Fairy Tale Review: The Grey Issue #8
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Getting lost is one of the most widely used narrative vehicles of all time. Once characters become lost, they can stumble upon anything—it’s a light-speed bullet train between credibility and suspension of disbelief. Falling down a rabbit hole or stepping off the trail in a labyrinthine wood can transport a character to another world entirely in a manner of seconds. When a protagonist starts to get lost, something exciting is about to happen.
Kate Bernheimer
Kate Bernheimer has been called “one of the living masters of the fairy tale” (Tin House). She is the author of a novel trilogy and the story collections Horse, Flower, Bird and How a Mother Weaned Her Girl from Fairy Tales, and the editor of four anthologies, including the World Fantasy Award winning and bestselling My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales and xo Orpheus: 50 New Myths. She is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Arizona in Tucson, where she teaches fairy tales and creative writing.
Read more from Kate Bernheimer
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Fairy Tale Review - Kate Bernheimer
FAIRY TALE REVIEW
The Grey Issue
FOUNDER & EDITOR
Kate Bernheimer
GUEST EDITOR, THE GREY ISSUE
Alissa Nutting, John Carroll University
ADVISORY BOARD
Donald Haase, Wayne State University
Maria Tatar, Harvard University
Marina Warner, University of Essex, UK
Jack Zipes, University of Minnesota
ASSISTANT & CONTRIBUTING EDITOR
Timothy Schaffert, University of Nebraska–Lincoln
ASSISTANT EDITORS
Tara Goedjen, University of Wollongong
Drew Krewer, University of Arizona
ORIGINAL PRINT DESIGN
J. Johnson, Design Farm
COVER ART (INSIDE FRAME)
Kiki Smith, Born
COURTESY OF THE ARTIST
LAYOUT
Ameliah Tawlks, Tara Reeser
English Department’s Publications Unit, Illinois State University
A publication of Fairy Tale Review 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 © 2012 by Fairy Tale Review Press.
The Grey Issue (2012) 978-0-8143-4177-3
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.
You see, I don’t know any stories. None of the lost boys knows any stories.
—Peter Pan by J. M. Barrie
FAIRY TALE REVIEW
The Grey Issue
ANNOTATED TABLE OF CONTENTS
ALISSA NUTTING
Guest Editor’s Note
Getting lost is the price of admission for discoveries good and bad, and some lessons cost far more than others.
SETH ABRAMSON
Three Poems
I smell in the deep of a sack
an unfortunate boy but for the eyelashes
MATT BELL
The Fingerling (an excerpt)
Not an arm, but an arm bud. Not a leg, but a leg bud, a proto-knee.
MOLLY BENDALL
Two Poems
Leaves evaporate kindly and don’t trouble our alphabet game.
WYATT BONIKOWSKI
Little Man
I could not find myself among the voices around me.
BRITTANY CAVALLARO
Girl-King (iv)
The last fire took your tiny house
and your ermine mother and the tassels
MAILE CHAPMAN
Sanctuary
I hear her laughing at the heart of the maze, and though I walk every path of every year, I can never find the center.
MIMI CHUBB
Tears
In the corners of Tom’s eyes, where before there had only ever been dark strands of slime and dark bits of sand, there were two perfectly shaped teardrops of the purest gold.
TARA GOEDJEN
(Because Children Are Still Brave)
I protest and they kick my cage.
SARA GONG
The Mask
The children liked to speculate upon whether or not the blood was real.
CAROL GUESS & DANIELA OLSZEWSKA
How to Be and Look Like a Mean Girl While in Girl Scouts or How to Make a Bullet Belt
Mash burnt marshmallows into bullet pellets; paste to your waist. Wait. Finger pricks = blood sisters or saints.
AIREANNE HJELLE
girl you won’t remember
You bared your teeth in joy and slept while spinning.
DESIREE HOLMAN
Three Images
ASHLEY ELIZABETH HUDSON
Elegy for a Child Trapped Underground
didn’t they always say to stay put, shocked pale, in one place?
SHANE JONES
Remy and the Crystals
Remy once believed each pet on the dog’s head produced one crystal inside.
JESSICA JOSLIN
Three Sculptures
KRYSTAL LANGUELL
Your Blood Like an Animal
your seizure ghost your jaw clamp and tongue blood pouring from mouth ghost
STACEY LEVINE
Illustration by David Lasky
The Castaways (excerpt)
Each day had a sameness, a soothing constancy parallel to the disinterest of the earth.
