Black Heart, Ivory Bones

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: “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.

* * *

When Jane Yolen was a child living in New York City, her mother always warned her never to open the door to strangers. So when she read “Snow White,” she assumed — little tartar that she was then — that Snow White got what she deserved, letting that old witch in. So in “Snow in Summer” Yolen feels that she has finally written the Snow White she was meant to write, way back then.

Briar Rose and Witch DEBRA CASH

Debra Cash is a poet whose work often draws on images from traditional literature, including the Hebrew Bible and liturgy. She lives in Boston, Massachusetts, where she runs an international consultancy in workplace analysis and design. She has also been a dance critic for the Boston Globe for a number of years.

Briar Rose

A hundred years of dreams—
I would not have given up an hour
of those shifting landscapes, the tower, the lagoon
the rough roses making a cradle around my bed.
Everything stops
for me and for everyone I know
while behind my wincing eyelids I absorb
my parents’ recklessness.
We wanted the best for you, they’ll tell me:
all those girlish virtues
a pretty face and figure, kindness to the poor
the ability to sing and play the spinet.
Inviting the colors of the rainbow to my christening,
spraying me with holy white light,
they locked out one color of the spectrum
the darkness that absorbs it all
and I blame my father. Maleficent came to his birth
just as surely as she did to mine:
the difference is that everyone knew her then
when her name was Poverty and Need
and the guests all bowed their heads. In our day
my birthday, no one expected her.
Evil, they called her. I call her
Resentment, Fury. Locked away, I dream
and no one tells me what to do.
No one breaks in. And when a stranger offers me a spindle
glistening, sexual, I sink into the pillows
and remember the worst has already happened:
I have survived death and turned it into sleep
and a dream lasting one hundred years.
When I wake
I will know my lover’s face.

Witch

If I were really cruel I would have turned them into frogs and snakes
and squirmy insects with brittle legs
not gingerbread and oatmeal raisin—
and I would have hid them under stones
not set outside as lawn ornaments.
O my house is my only safety
hidden in the deep, dark forest
where animals know to stay away
and children drift in like leaves falling
from parents who neglect them
and tell them they are bad.
I am so ugly I want to bay at the moon
my heart feels like a cinder
the wicked, wicked witch
my heart gnawed like the shrinking night.
One day I will get lucky and a girl will push me in the oven
its raw bricks making walls without windows
a house square, solitary, exploding.
I long for it, to be baked like they were baked
become sweet and sweet-smelling as the minutes tick.
I am waiting for some pigtailed Gretel,
loyal and clever and loving
to give me a shove, headfirst—
and she will be the next witch in the forest
turning the children back into children.

* * *

Although “Witch” and “Briar Rose” were not written as a pair, they both expose silences at the heart of their respective tales: in one case, the unexplored private pain at the heart of evil, and in the other, the mysterious fluttering pictures that enable a sleeping beauty to wake renewed and aware.

Chanterelle BRIAN STABLEFORD

Brian Stableford lives in Reading, England, and is the author of more than forty novels including Empire of Fear, Young Blood, and Inheritors of Earth. His most recent publications include Teach Yourself Writing Fantasy and Science Fiction, Yesterday’s Bestsellers, Glorious Perversity: The Decline and Fall of Literary Decadence, The Dictionary of Science Fiction Places, and the novel The Black Blood of the Dead. His short stories have been published in Interzone, OMNI Internet, and Sirens and Other Daemon Lovers. Stableford is also the editor of The Dedalus Book of Decadence (Moral Ruins), Tales of the Wandering Jew, and The Dedalus Book of Femme Fatales.

* * *

There was once a music-loving carpenter named Alastor, who fell in love with Catriona, the daughter of a foundryman who lived in a Highland village near to the town of his birth. Catriona was known in the village as the Nightingale, because she had a beautiful singing voice. Alastor loved to play for her, and it was while she sang to his accompaniment that she fell in love with him.

When Alastor and Catriona were married, they left the Highlands for the Lowlands, taking up residence in the nation’s capital city, where Alastor was determined to make a living as a maker of musical instruments. Their first child, a son, was born on the first Monday after New Year’s Day, which is known throughout Christendom as Handsel Monday.

A handsel is a gift made to celebrate a new beginning, as a coin might be placed in the pocket of a freshly tailored coat. Alastor knew that his son might be seen as exactly such a gift, bestowed upon his marriage, and he was determined to make the most of him.

“Should we call him Handsel, do you think?” Alastor asked Catriona.

“It is a good name,” she said.

Every choice that is made narrows the range of further choices, and when the couple’s second child was due, Alastor said to Catriona: “If our second-born is a girl, we must not call her Gretel. There is a tale in which two children so-named are abandoned in the wild forest by their father, a poor woodcutter, at the behest of their stepmother. The tale ends happily enough for the children, but we should not take chances.”

“You are not a woodcutter, my love,” Catriona replied, “and we live in the city. We left the wild forest behind us when we left the Highlands, and I am not sure that we should carry its legacy of stories and superstitions with us.”

“I think we should,” said Alastor. “There is a wealth of wisdom in that legacy. We may be far away from the haunts of the fairy-folk, but we are Highlanders still. There have been those in both our families who have had the second sight, and we have no guarantee that our children will be spared its curse. We should be careful in naming them, and we must take care that they hear all the stories we know, for whatever their guidance might be worth.”