DOUBLE FAIRY TALE FLASH - Cold Blooded by Katherine Herron AND The Rose by Donna Kennedy

We've got 2 tales for today's Fairy Tale Flash...

First, they catch her in a net.

She lets them.

Their wide eyes and breathless curses send pools of cool blood writhing towards her cheeks. Humans go warm with embarrassment, she remembers absently. Fish don’t blush at all. Merpeople, with their cold blood, freeze at humiliation.

They keep staring. She’s cold, colder still, an ice sculpture cracking under the pressure of each gaze.

She shatters.

For all their gaping, no one notices.

They spread her out on a metal slab cooler than her cheeks.

She doesn’t struggle.

They poke and prod at the tail she can’t bear to examine for herself. She’s not cold anymore. Her tail is grey now, and her face greyer. She’s a fetus scream and flakes of dry skin. A series of scars and a headful of nightmares.

“Don’t sing for the humans,” her father used to say, several scalpels and too many sunsets ago, gesticulating with his violet tail rather than his webbed hands.

A scalpel gleams above her now, all sharp edges and sterile sliver. Why, she’d choke out if she could, but her doctors decided to 'cut the siren's vocal cords' weeks ago, back when she still thought they might give her legs. One snip, and her world ended.

The scalpel drips towards her pallid skin.

It’s still ending.

Katherine Herron is a long-time fan of all things fairy tale. A current creative writing graduate student, she lives in Edinburgh.

Kylie always puts her pink furry blanket close to Daddy’s drum. She’s so close her heart goes boom bah boom bah boom boom. She likes it when Daddy drums. It’s like he’s trying to make something happen. She closes her eyes and snuggles into the blanket. She’s not very cold in the park. She’s not very afraid of the dark. Even without Mommy. She couldn’t come. She never comes. But it’s okay.

They always go to the big playground first. Kylie sits on Daddy’s lap and they swing so high she can see the big trees and the lake. “Let’s fly into the sky,” he says. “Okay,” she says. Maybe they really can. Maybe Daddy wouldn’t sound so sad if they did. The swing slows to a stop, and Daddy lifts her up for a kiss. His eyes are blurry.

They walk to the lake. She sits on her blanket and eats peanut butter and honey sandwiches. Daddy reads her favorite fairy tale about the little girl who has a doll in her pocket that her mother gave her. The doll tells her what to do when she's scared “I wish I had a doll like that,” she always says. When it gets dark, Kylie snuggles into her favorite blanket.

Daddy goes closer to the lake and puts something red under a tree. She runs over to see. “Why did you stick that rose in the ground, Daddy?” she asks. He doesn’t say anything. Lots of times he doesn’t say anything. He just plays his drum, the long one with beads on it.

Boombah boom … The sound makes Kylie sleepy, so she lies down on her blanket, sucking the satiny edge. The big bright moon wakes her up. Daddy is drumming and smiling. He almost never smiles. Boom bah boom bah boom boom, drums Daddy. She can tell he’s playing “Ring around the Rosie,” so she sings with him.

She looks where he is looking. Over the lake, something is moving. Something white and misty. It comes closer until it seems to spin around the red rose like a see-through dancer.  It brightens and fades to the beat of the drum, swirling around them like a warm wind smelling of roses. Kylie moves her hand through it.

The beat of the drum slows, and the wispy something goes up into the sky. Daddy stops drumming and reaches for Kylie’s hand. When the mist is gone, he picks her up, holding her under one arm and the drum under the other. It’s a long walk to the car, so she closes her eyes a little, pretending to fall asleep. When they come out of the trees, by the car, she looks up and squints through her eyelashes at shadows crossing the moon.

“Look, Daddy,” she says. His shoulders shake, like he’s crying. But he’s not.

Donna Kennedy's library includes fairy tales and myths from all over the world.  She shares them with her twin 10-year-old grandchildren. When they're asleep she writes her own. Her story about them, "Here We Are Again," won second-place in Writer Advice's Flash Memoir Contest last year. Her winning 53-word flash fiction, "The Shed is Best," appears in Prime Number Magazine at https://www.press53.com/issue-127-donna-kennedy.

