Fairy Tale Review: The Mauve Issue #11

FAIRY TALE REVIEW

The Mauve Issue

FOUNDER & EDITOR

Kate Bernheimer, University of Arizona

MANAGING EDITORS

Laura I. Miller, University of Arizona

Thomas Mira y Lopez, University of Arizona

PROSE EDITOR

Joel Hans, University of Arizona

POETRY EDITOR

Jon Riccio, University of Arizona

ADVISORY BOARD

Donald Haase, Wayne State University

Maria Tatar, Harvard University

Jack Zipes, University of Minnesota

EDITORIAL ASSISTANTS

Sylvia Chan, Jarrett Eakins, Andrea Francis, Kendra Mullison, Matthew Schmidt, William Slattery, Sara Wolfe Vaughan, University of Arizona; Elka Weber, Mills College

UNDERGRADUATE INTERNS

Kelsey Blackman, Katelyn Canez, Nola Christopher-Meziab, Jared Hughes, Zane Johnson, Catherine Walker, University of Arizona

ORIGINAL PRINT DESIGN

J. Johnson, DesignFarm

COVER ART (INSIDE FRAME)

Kiki Smith, Born

COURTESY OF THE ARTIST

LAYOUT

Tara Reeser

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 © 2015 by Wayne State University Press.

The Mauve Issue (2015) 978-0-8143-4180-3

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.

Mauve is the past; the future is mauve.

—Shelley Jackson

FAIRY TALE REVIEW

The Mauve Issue

ANNOTATED TABLE OF CONTENTS

THOMAS MIRA Y LOPEZ

Editor’s Note

Mauve, most famously, is an accident.

MATT BELL

The Painted Sisters

Because in this story the older and the younger were again sisters, both brave with tattoos.

EMMA BOLDEN

In Every Tale About Hunger

He slices the soles off his shoes

to give his feet the gift of ice, a slow burn to numb.

Above him, geese gather like a bad hem. They urge

him: northward, north.

WYATT BONIKOWSKI

Wind-Up Toy

My mother sat on her grandfather’s lap at the mahogany desk in his study and he showed her his collection of tin wind-up toys. It was her happiest memory of him, she told me.

TRACI BRIMHALL

Plantation Landscape with a Mob of Unwanted Children and Pollinating Rubber Trees

Little knights, little queens, little overseers

of this squalid kingdom. In the dry season

the river retreats, and rocks reveal the faces

of everyone who’s gone missing since the coup.

LUCAS CHURCH

The Whole Thing up Till Now

When the two men showed up, Emma panicked and pushed Jack into the closest hiding place, an old wooden chest at the far end of the kitchen. She let the lid slam and lock.

CLAIRE CRONIN

What Haunts

The Mauve Issue Poetry Contest Winner as Judged by Ilya Kaminsky

Once a woman was disfigured by a story

told only through a series of red masks

LENNY DELLAROCCA

Fables

I collect windows in a bottle, and as you might expect, windows are the same everywhere. Mostly.

MONICA DRAKE

Love Story

An Essay

Last night a very intoxicated older man decided to set up on our porch.

MOLLY FAERBER

And Also in the Sea

The widow had taken her in that first day, impressed by the way she could reach unflinching into the barrel and draw out the lobster whose meat was sweetest. Beguiled by her fingers that coaxed the creatures to sleep before she slipped them into steaming broth. Like carrying children to bed.

MAJDA GAMA

British Museum, Neolithic Deer Antler Headdress

Here is age, dim word, the warp of it

In a glass case of remains from a time

Of flint and bone, when tongue trumped ink

Skin and skull held words

ELIZABETH GROSS

Antelopes of Thera

Famous, unlucky

the goat fell through centuries

and centuries of volcanic ash.

Archaeologists followed in awe.

KIRSTEN HOLT

Selkie

In this city, everything drowns:

Wedding dresses stick to the knees, libraries soak

to the third shelf, compost floats like paper

boats, and daughters are named after hurricanes.

CHRISTINA KLOESS

Binnorie

On the last day of winter, Vikrum watches Born Free in his bedroom. The movie is showing on cable, which means the connection is a little fuzzy. Vikrum steams up his glasses when he cries.

MARY LAVALLEE

Victor Vale

I meet the protagonist outside a coffee shop in Prague, which is a city I have never been to. He orders coffee, thick with sweetened condensed milk. I wonder if there is some sort of significance in this.

ALICIA REBECCA MYERS

Legs

The ocean was popular and nearby removed

from her like an ablation her grandmother

warned that she would be removed from it her body

SEQUOIA NAGAMATSU

The Peach Boy

And so came the day when Momotaro, whose parents found him inside of a peach, grew tired of adventures and settled down with a samurai’s daughter.

