How to Fracture a Fairy Tale Read online

  Then you have to figure out what kind of fracture you’re attempting. A small sprain or the calving of glaciers? Do you want to subvert the story’s paradigm entirely, or just make a joke? I have done both. In “Allerleirauh,” using a Cinderella variant, I show the bitter truth of incest. In “Sleeping Ugly” I tell Sleeping Beauty as a joke.

  Do you want to write the story from a different point of view? For example, I have told “The Three Billy Goats Gruff” from the bridge’s point of view. Taken several incarnations of the Big Bad Wolf stories and placed them into a nursing home for old wolves.

  How about setting a story that is well known, like Rumpelstiltskin, in a different time and place? I read the story as an anti-Semitic tale, and set it in a make-believe Middle European kingdom (sort of Poland but not actually) where the spinner of straw into gold becomes a money-changer. His widow is known as “Granny Rumple.”

  Just fracturing an old tale is fun. Occasionally it takes courage. Sometimes the story sells. What more can a writer ask for?

  Fame, a large house, many awards.

  Well—like the old witch in the woods of hundreds of old fairy tales—let me give you this piece of advice: be careful what you wish for. One of my awards set my good coat on fire. That may sound like a fairy tale well fractured, but it really happened.

  —Jane Yolen,

  Phoenix Farm, 2018

  Snow in Summer

  THEY CALL THE WHITE flower that covers the lawn like a poplin carpet Snow in Summer. And because I was born in July with a white caul on my head, they called me that, too. Mama wanted me to answer to Summer, which is a warm, pretty name. But my Stepmama, who took me in hand just six months after Mama passed away, only spoke the single syllable of my name, and she didn’t say it nicely.

  “Snow!” It was a curse in her mouth. It was a cold, unfeeling thing. “Snow, where are you, girl? Snow, what have you done now?”

  I didn’t love her. I couldn’t love her, though I tried. For Papa’s sake I tried. She was a beautiful woman, everyone said. But as Miss Nancy down at the postal store opined, “Looks ain’t nothing without a good heart.” And she was staring right at my Stepmama when she said it. But then Miss Nancy had been Mama’s closest friend ever since they’d been little ones, and it nigh killed her, too, when Mama was took by death.

  Papa was besot with my Stepmama. He thought she couldn’t do no wrong. The day she moved into Cumberland he said she was the queen of love and beauty. That she was prettier than a summer night. He praised her so often, she took it ill any day he left off complimenting, even after they was hitched. She would have rather heard those soft nothings said about her than to talk of any of the things a husband needs to tell his wife: like when is dinner going to be ready or what bills are still to be paid.

  I lived twelve years under that woman’s hard hand, with only Miss Nancy to give me a kind word, sweet pop, and a magic story when I was blue. Was it any wonder I always went to town with a happier countenance than when I had to stay at home?

  And then one day Papa said something at the dinner table, his mouth greasy with the chicken I had cooked and his plate full with the taters I had boiled. And not a thing on that table that my Stepmama had made. Papa said, as if surprised by it, “Why Rosemarie” . . . which was my Stepmama’s Christian name . . . “why Rosemarie do look at what a beauty that child has become.”

  And for the first time my Stepmama looked—really looked—at me.

  I do not think she liked what she saw.

  Her green eyes got hard, like gems. A row of small lines raised up on her forehead. Her lips twisted around. “Beauty,” she said. “Snow,” she said. She did not say the two words together. They did not fit that way in her mouth.

  I didn’t think much of it at the time. If I thought of myself at all those days, it was as a lanky, gawky, coltish child. Beauty was for horses or grown women, Miss Nancy always said. So I just laughed.

  “Papa, you are just fooling,” I told him. “A daddy has to say such things about his girl.” Though in the thirteen years I had been alive he had never said any such over much. None in fact that I could remember.

  But then he added something that made things worse, though I wasn’t to know it that night. “She looks like her Mama. Just like her dear Mama.”

