Month: May 2023

It Takes a Princess to be a Queen

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Poor little thing, feet bare, bedraggled dress, beleaguered, and common. The prince says to me, “I’ve found a wife.”

More like a wet kit.

I could say, “She’s a sly one.” He would never listen. He has too good a heart.

So, I tell my maid, “Find her a gown. Let her sup in the kitchen. And lastly, make up the softest bed with the hardest pebbles inside as a test.” Maid’s done this many times.

The ungrateful girl eats nothing. The satin is not fine enough, the slippers too stiff. By morning, I know she’s a princess most uncommon.

A Stormy Night Atop a Pea

Edmund Dulac, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

She rushed along a lightening illuminated path. Mud sucked one satin slipper off, the other she tossed away calling it useless, like she had the cooks whose roast meat was not bloody enough, their bread not crusty enough. Torrential tears fell. Rain streamed from her hair, her clothes, and the tip of her nose.

A man and his unruly mare pulled up, clods flying.

“Fool, do you know who I am,” she asked.

Eyebrow raised, he said, “A woman in need of dry clothes.” The lord carried her to his castle, grand as her father’s.

She didn’t sleep a wink.

A Mother’s Quandary

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My only daughter, a kind one her. Didn’t she bake a cake, ripe with almond scent, to bring her grandmother? To visit my mother is arduous, more than one day’s journey. Should I caution her? Could my daughter understand if I warned her about the treacherous nature of the beast we women become by the light of the moon? And as fate would have it, the moon is full tonight. 

I must trust my precious girl. I tell her, “Stay on the path, avoid strangers, clean yourself in the river along the way if you must. My love to Grandma.”

The Woodsman’s Lament

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Blood. It was blood everywhere. Soaked into the cracks of the wooden floor, on the old lady’s nightgown, pouring out from the dead wolf’s throat. The carving knife and the young girl’s hand what held it dripped with the stuff. I thought she were cut, too. Like the wolf tore her open some way, I thought. But when I got to her, she were fine. Dazed, a murderous light in her eye, innocent no more.

I tucks them both in bed, gets a fire going, then sits down. The girl’s asleep. I tell her Grandma, “Let’s say I did it.”

Cut Before the Chase

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Yeasty fresh rolls wrapped in rough textured linen, unpolished like the girl who carried the basket. Mist rose from woody ground to fill the heavy air. The young girl parked herself to rest under a tree.

Behind her, a rank smell rose. A wild laugh accompanied the odor’s owner, a creature of the forest who embodied all that tangled in trees and clung to rocks. “Tired? I have a shortcut for you.” 

“Where am I going, then?”

“Give something, get something.”

“I’ll give you what for.” She pulled out an ax from her red riding cape and cut things short.