HELEN PHILLIPS

One of Us Will Be Happy; It’s Just a Matter of Which One

Once upon a time and for all time, a Queen and King sat on twin thrones. They were young and beloved, this Queen and King, for she was famous across the land as a wife who valued above all else the happiness of her husband and he was famous across the land as a husband who valued above all else the happiness of his wife.

TIM RAYMOND

All Our Children

My Aunt Sarah used to say that Tina Wallace has so many kids because she’s a Catholic, and I didn’t get it until later, last year, when I turned fifteen. Tina Wallace has a husband, somewhere, and she has five girls and four boys at home. Aunt Sarah is a funny person, though she doesn’t laugh when she tells her jokes. To me, that makes her funnier.

CHRISTIAN REES

The Rope-Maker’s Beautiful Daughter

they never love her like a knot

loves a bind   to them loving her is carpentry

lay seven untimely stairs flush

one crook-fingered post true

latch the trick-lip door

ELIZABETH FRANKIE ROLLINS

from Seeking Rubilio

Armed with the Optimists’ List and their Glossary of Fears, the little band marched resolutely towards the darkest part of the woods. They gave up trying to leave a trail. They did not think they’d be coming back.

RICHARD SIKEN

Two Poems

Once, night, unchallenged, extended its dark grace

across the sky. To the credit of the town, the stars

at night had been enough, though sometimes

the townspeople went about bumping their heads

in sleep.

EMILY TEMPLE

Olive

Olive was drilling a hole through her fence.

No, that’s not quite accurate. The carpenter was drilling a hole through Olive’s fence, the fence being a big honking white picket one, the kind you see in advertisements for dryer sheets. Olive was directing.

MAI DER VANG

Two Poems

You told me north water

was not built by virga

but from suicide of the moon.

CALEB WASHBURN

The Man in Your Mouth

Nights I can’t sleep I picture a man carrying me

between his cheeks, his body

exposed in the sun. I picture his chest as its own

horizon

KELLIE WELLS

The Arse End of the World

When Death was born, it was outwardly ambivalent, gelatinous face pursed in indecision, groin smooth and non-committal.

ELISE WINN

Brother and Sister

The Mauve Issue Prose Contest Winner as Judged by Sarah Shun-lien Bynum

My poor brother: he was born a rat, a snake, a wolf, a roach. Our mother tried and tried for another child like me, a plain and smart child, a resourceful child, but it didn’t work out. Each time she birthed him, she cried out in terror and put him back, but he came out a different kind of disappointing every time.

REBECCA WOLFF

Myshka, or The Unknowable

You’re bored but you don’t want to read. The mother sat with her daughter in a comfortable proximity. It was a warm spring, cooler inside the house than out this afternoon, so the mother had lit a fire in the stove in the middle room where the pale sun bypassed the windows.

RACHEL ZAVECZ

Six

Perfection: he creates them six electric children organized into two rows by three Their reflective bodies detailed silver etching at the fingers throat and testicles

Contributor Notes

EDITOR’S NOTE

Mauve, most famously, is an accident. William Henry Perkin, the 18-year-old English chemist charged by his professor with synthesizing quinine, found a purple residue in the midst of his experiments and had the good sense to take note of the leftover pigment. So began the color mauve in 1856, the world’s first synthetic dye.

Kate Bernheimer, our professor, asked a group of her students to conduct an experiment of her own. We were to assemble The Mauve Issue and shepherd two inaugural contests through their various stages. It was an adventure, to say the least, not only because some of us didn’t even know how to pronounce the word mauve. Although we also didn’t synthesize anything antimalarial, we ended up with what any good experiment stumbles upon: the happy mistake, the alluring and seductive accident. Move through this issue however you like—wade, tear, rubberneck, walk—and you will find the unexpected resonances within that we did not originally set out to encounter. You will find the pieces exert a thrall as seductive and serendipitous as the color under which they gather.

This was an experiment, but also a generosity on Kate’s part. She didn’t just invite us to a seat in her world, but over the past two years, her efforts have funded a number of University of Arizona graduate students to serve as editors with Fairy Tale Review. The fairy godmother analogy is passé, so we’ll simply say that we have dined on fairy tales. They’ve been our bread, bottle, and butter. Though we might turn back into tuberous roots in a short while, they’ll have to yank us out by our hair first.

Mauve is a fashion. It is a color for vestment, a color to wear. Many people confuse mauve with magenta. Do not do so. Mauve has many more intricacies of blue and grey.

Mauve is also fashioned. It is a new word with old roots. The color’s earlier incarnations—Tyrian purple (given for the shade of Roman emperors’ cloaks) and aniline purple—were abandoned when, to increase the popularity of Perkin’s dye, its sellers named the color after a French flower called the mallow. Mauve is a marketing tool. We hope you forgive us that.