Covers: Amanda Bergloff                                                                                      

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BEYOND THE GLASS SLIPPER

Ten Neglected Fairy Tales to Fall in Love With

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SUN KISSED by Katherine Herron

Father had a beautiful cage built for me,
bronzed like my skin...

Sunlight is one of the only things that can touch me now. Warm and bright and almost like a human touch, if you forget the tangibility of skin, the pleasure of another person’s palm lines aligning with yours, which I almost have, because it’s been so long. Father kisses my forehead, sometimes, when he visits, but Father locked me away here, so his touches don’t count or comfort. He doesn’t count or comfort.

It’s not a father’s or jailor’s touch that I want.

(I raked my fingernails against his cheek the last time he came. Then envied the blood there, the proof of human contact.)

(He has not returned since.)

No one else ever comes, no one who can touch me the way I want to be touched, so I imagine a lover into the summer sunlight that strays into my tower. I dream one into the rays leaking, looking through the sunroof—reverie that it’s a lover’s lips on mine instead of the sun’s light, rhapsodize about the patterns on those imaginary lips, invisible from a distance but so so intimate in the moment, merging with mine. His bright hands on my hips and then my waist and then everywhere else.

The bronze below me, around me, heats with the sun sometimes. Shines with it. Father had a beautiful cage built for me, bronzed like my skin. I know I’m high above the palace courtyard, but there aren’t any windows here, save the sun roof, so I can’t see anything but the blue sky above, the occasional cloud. Sometimes, I can almost hear gardeners and visitors strolling below, and I wonder what they make of the tower sitting amidst the sunflowers, if they know about the bronze box—Father calls it a chamber, but it’s a box, really, no matter the soft bed and the fine robes and the precious metal walls—I’m living in. They’ve grown accustomed to me, most likely. I’m old gossip. Argos’s princess, a gem in a jewelry box.

Where was I, the courtyard, I wish I could see the courtyard. I used to play outside these bronze walls as a girl, before these bronze walls existed, skipping around its columns with the sons and daughters of servants. Older. Sneaking through its mazes with the cook’s son, letting him kiss me into stone corners the sun couldn’t reach, loving the spices in his breath. Wanting my legs around his hips and my back against one of the stone columns and the erasure of all space. To be touched, every bit of me, consumed, all of me.

But the cook’s son only ever kissed my lips, because a princess must be pure for her prince, whenever he may come. I wonder if the cook’s son is the cook now. If his soft hands prepare the fruit bowls and breads and spiced meats I receive each day through a slit in my bronze chamber, too narrow to fit more than a plate through. (I’ve tried.) There’s a door too, but only my father has the key. Servants aren’t trusted with its weight.

When I close my lips around figs in the morning, I envision the cook’s son preparing them. It bothered me, once, that his fingers were never as pristine clean as mine, but I wish they’d stain me now. Stained means touched. If the Oracle of Delphi were to give me a prophecy, I imagine it thus:

You’ll spend your life as a ghost, aching for the climax of contact.

A prophecy changed my father’s life, ruined mine, so I’ve spent hours, days, weeks, more considering them. If my father hadn’t visited Delphi, honored its oracle, then I’d be outside right now. Wed by now. Touched by now. Loved by now.

You’ll die a maiden, untouched as a priestess in your afterlife.

Except that wasn’t the prophecy, wasn’t my destiny, wasn’t I supposed to have been loved by now? Father locked me away, you know, went mad, you know, because Delphi’s oracle told him his death would come at the hands of his daughter’s son.

So no one can touch me.

Sometimes, I wish I had a sister, and then spend hours on my knees, praying to the gods for forgiveness. The sun always chooses those moments to bathe me. Like it’s listening. My only friend. If I close my eyes, the sun has a face. The sun is a man with power enough to free me, passion enough to consume me. Knock away the bronze. Kiss away the intangibility trying to undo me. If I close my eyes, I can feel a man’s beard in the sunlight, swear that it echoes on my chin and cheeks and thighs.

