.
Each night she and her mother would sit together and tell stories and jokes. Sometimes her father would visit. (Always at dinner time. Her mother was the most marvelous cook. Her pastry was like flakes of pure heaven.) And he would tell them stories of his journeys. His girlfriend was long-since departed, and he now traveled the world selling and buying clever items for the kitchen. He bought Doe’s mother a gadget for lemons and one for eggs, he bought spices and seasonings that made the whole house smell delicious.
Neither of them hated him for his early desertion; he was, for the most part, a good man and they loved his stories and gifts.
Each night Doe’s mother would stroke, mold, press, and kneed her flesh, stretch and smooth it. Sometimes this hurt, but it also always felt good.
By the time Doe was eighteen, she had transformed into a beautiful, lithe young woman with a sense of humor, an infectious laugh and a vast storehouse of stories.
In short, she became marriageable.
She had no interest in such a thing, though. She knew she could not have children because those parts of her were not fully formed, and she saw no other reason to tie herself to one man.
Like her father, she enjoyed journeys, explorations, and with her mother’s blessings and warnings, her father’s financial help, she set out for adventure.
She spent ten years exploring the world, tasting, seeing, learning, becoming, loving. She ate damper, dinkelbrot, pain de mie, bagels, sangak, roti, and pandesal. She learned how to cook each loaf, loved to watch it brown, hug it to her chest warm from the oven. And like each loaf, each lover felt different, because she could mold herself around them. Encase them. More than once a man wept after their lovemaking.
“Nothing. Ever. So beautiful.” The words in gasps.
Each encounter left her dented and stretched. She could massage herself back into shape, but she missed her mother’s gentle touch and the stories they shared.
One day, her mother contacted her. “Your father is buying me a wonderful gift. A bakery! I will make cakes people will want to keep forever and others they will eat while still standing at the shop counter and order another.”
“Will you bake bread?” Doe asked
“If you come back, you can be the bread baker. My dear little Doe.”
But Doe had changed. She felt as if all she’d eaten, smelt, and seen so much; all the men she’d loved, all the women she’d spoken with, all the stories and jokes she’d shared: all of this had altered her. Would her mother still love her?
Her mother sighed as they embraced, but there was no judgment, no disappointment. “I’ve missed you!” she said, and her fingers pressed and stroked until Doe felt ordinary again.
And she set to work baking the most wonderful breads for her mother’s bakery.
All this is to explain how it came to be that Doe helped to fulfill the awful Mr. Crouch’s dying wishes and thus lay his cruel ghost to rest.
As he lay on his deathbed he said to Mrs. Crouch, “You have been a bad wife. Only this many times have we had relations.” There is some dissention as to how many fingers he held up. “You owe me three more. After my death, you will lie with me three nights, or this village will suffer the consequences.”
He lay back, then, and demanded bread. He loved Doe’s tiger bread and chose that as his last meal.
Doe walked into his sick room. Even though she’d been warned, the stench was overwhelming. She knew the odor of yeast left to ferment too long, but that was nothing compared to this. She’d smelt dead animals in the roof drains and the worst toilets any nightmare could dredge up. She’d smelt a man who hadn’t bathed for twenty years.
Nothing came close to the stench of this room.
She pinched her nose and squeezed to close her nostrils.
“Here she is, the beautiful baker,” Mr. Crouch said. “Come and knead me, darling. I am ready for you,” and he weakly tugged away the covers to reveal his naked body.”
She placed the tray of bread beside him and left the room.
It is said he choked on a crust; that was not Doe’s doing.
They buried him three nights later. Fearful of his curse, the women of the town went to Mrs. Crouch, to help prepare her to go to his grave.
She said, “He was repulsive alive. I cannot lie with him dead. And you know he was a cruel man; he means to damage me. Destroy me.”
She refused to go that first night. The next day ten fields were found withered.
She refused to go that second night and the next day the clinic for the unwell was burnt down. Many would have been lost were it not for the early-rising Doe and her mother, who sounded the alarm.
The villagers went to Mrs. Crouch to beg her to lie with her dead husband. “He will take the children next. You know he will,” they said.
She refused. “He means to destroy me. Mar me for life, haunt me into eternity, kill me.”
They turned from her, distraught but not surprised. She was selfish and cruel and didn’t care about the rest of them.
“I am driven by bad fortune! All my life!” she called after them, as if that made a difference.
Doe had led a blessed life, really. Full of good fortune and windfalls.
She went to Mrs. Crouch, who sneered at her as she always did.
“My deepest sympathies,” Doe said, and she held Mrs. Crouch close, squeezing until the woman made an imprint in Doe’s soft body.
