Fairy Tale Review: The Violet Issue #3

FAIRY TALE REVIEW

The Violet Issue

EDITOR

Kate Bernheimer

ASSISTANT EDITORS

Alex Chambers

Ivy Grimes

Christopher Hellwig

Andy Johnson

Michael Lee

Laurence Ross

UNDERGRADUATE EDITORIAL ASSISTANTS

Jesse Holmes

Amanda Johnson

MANUSCRIPT EDITOR

Tara Goedjen

WEB EDITOR

Brian Oliu

ADVISORY BOARD

Maria Tatar, Harvard University

Marina Warner, University of Essex

Jack Zipes, University of Minnesota

COVER ART (INSIDE FRAME)

Kiki Smith, Born

COURTESY OF THE ARTIST

DESIGNER

J. JOHNSON, DESIGNFARM

A co-publication of Fairy Tale Review Press and The University of Alabama Press.

FAIRY TALE REVIEW

www.fairytalereview.com

Electronic edition © 2015 by Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan 48201. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without formal permission. Manufactured in the United States of America. Originally © 2007 by the University of Alabama Press and published by Fairy Tale Review Press.

The Violet Issue (2007) 978-0-8143-4172-8

FAIRY TALE REVIEW is devoted to contemporary literary fairy tales and hopes to provide an elegant and innovative venue for writers working with the aesthetics and motifs of fairy tales. How can fairy tales help us to go where it is we are going, like Jean Cocteau’s magical horse? We hope to discover. Please know that Fairy Tale Review is not devoted to any particular school of writing, but rather to original work that in its very own way is imbued with fairy tales.

In Memoriam

Sarah Hannah

1966–2007

Please, what’s that? asked the princess.

A spindle, my dear, said the old woman, who hadn’t heard of the fairy’s curse.

May I see? the princess asked. As she reached out, she cut her finger on the spindle. She fell, unconscious, to the floor.

Help! called the old woman. All the king’s servants came running. They tried frantically to revive the princess. They put cold linen to her head, ammonia to her nose, rose water on her wrists and brow. Nothing helped.

When the king saw her, he knew the curse had come true. He gave order to the maids-in-waiting. Soon the Sleeping Beauty lay in her best dress, in a room all tapestried with gold and silver. The magic sleep increased her beauty. Her cheeks and lips were rosy. The soft sound of her breathing showed she wasn’t dead, but sleeping.

—From Sleeping Beauty

Translated by Marie Ponsot

FAIRY TALE REVIEW

The Violet Issue

ANNOTATED TABLE OF CONTENTS

KATE BERNHEIMER

Editor’s Note

At an early age, children are weaned on the marvelous, and later on they fail to retain a sufficient virginity of mind to enjoy fairy tales, Andre Breton wrote in 1924. There are fairy tales to be written for adults, he continued. Fairy tales almost blue. Violet flowers are often described as almost-blue, which is how I chose this color; or almost how.

KIM ADDONIZIO

Snow White: The Huntsman’s Story

I took out my knife and held her head

back. She closed her eyes. A deer

crossed the clearing, stopped

and turned. I thought

it watched me

I think it watches me still . . .

DON MEE CHOI

The Tower

No one spoke to her

but she married anyway.

She loved her bedroom, her tower.

She slept alone on a mattress

covered in Ziploc garbage bags.

LUCY CORIN

A Woman with a Gardener

I’m with the caterers, a one-time job, a borrowed bow tie, old sneakers I’ve spray lacquered black. It was that or heels. Fifty bucks, four hours.

TRACY DAUGHERTY

The Sailor Who Drowned in the Desert

The Sunday service had just ended. Father Thomas had prayed, again, for a budget influx to fix the sanctuary door, which was old and splintered with rusty hinges.

ESPIDO FREIRE

Irlanda: Chapter One

Translated by Toshiya Kamei

Sagrario died in May after much suffering. She was buried after a service at the packed church. Many flowers lay at her grave during the first week, but they soon disappeared.

SARAH HANNAH

Three Poems

Seems like she just keeps running through her woods

Grasping: violet, bramble, thatch, stumped utterly.

LILY HOANG

from Changing: A Novella

Mother with her silence listening to Father

& he with his hardness & his stubbornness

& his anger & Mother pretending calm by

caging tongue behind teeth & not speaking

& there is no little calmness in our home.

ANNA MARIA HONG

Cin City

In the dumb kingdom of fear and trembling

the person with the see-through slipper knew

enough to split before the other one

KIM HYESOON

The Eye of the Cyclone

Translated by Don Mee Choi

A poplar tree shakes its wet hair

In front of a mental hospital in Ch’Đngyangni

Maybe the night wind is blowing—

the wind woven with the crazy birds’ hair

JEFFREY LEVINE

Two Poems

There was a swift, shy, confident, anxious kiss

similar to a first kiss. The delicacy

of the first kiss after the resurrection.

