“You didn’t think it would be so easy, now, did you?” The girl laughs behind me. “This is still a fairy tale, you know. But you’ve been braver than I expected from the looks of you, and I am feeling benevolent. Let me see… Yes. If you take the path to the left, you will return to your old life, just like you’ve never left it, and no one the wiser. And if you take the one to the right, you will get an entirely new happy ending. A new, better prince and everything. What color eyes do you prefer?”
I look to the left. I already miss my children terribly.
I look to the right. I am tempted to start anew.
“What if I go straight?” I ask.
“Straight where?” Her laugh is just like the tinkle of the brook rushing over the pebbles. “There is no straight here, dummy. Only left or right.”
She speaks the truth, of course. The paths diverge, one veering back, one leading forward, but between them lies a perilous eruption of poisonous briars, a wilderness of weeds, a dark tangle of branches and roots so dense it is impossible to see through it.
I turn to ask another question. The girl is gone. Only the willow branch is trembling lightly, and the brook is still laughing with her young, cruel voice.
For a long while I stand unmoving on the edge of the quiet brown wood, not thinking about anything, just listening to the beating of my heart.
Then I gather my cloak around me and push straight into the briars.
At the Woodsman’s Cottage
My hands are soon bleeding, my clothes torn, my face scratched. This is a different kind of wood altogether—no longer the softly luminous, cathedral-like alleys of stately trees, but a snarling chaos of brambles, thistles, thorns, overgrown undergrowth. I cannot see three paces before me as I struggle through the wild brush, and my hearing is filled with the deafening crackle of branches snapping over my head and under my feet. Everything is untamed, everything is hard and sharp, everything is pushing against me. When I tumble into a ravine and find it filled waist-high with yellowing nettles, I almost weep with relief, so familiar does their gentle fire feel against my skin. Yet I pick myself up, clamber onto the other side, and plunge back into the murderous thicket. I do not stop, nor do I turn back—and in any case, I know that even were I to regret my decision and retrace my steps, I would not find the summery clearing with the laughing brook and the two paths diverging.
You are only ever given one shot at a choice in stories such as this.
Creatures in this part of the wood are curious rather than stealthy, almost as though they have never encountered a princess before. Birds and squirrels jump to lower branches to watch me closely as I fight my way past. For a while, a fawn walks gracefully through the brush alongside me, soundless next to my crashing and stomping, the white spots on its skin like round flashes of sunlight in the leaves. Then a wolf springs out of the bushes mere steps away, and the fawn vanishes just as suddenly as it appeared. The wolf stares at me with narrowed orange eyes, then follows me in turn, always keeping the same distance. I have no fear of it.
“Excuse me,” I say politely, “but have you seen a house built like a shoe?”
At the sound of my voice, the wolf tenses, twitches its ears, and swerves away, melting into the surrounding twilight. I notice that it has indeed grown darker all around me, as if the day, having only just begun, is already rushing toward evening. I stop to peek at the sky through the brambles, and it seems to me that I do see a star blinking far, far above. Something soft nudges my ankle, and I look down to discover what appears to be a family of plump brown mushrooms gathered at my feet. In the next moment they doff their wide-brimmed hats, and I am surrounded by lumpy, boulderlike creatures with twigs for their noses and moss for their hair.
I crouch before them. Their eyes are like birdseed, beady and excited.
“Pardon me,” I say to them, “but do you know where I can find a woodsman’s family that lives inside a shoe?”
They twitter and chatter in birdlike accents, then file off, giggling, one after another, into the weeds that reach to my shoulders. I wait a bit, but they do not return, so I press ahead. After another hour or two, it has grown completely dark, but the way has become easier little by little. Stars twinkle gently, their flickering light enough for me not to trip yet not enough to see anything clearly. Sometimes it feels as if I am walking in place, on the bottom of a sonorous well, with the night sky a perfect black circle above me. Now and then I enter colder pockets of drifting mists and guess at vague shapes swirling through them—pallid lilies, grimacing faces, beckoning hands with thin, ghostly fingers—but the fog clears swiftly, and I find myself walking on the bottom of the dark starlit well once again. Once, I am enveloped in a cloud of floral scents sweeter than a powder room crowded with perfumed court ladies, yet with the lightest tinge of rot at the very heart of the smell. It seems to me then that I am passing right next to a crumbling brick wall of some manor all entwined in blooming wild roses, yet I cannot be certain; and when I carefully put out one hand and feel about, I succeed only in pricking my finger on a thorn. Soon I start to feel drowsy, and drowsier still, until I am close to falling asleep on my feet. And perhaps I really do, for as I continue to stumble, to slumber, to stumble through the woods, I imagine a small log cabin striding past me on giant chicken legs, its one window fiercely ablaze, ruffled forest imps squawking and leaping out of its way by the dozen—and a sleek black cat on a golden chain who is singing a wordless song in a pleasant velvety baritone as it winds its way back and forth around an immensely thick oak tree in a blue woodland glade—and a glorious silver-haired maiden who is bathing in a silent forest pool, shining droplets of moonlit water running like pearls down her outstretched white wings—and other, stranger things that shimmer at the edges of my vision, beautiful and wild, yet melt into the dark whenever I turn to look at them directly. And as I walk, as I dream, through the obscure, glowing mysteries of the night, the ground evens out under my worn ballroom slippers, the unkempt brush slowly gives way to the magnificent trees of the morning, and the trees begin to part, and the path widens, and then I do trip, after all, but manage to catch myself, closing my eyes protectively for an instant—only to open them upon a sunny autumnal day, a clear pale sky over a meadow, and, across the meadow, a cheerful house painted bright yellow and shaped like a shoe.
I blink, half expecting the house not to be there when I look again—yet there it is still, just as solid, with its green roof, its red door, its blue weather vane fashioned like a rabbit. A dozen shirts of all colors, from prodigiously large to doll-sized tiny, flap and billow on a stretched clothesline in the small yard, and a cow is grazing outside the white wooden fence. As I stand there staring, a redheaded boy, barelegged and barefoot, no older than three, bursts out of the door, rushes into the yard, and, screaming with laughter, bends to pick up a handful of mud and flings it at the drying shirts. His aim is faulty: the clod of dirt arcs short of the clothesline and splatters the cow instead.
The cow looks up impassively, chewing all the while.
“Stop it this instant, you rampaging wildebeest!” cries the buxom woman who has just appeared in the doorway. “I should send you and your unruly brothers off to the woods. Not fit for civilized living, the lot of you!” Her apron is askew, her mouse-colored hair coming out of its bun in messy wisps, and there is a wailing baby propped on her hip. “Why can’t you be more like your sisters? Come here, you little monster!”