In the bakery, she mixed dough, let it rise, punched it down, shaped it, let it rise again.
She baked this bread hard and brown. She baked Mrs. Crouch with her eyes closed.
As the moon rose high, she carried the bread lady to the cemetery. It was light, as good bread should be.
She laid it on Mr. Crouch’s grave. “Darling,” she called out. “Darling, I’m here.”
Then she tripped away to hide.
At first, there was stillness, a terrible quiet that made her doubt her ears. Then a disturbance in the dirt, a writhing, then four nubs appeared, then eight, like pink grow
ing tendrils of an unpleasant plant.
He rose up naked and fully erect.
He fell upon his bread lady, roaring, biting, thrusting, filled with lust and fury. Doe looked away and she thought, I will tell her I understand. What woman could lie with this man and ever feel clean again?
He fell upon his dough-wife, the Lady Bread, and his sweat, his juice, the dampness of the air, helped to dissolve the bread into a pale mush. He did not seem to care. He stood up, shook himself like a dog, then nodded and sank into his grave.
All at once, sound returned; the rustling leaves, the howling dogs, and Doe felt that she could leave.
In the morning, the only tragedy found was Mrs. Crouch, strangled with her own hands clenched around her neck, her eyes wide, tears dried in a map across both cheeks.
There was reward to be had though.
On clearing the Crouch’s house, their secret fortune was found, and this was shared amongst them all. Not only that, but for a dozen years to come the crops grew tall and golden and brought good fortune to them all.
As for Doe . . . as her mother aged, they looked for a baker to take her place. One day he came to them, and Doe felt soft on the inside as she had never felt before.
His hands were warm and she could feel her flesh shift at his touch. He could mold dough like an artist and needed only four hours sleep a night.
All the village was happy for their Doe.
And that is all to explain why, each year on December the twenty-first, the villagers all buy the perfect Lady Bread, thus bringing good luck upon themselves and upon the village and all who pass through her.
Shirley Jackson Award-winning author Kaaron Warren has lived in Melbourne, Sydney, Canberra, and Fiji, She’s sold many short stories, three novels (the multi-award-winning Slights, Walking the Tree, and Mistification) and four short story collections. Two of her collections have won the ACT Publishers’ and Writers’ Award for fiction, and her most recent collection, Through Splintered Walls, won a Canberra Critic’s Circle Award for Fiction, two Ditmar Awards, two Australian Shadows Awards, an Aurealis Award, and a Shirley Jackson Award. Her stories have appeared in Australia, the U.S., the UK, and elsewhere in Europe, and have been selected for both Ellen Datlow’s and Paula Guran’s “year’s best” anthologies.
You can find her at kaaronwarren.wordpress.com and she tweets @KaaronWarren.
The story “Tales That Fairies Tell” seemed like a natural for me. The invitation to contribute to this anthology came as I was working on a collection of modern, feminist-centered fairy tales—The Queen, the Cambion and Seven Others: eight fairy tales generously illustrated with art by Arthur Rackham and Gustave Doré. Recently published by Aqueduct Press, it also includes my essay, “A Secret History of Small Books,” tracing the path of literary fairy tales back to the late seventeenth century and Charles Perrault’s Histoires ou contes du temps passé, in which Puss—featured in this story—makes a memorable first appearance.
Richard Bowes
Tales That Fairies Tell
Richard Bowes
1.
“In the old world years ago,” said the Cat, “monarchs were plentiful, Mortals and Fairies co-mingled, dragons flew and animals spoke; witches, ogres, dragons, a host of magic creatures roamed the countryside, and a cat could stare at a king.”
The Cat spoke to Julian in the midst of a mad collage of a dream. He’d had a few of these recently and would wake up trying to grab some of the details. This one began in his stepmother’s loveless suburban kitchen in New Hope. But instead of his father and stepmother with their respective despair and hostility he saw the figure everyone in New York (the Big Arena as it was called) desired or at least wanted to be seen with at that moment.
The artist/couturier Clemenso sat naked and looked right past Julian as everybody did. Clemenso’s Crisis Fashion Show was also in the dream. Models covered head to toe in bullet-resistant fabrics filed past his fridge.
There was more. But during it all, only the Cat—better known as Puss—spoke. He sat on the lap of the infamous and beautiful Veronessa who, in turn, sat under a basketball net suspended from a gold hoop at the gym-themed Park Avenue High and delivered his little speech.
Always after these dreams Julian would awake wanting to grab and preserve details and always they evaporated at his touch.
This time they stuck, even made a certain sense when Julian awoke in the dark. Not many hours before he had seen Puss and Veronessa in just that pose and place. Veronessa was tall, with a cloud of pale red hair. Her blog, Tales That Fairies Tell (TTFT), was the hottest tip and scandal site in the Big Arena. It featured a running commentary on Fairy Godmothers, who had them and who didn’t.
