For some reason, I do not want to mention the witch, or the night at the crossroads.
“I just stopped by to talk,” I say, uncertainly.
“Oh, yes, talk, I love talk!” she exclaims, muffled now, her mouth full of chocolate. “You don’t mind if I knit, do you, my dear? At this time of the year, with the holidays almost upon us, I am always so busy making socks for the poor town orphans… Tell me, and how are your own precious darlings? Doing well, I trust?”
My breath catches.
“Oh, Fairy Godmother! Do you not know? I haven’t seen… I haven’t been allowed to see…” And suddenly everything, everything, is too much—the hot, unmoving air inside the sweet pink house, the headache still beating at my temples like a trapped bird at the bars of a cage, the woman’s moist, egglike eyes turned upon me in smiling expectation, the chocolate treat I have forgotten I was still clutching beginning to melt, to run down my fingers, the exhaustion of keeping all my deeper emotions eternally locked away while I go about my hopeless task of fighting surface entropy with mops and dustcloths, the bitterness of the knowledge that, unlike all the other fairy tales in the world, mine has proved to be a sham—the old gnawing fear that I will never make sense of anything ever again, the new feeling of violation at having my life’s spark wrenched away from me by something, by someone—and more than anything else, the anguish of this never-ending separation from Angie and Ro, days turned to weeks turned to months, and who even knows what is happening to them, whether they are healthy, warmly dressed, properly fed, whether or not they go to bed every night crying for their mama—and now I am crying, too, tears freely streaming down my face, mixing with streaks of chocolate when I attempt to wipe them away with my sticky hands. “I may never be able to see… to hold… all I want… I love them so much… and that cruel, hard-hearted man…”
My words are turning into jerky sobs, become hiccups before trailing off into wet, incoherent shuddering.
“Oh, dear child! I simply had no idea, no idea!” the fairy godmother cries. She has flown out of her chair and is fluttering about me now, patting my cheeks with her fuzzy pink shawls, petting my back with her plump pink hands. “There, there, a nice long cry is good for you. Here, have a tissue… And now, take a deep breath and tell me what’s going on. Let’s start with what happened in the last months of your marriage, after the poor old dear… ahem… after King Roland died.”
I blow my nose, shake my head.
“Child, it’s not healthy to keep things bottled up inside like that.”
“You can’t possibly understand! How can you, when you yourself never had… had any… any…” Just as the sobs are encroaching again, I choke on a piece of dark chocolate I find wedged in my mouth. It starts sweet on my tongue, then turns so lip-numbingly bitter that I am shocked into silence as I work my teeth around it, laboring to rid myself of its sharp, binding taste.
The fairy godmother is back in her chair, knitting needles flashing in her hands.
“True, I never had any children of my own,” she says quietly. “But I know something about the heartbreak of motherhood. Why don’t you sit and breathe for a while, and I will tell you a little story. It’s a story of a fairy who was not always good.”
Surely, not you, Fairy Godmother? I want to ask, but my mouth is too full.
“Hush, child, do not interrupt. Just chew that chocolate, there’s my girl.”
And as I sputter around the sweet bitterness invading my mouth, she begins to talk, her needles clicking in rhythm with her words, the lamps glowing warm and pink around us. Once upon a time—the precise date is of no significance—in a nearby kingdom, there lived a fairy. In most respects, she was quite an ordinary fairy, preoccupied with small, benign workings of magic—infusing liquors with enhanced berry flavors, helping with firebird eggs, sewing dresses out of starlight, dabbling in royal matchmaking, and the like—save for the fact that, unlike most of her kind, she was raising two young children of her own. All fairies could have offspring, of course, but most chose not to, for, being obligated in the course of their professional engagements to spend much of their time at christenings and, subsequently, to watch over their godchildren as the spoiled little brats grew into proud princesses who refused to laugh or tyrannical princes who sent countless minions on missions of death in search of talking horses, mute brides, and pairs of comfortable slippers, they knew enough about the pitfalls and tragedies of motherhood to prefer vaulting right over the whole sorry mess on their humming iridescent wings. Not this fairy, though—this fairy had a sweet voice made for singing cribside lullabies and a generous heart made for unconditional love, and so she had produced two babies of her own to share her songs and her love with; and thus it was really quite sad when, finding herself the eleventh in line at a routine christening feast gone routinely wrong, she nobly intervened in a curse placed on some royal infant by a resentful old biddy and, after the infant’s father voiced a strongly worded objection to the manner of her intervention, lost her head, leaving behind a ten-year-old fairy boy and a five-year-old fairy girl.
The two children had a miserable time growing up. The hapless fairy’s friends took turns raising them, but, being flighty and callous by nature, they could not make up for the warmth that the siblings had lost when deprived of their own doting mother. In spite of the other fairies’ meager parenting skills, however, the brother and sister survived to young adulthood and, acquiring sufficient knowledge of their private history, swore revenge. They went about it in different ways. The brother, favoring a direct, blunt approach, as men often would, chose to wreak havoc within the family of their mother’s actual murderer. Insinuating himself into the palace under the guise of a celebrated physician, he proceeded to cast a sleeping charm upon the king’s sixteen-year-old daughter; then, having gorged himself on the king’s rage for so long that his gloating turned to boredom, he ensured the man’s death by conjuring a pointy fish bone in His Majesty’s throat. At that point, with the royal line essentially snuffed out, the brother took a parting stroll, in the same spirit of gloating, through the slumbering princess’s dreams and, unexpectedly, found himself so fascinated by what he discovered in her pure maidenly head that he declared the dreams of impressionable virgins to be the new object of his ambitions, and, bestowing a bristly kiss upon his sister’s dewy forehead, donned a bowler hat and left for greener pastures and darker nights.
The sister, on the other hand, possessed of a much subtler intellect and nurturing grander designs, set out to destroy the tranquility of each and every royal family in the vicinity, swearing to render each and every royal child a motherless orphan by the age of five—the age at which she herself had been deprived of maternal love. She worked at it tirelessly, relentlessly, for decades, initially getting the neighborhood queens to succumb to sickness and waste away in a plain, old-fashioned manner, but in time becoming more and more inventive at disposing of the royal consorts, turning some of them into frogs at the precise moment when they kissed their newborn babes for the first time, trapping others in magic mirrors, condemning them to report on the sordid doings of others in all perpetuity, making still others lose their hearts to donkeys or scarecrows or brooms and run off into the sunset with their tragically unsuitable seducers. There was a queen who, in a bout of uncharacteristic insanity, leaped into a well after a golden ball and lived out the rest of her life as a petulant herring. There was another who fled from her spouse and children to join a circus, first as a lion tamer and subsequently (after a local magician known as Arbadac the Bumbler caused an inadvertent accident during a coughing fit at a performance he attended) as the lion. The fairy celebrated each malicious accomplishment with chocolate bonbons and grew quite plump.