  My Stepmama only said, “Snow, clear the dishes.”

  So I did.

  But the very next day my Stepmama went and joined the Holy Roller Mt. Hosea Church, which did snake handling on the fourth Sunday of each month and twice on Easter. Because of the Bible saying “Those who love the Lord can take up vipers and they will not be killed,” the Mt. Hosea folk proved the power of their faith by dragging out rattlers and copperheads from a box and carrying them about their shoulders like a slippery shawl. Kissing them, too, and letting the pizzen drip down on their checks.

  Stepmama came home from church, her face all flushed and her eyes all bright and said to me, “Snow, you will come with me next Sunday.”

  “But I love Webster Baptist,” I cried. “And Reverend Bester. And the hymns.” I didn’t add that I loved sitting next to Miss Nancy and hearing the stories out of the Bible the way she told them to the children’s class during the Reverend’s long sermon.

  “Please Papa, don’t make me go.”

  For once my Papa listened. And I was glad he said no. I am feared of snakes, though I love the Lord mightily. But I wasn’t sure any old Mt. Hosea rattler would know the depth of that love. Still, it wasn’t the snakes Papa was worried about. It was, he said, those Mt. Hosea boys.

  My Stepmama went to Mt. Hosea alone all that winter, coming home later and later in the afternoon from church, often escorted by young men who had scars on their cheeks where they’d been snakebit. One of them, a tall blond fellow who was almost handsome except for the meanness around his eyes, had a tattoo of a rattler on his bicep with the legend “Love Jesus Or Else” right under it.

  My Papa was not amused.

  “Rosemarie,” he said, “you are displaying yourself. That is not a reason to go to church.”

  “I have not been doing this for myself,” she replied. “I thought Snow should meet some young men now she’s becoming a woman. A beautiful woman.” It was not a compliment in her mouth. And it was not the truth, either, for she had never even introduced me to the young men nor told them my true name.

  Still, Papa was satisfied with her answer, though Miss Nancy, when I told her about it later, said, “No sow I know ever turned a boar over to her litter without a fight.”

  However, the blond with the tattoo came calling one day and he didn’t ask for my Stepmama. He asked for me. For Snow. My Stepmama smiled at his words, but it was a snake’s smile, all teeth and no lips. She sent me out to walk with him, though I did not really want to go. It was the mean eyes and the scars and the rattler on his arm, some. But more than that, it was a feeling I had that my Stepmama wanted me to be with him. And that plum frightened me.

  When we were in the deep woods, he pulled me to him and tried to kiss me with an open mouth and I kicked him in the place Miss Nancy had told me about, and while he was screaming, I ran away. Instead of chasing me, he called after me in a voice filled with pain. “That’s not even what your Stepmama wanted me to do to you.” But I kept running, not wanting to hear any more.

  I ran and ran even deeper into the woods, long past the places where the rhododendron grew wild. Into the dark places, the boggy places, where night came upon me and would not let me go. I was so tired from all that running, I fell asleep right on a tussock of grass. When I woke there was a passel of strangers staring down at me. They were small, humpedbacked men, their skin blackened by coal dust, their eyes curious. They were ugly as an unspoken sin.

  “Who are you?” I whispered, for a moment afraid they might be more of my Stepmama’s crew.

  They spoke together, as if their tongues had been tied in a knot at the back end. “Miners,” they said. “On Keeperwood Mountain.”

  “
I’m Snow in Summer,” I said. “Like the flower.”

  “Summer,” they said as one. But they said it with softness and a kind of dark grace. And they were somehow not so ugly anymore. “Summer.”

  So I followed them home.

  And there I lived for seven years, one year for each of them. They were as good to me and as kind as if I was their own little sister. Each year, almost as if by magic, they got better to look at. Or maybe I just got used to their outsides and saw within. They taught me how to carve out jewels from the black cave stone. They showed me the secret paths around their mountain. They warned me about strangers finding their way to our little house.