When we consult the dictionary, it tells us that the mallow is a herbaceous plant with hairy stems and pink or purple flowers. Its fruit comes shaped in wedges and so it is nicknamed the cheese plant. Mallows are grown as ornamentals, and mallows are grown as edibles. Some are for looking at, others are for eating. We want this issue to be both—a mallow, a marsh, a cake that defies old proverbs. Gaze at it. Eat it too. Consume, ravage, devour it. Why, go ahead and try it on, walk around in it as long as you like. Either way, we promise you’ll look ravishing.

What do we do with stories if not dress in them? We suit up, parade around, show our friends, and see how long we can remain stitched in their skin. And what do we seek of stories if not that thrilling, sexy moment when we wonder just what would happen, however dangerous, if we stayed sown up there forever?

—Thomas Mira y Lopez

Managing Editor

MATT BELL

The Painted Sisters

Because in this story the older and the younger were again sisters, both brave with tattoos, spun across their collarbones and forearms, hips and breasts, and so it was easy to misunderstand why they hid their new bodies within their skirts, sleeved their thighs in patterned tights, crossed cautious arms across bright and buttoned cardigans. The sisters went unsweatered only in certain parlors, where they paid illustrated men to ink holy histories across their bodies—birds among the lions, lady patron saints, more feathers—and then at night when they touched their own flesh, or else with invitation each other’s, tracing the raw outlines of that work, the painted feathers and the fur. Later they spoke boldly across the black room, spoke the whole of secrets hidden now in plain but hieroglyphic sight: the aggression of a false uncle, a tutor with hungry hands, the way every boy they’d ever loved had turned out to be a wolf. The ink was like an armor but it was not enough. For every kind of boy it scared, it invited another. With their voices the sisters went looking for strength in the darkness; when apart they cried out each other’s names, the true names known only to each other. When they awoke it was often to find themselves in the same bed, entangled, all their inkiness touching, leaning against, learning to last.

.   .   .

Because before the abandonment their parents were frequently absent, so that the sisters were often alone except for each other. And because they believed it would protect them—and later restore them—they had first become such good girls: Remember their spotless rooms, their perfect handwriting, spun across homework completed early and without error. Remember their manners at the dinner table, their demureness with the spoons. Remember the tasteful colors of their early paintings, the teal and the taupe. Remember as they aged the way they learned to walk so erect, chests over hips, legs lengthening atop the squatness of first heels, each step following the last, as if balancing atop the beam. Such good girls, these sisters, everyone agreed, not just the older but the younger too—but despite their belief, goodness alone was no barrier from harm.

.   .   .

Because even as children they had loved to frighten each other with loss, they often went alone into the unsupervised night of the city, treaded the streets as far from home as they dared. Theirs was a special kind of fright then, the safest trembling: In the oldest tales, breaking a prohibition never resulted in lasting punishment. In the fairy stories, mistakes were the path to adventure. But these were not the oldest tales.

.   .   .

Because when the older desired to master the violin, then the younger was left home alone during her lessons. And while somewhere in the city the older made the first unlearned scrapes of bow across string, at their own home there was a knock on the tall glass of the sliding door, the glass that led to the shared backyard between apartments, where for the younger there waited a man in a robe, its rough fabric bachelor-grey, barely tied. The first of the suitors.

Because in another telling the suitor wore the white square across his throat. And in yet another he was the music teacher, and it was the older who was first exposed to danger.

But not in this story. In this story it was the younger who suffered first, who found the suitors waiting, already comfortable in the dark, the rebuttal to the girls’ belief that they would not be punished for their bravery.

.   .   .

Because the sisters wore what they liked and because the suitors liked this too: first ribbed tights, of mango and canary, robin’s egg and fuzzy wuzzy, and then later the older wore black thigh-highs, the younger flesh-colored stockings. The color nude, as if skin were a shade. Because the suitors convinced themselves the sisters wore what they wore for the suitors’ attention, affection, desire. Because after the first harrowing, the younger could not see any other colors, then the sisters redrew their wardrobe, choosing only black and white and reds, a solidarity of patterns, muted polka dots, tearing each new outfit out of a sketchbook of blank pages, from which any cloth they desired might be summoned. They tried to address their problems with coverings of new clothes and with sophisticated style, pledged never to be younger than, less than anyone else again. Remember their hair dyed, their skin inked, their eyelids mascaraed and their lips painted, their shapes swathed and sweatered, the first tattoos—and remember all of their costumes were insufficient to hide the younger’s sadness, a great welling grown within them both, for each a tree planted as always, planted with a seed.

.   .   .

Because they were asking for it, the suitors said. Because the sisters had not said no, they said. Because they had not said no enough. Because of the color and shape of their dresses. Because of the boldness of their makeup, its smoked allure. Because of their scent, the perfumes applied and the perfumes made. A pheromone irresistible. Because as teenagers they had fallen asleep in the suitors’ beds, in the beds of the suitors’ friends, in the