Everyone said Puss was her pet. A few hinted it was the opposite way around. But none disputed that she wore clothes better than anyone else in the Arena and could command a spotlight. Her costume that evening at Park Avenue combined a lightweight bomb fragment-resistant jacket—its blue matched her eyes—and gray/black city camouflage slacks.
Julian wore a class of 1958 U.S. High School gym uniform, the prescribed outfit for waiters at Park Avenue High—1958 had been last autumn’s discovery and was tired. It was easy to know what was passé but those said to have zeitgeist antenna, who could sense the next new thing, were treated as sacred prophets.
Julian was waiting on one said to possess that skill. Jack Reynard, an impresario also known as “the Fox,” was there with a party. About Reynard someone had said, “Cold whimsy is his style: he works with a chuckle and a blade between the ribs.” His current project—Macabre Dance, ballets about the famous deaths and mutilations of dancers—had the aura of a sure thing.
Julian saw no way he could be part of that scene. He was not graceful and members of Reynard’s party seemed amused by even the sight of his bare knees. So his attention was fixed on Puss.
Julian had heard stories of Veronessa bringing the Cat right into places that didn’t admit pets because she was Veronessa and he was extraordinary. So the first sighting of what seemed a plain black and gray tabby was a disappointment. Puss looked as if he owned the place. But what cat doesn’t?
In the dream Puss was much larger and stared right at Julian. In real life he hadn’t deigned to do that. Nor had he spoken.
Julian opened his eyes and immediately looked at his palm (as everyone did on waking) to see if there were messages in his implanted feed. There were none. Julian gazed around the two-room studio on the twenty-fourth floor of a Chelsea high/low (high floor/low rent) with uncertain heat, hot water, air conditioning, and elevator service. He shared the place with a waitress/composer, a pedicab driver/dancer, and a tour guide/filmmaker. All four had come from various bankrupted suburban towns or small wrecked cities hoping to snatch a crown out of the gutter.
Lack of success and poverty had not united them. None of his roommates were close enough to Julian that he could wake any of them up and tell them his dream.
Then, suddenly, the Cat was back, ears twitching. Julian realized that what he was seeing wasn’t a dream but a kind of vision that was being sent to him somehow. Puss said, “My tale was born around fires in caves, given form before the hearth and came of age in palaces without an unscented breath of air. It has entertained sophisticated adults and small children for centuries.”
The tabby’s tail switched back and forth. “In the past I’ve swallowed monsters whole to help certain mortals whom I loved. Who knows what wonders are yet to unfold?”
The pedicab driver snored in the background as Julian watched Puss who regarded him through slitted eyes. “Whatever shall I do with this one?” he asked.
Veronessa was no larger than the Cat who sat beside her. “He’s nothing special,” she replied, propped on a pile of gosling down pillows and seemingly amused. “Okay-looking but not compelling. He isn’t someone who’d succeed without a lot of help. The simplest way would be what you do most easily: a quick pounce, a bit of play, and done.”
The Cat ig
nored her. “It’s easy to get attached to the memory of one’s first pet. Mine was a wonderful young oaf without an idea or plan. His imagining he was my owner was what charmed me most. I get sentimental about those who remind me of him.”
Veronessa shrugged. Puss stretched and bared his claws. “Cardinal Richelieu had a litter of kittens in a basket in his study at all times. He found their antics amusing, and a distraction from the bloody murder of running France. When the kittens grew up he gave them as presents to favorites who cherished them.”
“As a pet,” she said, “everyone will say that this one seems an odd and boring choice.”
“They said that about me when we first went out in public,” he replied. “And will say the same about you when they know me a little better.”
2.
Next morning, Julian woke up late and alone. His roommates were all at work. As he showered and shaved he remembered the Cat and Veronessa clearly. He wondered if he was crazy and if the insanity could be used artistically.
He left the apartment, descended in an unreliable elevator. As New York approached the mid-twenty-first century, artists were abundant and some were even talented. Though much of the city’s wealth was lost, most of its towers remained and the classier neighborhoods still blazed with nighttime light. In those enclaves the beautiful and desperate mingled with the famous and wealthy.
The city was, as always, restless, hard to please, and easy to bore. Painters, chefs, comedians, dancers, actors, and even writers were each worshipped in their turn and then abandoned.
Julian hurried to work hoping he could get a coffee and roll out of the kitchen before his afternoon shift. Instead, when he came in the door, the maître d’ immediately sent him to the manager’s office.
Once Upon a Time: New Fairy Tales Page 10