  I cooked for them and cleaned for them and told them Miss Nancy’s magic stories at night. And we were happy as can be. Oh, I missed my Papa now and then, but my Stepmama not at all. At night I sometimes dreamed of the tall blond man with the rattler tattoo, but when I cried out one of the miners would always comfort me and sing me back to sleep in a deep, gruff voice that sounded something like a father and something like a bear.

  Each day my little men went off to their mine and I tidied and swept and made up the beds. Then I’d go outside to play. I had deer I knew by name, grey squirrels who came at my bidding, and the sweetest family of doves that ate cracked corn out of my hand. The garden was mine, and there I grew everything we needed. I did not mourn for what I did not have.

  But one day a stranger came to the clearing in the woods. Though she strived to look like an old woman, with cross-eyes and a mouth full of black teeth, I knew her at once. It was my Stepmama in disguise. I pretended I did not know who she was, but when she inquired, I told her my name straight out.

  “Summer,” I said.

  I saw “Snow” on her lips.

  I fed her a deep-dish apple pie and while she bent over the table shoveling it into her mouth, I felled her with a single blow of the fry pan. My little men helped me bury her out back.

  Miss Nancy’s stories had always ended happy-ever-after. But she used to add every time: “Still, you must make your own happiness, Summer dear.”

  And so I did. My happiness—and hers.

  I went to the wedding when Papa and Miss Nancy tied the knot. I danced with some handsome young men from Webster and from Elkins and from Canaan. But I went back home alone. To the clearing and the woods and the little house with the eight beds. My seven little fathers needed keeping. They needed my good stout meals. And they needed my stories of magic and mystery. To keep them alive.

  To keep me alive, too.

  The Bridge’s Complaint

  TRIT-TROT, TRIT-TROT, TRIT-TROT, all day long. You’d think their demned hooves were made of iron. It fair gives me a headache, it does. Back and forth, back and forth. As if the grass were actually greener on one side one day, on the other the next. Goats really are a monstrous race.

  It makes me long for the days of Troll.

  We never were on more than a generic-name basis. He was Troll. I was Bridge. It takes trolls—and bridges, for that matter—a long time to warm up to full introductions. So I never had a chance to know his first name before he was . . . well . . . gone. But he was a pleasant sort, for a troll. Knew a lot of stories. Troll stories, of course, are full of blood and food, food and blood. But they were good stories, for all that. Told loudly and with great passion. I really do miss them.

  Not that I don’t have a few good stories of my own to tell. I mean, I wasn’t always a Goat Bridge. Long before that demned tribe arrived to foul my planking, I was a Bridge of Some Consequence. Mme. D’Aulnoy herself traversed my boards. And her friend Mme. le Prince du Beaumont. Ah—the sound of wheels rolling. There is a memory to treasure.

  None of this trit-trot, trit-trot business.

  But then the dear ladies were gone and the meadows, once pied with colorful flowers, were sold to a goat merchant, M. de Gruff. He pastured his demned beasties on both sides of my river. They sharpened their horns on my railings, pawed deep into the earthen slopes, and ate up every last one of the flowers. The grass in the meadows was gnawed down to nubbins by those voracious creatures. In other words, they made a desert out of an Eden.

  Trit-trot, trit-trot, indeed.

  So you can imagine how thrilled I was when Troll showed up, pushing his way upstream from the confluence of the great rivers below.

  He wasn’t much to look at when he arrived, being young and quite thin. Of course he had the big bran-muffin eyes and the sled-jump nose and the gingko-leaf ears that identify a troll immediately. And when he smiled, there were those moss green teeth, filed to points. But otherwise he was a quite unprepossessing troll.

  Trolls are territorial, you know, and when food gets scarce, the young are pushed out by the older, bigger, meaner trolls. Or so my Troll told me, and I have no reason to disbelieve him. He said, “Me dad gave a shove when he got hungry. I had to go. Been on the move awhile.”