LISA OLSTEIN

Four Poems

We are ringed by hills. I’ve taken to burying almost anything that dies—spiders, mice, birds I find in the road. This goes against local custom; here they burn.

DAVID PETRUZELLI

Abandoned House

You heard it so many times

you began to believe you were there

and of course you were there

always going inside alone

NATANIA ROSENFELD

The Minder

My minder accompanies me everywhere I go, on errands of tedium and excursions of fun—especially on excursions of fun.

AURELIE SHEEHAN

Small Animal

Sara herself did not know the people throwing the party, but she went to the house in the woods anyway.

RICHARD SIKEN

Fryderyk Zajac

Gently, gently, with a voluntary kindness, the hand does the work because the world needs to be touched. There is a button, and there is a shoulder, and there is a darkness, and there is something on the other side.

KIERAN SUCKLING

Frogs

The suspect was not your average maggot-looking dope dealer on the corner. At least that’s what the police say. It was 1994, and he was arrested for possession of bufotenine, a Schedule 1 drug under the California Controlled Substances Act. The drug in question came in the form of four toads—Hanz, Franz, Peter, and Brian—that the suspect intended to smoke.

LEE UPTON

Three Poems

Even if he was a bull angel

a land whale, a million tumblers of blubber

a horned prevaricator

it took dirty tricks to get him.

JULIE MARIE WADE

Maidenhead

It all begins with Red. She was a good girl, couldn’t have been more than twelve or thirteen, nothing on her mind but an innocent visit to Grandmother’s house. Problem with the child isn’t that she’s vain but that she’s vulnerable—or so the story instructs us to believe.

Contributor Notes

Acknowledgments

Announcement

KIM ADDONIZIO

Snow White: The Huntsman’s Story

I took out my knife and held her head

back. She closed her eyes. A deer

crossed the clearing, stopped

and turned. I thought

it watched me,

I think it watches me still . . .

I swore an oath:

to follow orders, without mercy

or pleasure. Even the part

you think might have been pleasure—

She wasn’t a creamy girl. She wasn’t

a girl at all. She was my assignment.

When I took the lung and liver

they were warm. I brought them

bloody in a bag to the queen,

who thanked me and mentioned a medal.

That night I left my quarters,

crouched in the weeds and got sick.

Think what you like:

that I spared her, that she sang

while keeping house for seven little men.

Believe in the apple, the glass coffin

without its covering flag,

where she lay

as perfectly preserved as Eva Peron

until the prince came to carry her away.

Of course he didn’t carry her;

the servants did. And when they stumbled

over a tree stump—

if you believe the story—the piece of apple,

caught in her throat, popped out,

a magical Heimlich.

I can see it so clearly now:

she sits up, the prince takes

her soft little hand, and the evil queen

trades her Ferragamos for cast iron sneakers.

And I remember my place in the story.

I let the girl go

into those fabled woods, in winter,

while the snow fell around us,

white on her black hair,

white on her blue Aryan eyes,

white on her pretty, open mouth.

DON MEE CHOI

The Tower

No one spoke to her

but she married anyway.

She loved her bedroom, her tower.

She slept alone on a mattress

covered in Ziploc garbage bags.

Her blue suitcase was packed

and ready to go.

At her wedding, she’d stayed

solemn behind her veil.

She gave her husband a ring

then let go of his hand.

Still no one spoke to her, so

she sat next to a photographer

and drank her champagne.

Later she entered a toilet booth

and watched the water swirl,

go down, then come up again.

She preferred her bedroom

where she could lament alone

and wipe the dust off her blue suitcase.

Her husband was normal and distant.

Goodhearted, he liked to fuck.

She said to him, No one speaks to me.

Then she went into her bedroom

and locked her dress, the door.

That night she laughed while

straightening the garbage bags

on her mattress. She knew joy,

she knew Freud. She thought

her hands were sleeping. They

touched neither man nor woman.

LUCY CORIN

A Woman with a Gardener

I’m with the caterers, a one-time job, a borrowed bow tie, old sneakers I’ve spray lacquered black. It was that or heels. Fifty bucks, four hours.

White turned rails swoop up the lawn and curve around the verandah. What’s a verandah? It’s what I think I’m seeing. There’s a funny white statue of a lithe angel holding a lamp at the walkway entrance, and then later, up nearer the house where the stairs start toward the entrance, nothing you could call a stoop, a baby one, what do you call it, a cherub? Like going