My name is Danae, Princess of Argos, daughter of King Acrisius, but no one has said my name in such a very long time.

I swear the sun whispers ‘Nae against my earlobe, into my lips and my neck and my chest and my stomach as he kisses, bites, scorches. Snipping my name in half, just to get that much closer to me.

I wish for a sunburn. A mark. Like the love bites I wouldn’t ever let the cook’s son leave on my neck but always left on his. I want the sun to burn my entire body. Sometimes I let my robes fall, and bathe all my bare skin in the sunlight for hope it will, but it only ever bronzes. I was a never a fair-skinned girl, but I’ve never been so sun-kissed.

I wish that someone, the gods, the sun, could give me the son that my father so fears. A boy heaven-sent to free me.

I know it’s mad, but I swear my stomach truly is increasing, though my diet hasn’t changed. Though I’m spewing my breakfasts more mornings than not, just after finishing their figs and breads and honey. Because I’m spewing my breakfasts more mornings than not.

I don’t think I’ve bled in two months.

Impossible that I haven’t bled in two months.

I haven’t bled in two months.

If it’s madness to think that I could truly be with child, then I’ll pray for madness. I’d cry through the prayers, but for the sun’s gentle lips, kissing away the tears before they can fall.

My belly has grown huge. I know I’m not mad, because none of my robes fit like they used to. It bulbs through all of them. I think the sun likes my stomach bare. It fawns over the skin there, the impossible child kicking beneath. Kisses and murmurs and caresses.

A hero, I hear in the breeze that sifts through the sunroof. Our son will be a hero.

As though I care about anything but the perpetual touch of a life grown from mine. My son can do whatever he likes, so long as he never leaves me. So long as he saves me from here, because the sun, for all its radiant warmth, cannot. So long as my son avenges me.

(Perhaps I do wish him a hero.)

I won’t consider the possibility of a daughter. I refuse to trap a daughter inside this tower, chamber, box with me.

Father has found a new box for me. Made of wood now. A chest now rather than a chamber. A more honest prison, fate, punishment, a quicker death. He was all smiles when he opened the door to my room for the first time in months, ready for the desperation of a daughter dying for any conversation from any company at all. Then all faltering smiles, all horror too profound for frowning, at the sight of the infant clutched to my chest

Horror encased me too, though I’d envisioned that moment triumphant with: Look at your grandson, Father. Doesn’t he look strong? Doesn’t he look up at me so lovingly? Won’t he grow up to desire you dead, dead, dead?

Reality was a flood of: He’s going to take my son, he’s going to take my sun, he’s going to steal the light and leave me here to touch only ever bronze.

The wooden chest splinters my shoulder blades now as waves whirl around us.

“The gods loathe kin slayers,” I pleaded with Father before he nailed us away within these wooden boards.

“I’m no kin slayer,” he said, before tossing us to sea. “Poseidon can do with you as he likes.”

And then I was screaming through the slits in the wood, but the waves had already taken us. My words fell to their depths to litter the sand like shells. I wrapped my body around my son’s cries. His soft, round cheeks and tiny toes.

“You’ll kill him for this someday won’t you, sweetling,” I soothe into his ear. “Won’t you, darling? My strong, sunlight boy.”

The ocean should have swallowed us whole by now, but the sun keeps creaking through the cracks in the wood, driving the water away. Running its thumb across my forehead, its lips over my eyelids, whispering, Our strong boy.

I wonder if Father, too, has pieced together his grandson’s sire. If he’s allowed himself to recall the strange forms Zeus will take for his human lovers. A swan, a satyr, a sunbeam. It took me ages to believe it, though nothing else explains the infant in my arms.

(I’ve been ravished by a god, but still never truly touched. It’s a lacking I’ll never admit aloud, for fear of lightning.)

“Zeus will save us, won’t he, sweetling,” I whisper into my son’s soft forehead. “My sweet, strong Perseus.”

Katherine Herron is a long-time fan of all things fairy tale. She currently lives in Edinburgh, where she is working towards her master's degree in Creative Writing.

Cover: Amanda Bergloff