  That was an understatement. Actually he had been wading through miles of river before he found me unoccupied. He must have thought it paradise when he saw all those goats.

  Not that he could have run across the fields after them. It is a well-kept secret that trolls must have one foot in the water at times. Troll told me this one night when we were trading tales. They call it water-logging. Troll even sang me a song about it that went something like this:

  Two feet wet

  None on shore,

  You will live

  Evermore.

  One foot wet,

  One foot dry,

  You will never

  Need to cry.

  Two feet dry—

  Say good-bye.

  Well, trolls are actually better at stories than poems. You want good poetry, you have to hang out with boggles or sprites.

  Of course the whole thing is a secret and I only tell you this because there are no longer many trolls about. It is a shame, actually. M. Darwin wrote of this disappearing phenomenon, and I, for one, believe it.

  So trolls must wait by a river’s bank for some creature to cross if they want to eat. That’s why trolls and bridges have such an affinity. A bridge means a crossing place, and we are much more stable than fords. Trolls, while not having particularly scientific minds, long ago figured this much out.

  So there we were, Troll and I, he dining on M. de Gruff’s billy goats, large and small and in-between. And after each meal, after he had a round of belching and farting—which trolls consider good form—he favored me with a troll tale.

  He told me about trolls in love and trolls at war—which to the untutored ear can sound much the same.

  He told me a tale about a troll who lived in the waters near Nôtre-Dame, eating fish and fishermen. But that troll conceived an unlikely passion for the cathedral. He desired to talk to the gargoyles, whom he thought must be cousins of his. He began to waste away with longing for just a single word with his stone kin. So he pulled himself up out of the water and started across the land. After three steps he died, of course. The Parisians used his bones for soup and built a monument where he fell. But he died happy—or so Troll said.

  He told me about a troll who had been interviewed by a journalist, and when I asked what paper the piece had appeared in, he giggled, an unlikely sound coming from such a large source. The silly troll, he said, had eaten the man before he wrote the story, not after. We had a good laugh about that!

  And then he told me about his mother, about the good times before his father had given him a shove. We cried together. After all, that’s what friends are for.

  He was so delighted with my company, he tried to compose a troll song to the beauty of my span, but he got lost in rhymes about tans/fans/bans and never did finish it. But he was a good teller of tales.

  And I am the consummate listener.

  I must admit that—except for the day Mme. d’Aulnoy and Mme. le Prince du Beaumont traded stories sitting on the banks of my stream, their petite picnic spread out on a blanket—I was never happier.

  But the sad fa
ct is that trolls are not very smart. Good storytellers, yes. Pleasant companions, quite. Undemanding friends, absolutely. But they lack upstairs what they have elsewhere. Breadth. They are—alas—really quite stupid. They do not have the slightest understanding of diplomatic dissembling. They do not know how to prevaricate—or to put it more succinctly, they cannot tell a lie. Even with my coaching, Troll would not move downstream a ways and take goats from different parts of the river just to fool them.

  “I like it here with you,” he said. “Besides, this is my place.”

  And not being a troll myself, I couldn’t shove him off.

  So the day came when the goats stopped crossing the bridge because it had become too notably dangerous. For a month not a single one went over my span. And while I was delighted to be rid of that constant, demned trit-trot, trit-trot, it worried me to see my friend grow so thin and wan. It got so one could almost read a book through him. He had not even the energy to tell stories.

  So I did what I could. Bridges are not a flighty tribe. We are solid and stolid. We stay put. But we have our wiles for all that. One does not arch over a river for so many years without learning something.

  I waited until one rather silly young goat strayed a bit too close to my embankments and I called to him.

  “Come here, little goat.”

  He looked about cautiously. “Are you a troll?”

  “A troll? Do I look like a troll?”

  “Well, actually you look like a bridge.”

  “And have you ever seen a troll?”

  He shook his little nubbined head.

  “But you have seen a bridge?”

  He giggled. I knew then that I had him.