OKSANA MARAFIOTI
Krivoye Lake
What can a fisherman’s son do, Ivan thought, if not try and better his station?
ADAM MCOMBER
History of a Saint
Still and white, she looked much like the landscape seen through the icy window set high on the museum wall.
CHRISTOPHER MERKNER
Tomtens
His mother had died; his father was plainly alone and poor.
BENJAMIN NADLER
The Upper Harz
The underground people—that tiny race
who dwell in the caves, who stuff beehives
with manure that is really gold
ANDI OLSEN, LANCE OLSEN & DAVIS SCHNEIDERMAN
Three Pieces
The teeth’s faith itself may become a vacuole of tiny screams.
DAVID JAMES POISSANT
Fox King
The girls knew then that they must run.
GRETCHEN STEELE PRATT
Vertigo
The man on the pillar has bare feet the color of a bruise.
IMAD RAHMAN
Petty
Children who look like you,
he said, this time softly and like someone on TV, need all the luck they can get.
MATTHEW SALESSES
A Korean Fairy Tale
During the time when people were still being born from eggs, but after the time when animals could turn into people, there were born twins.
KEVIN SAMPSELL
Telephone Girl
Sometimes she winced at the things I said.
J. A. TYLER
[the second house]
An opposite side where flowers are glaciers, where foxes are bears.
LEE UPTON
Escape from the Dark Forest
The cat uttered a cry—mechanical sounding, like a tiny door opening, a tiny door on the other side of the earth.
LAURA VAN DEN BERG
Cannibals
My brother and I never asked the cannibals where their meals came from.
ROB WALSH
The Dog
They hadn’t ever killed a dog as a favor before.
JILLIAN WEISE
Elegy for Zahra Baker
It is weird that I have all these legs in the attic but they would not let me keep the real leg.
KELLIE WELLS
Ever After
When the child is father of the man, there are, if you ask me, two people too many in the room.
ELIZABETH CLARK WESSEL
Three Poems
Ants have made a home
in my chest.
DEBORAH WOODARD
Two Poems
I will buy your eyes and give you a fine pair of glass ones for free.
JOHN DERMOT WOODS
Whistleblower
Contributor Notes
GUEST EDITOR’S NOTE
When we speak of grey as a location, placing a thing into a grey area, the color represents territory where the definite becomes lost. Grey lets us know that the truth is not always clear; even the most well-known paths can turn strange when a low grey cloud of fog rolls in. Grey is an act of subtraction, the loss of sun, joy, and color. Regrets are the natural property of grey hairs, said Dickens. Since grey is a symbol for the loss of youth, it seems a fitting issue for a theme about youth who are lost.
Getting lost is one of the most widely used narrative vehicles of all time. Once characters become lost, they can stumble upon anything—it’s a light-speed bullet train between credibility and suspension of disbelief. Falling down a rabbit hole or stepping off the trail in a labyrinthine wood can transport a character to another world entirely in a manner of seconds. When I’m reading and the protagonist starts to get lost, my fingers press against the pages a little more tightly; I know that, positive or negative, something exciting is about to happen.
Lost
has always been a central element in my life. I am a misplacer and a forgetter. A wrong-turner. A daydreamer. In school, teachers always marveled at how I could get lost without even leaving my desk. Earth-to-Alissa,
they’d say. Please come back and join us in reality.
I did not frequently accept their invitations. I preferred being lost in my head. I liked what I found in there. Not much has changed; if I’ve fallen deep into thought while looking at a building as I’m waiting to cross the street, it’s not uncommon for well-meaning people to tap me on the shoulder. You look lost,
they’ll smile. Do you need directions?
When I was very young, I was convinced that I didn’t forget where I’d put things—instead, if a possession went missing, it was because the world had taken it from me. I was okay with this thievery only because it seemed to be a barter system: if a small feather I’d picked up on a walk later disappeared from my pocket, when I went to search for it I’d come across a new treasure, like the dried carcass of a wasp.
In the fairy tales I picked up as soon as I could read, I saw this trade-off echoed on a much deeper level. The lost children of fairy tales broach life’s most painful truths with great honesty—an honesty that felt respectful to me as a child reader, and attracted me to return to the tales again and again as I grew, and grew to understand. Alone, disoriented, vulnerable, we will encounter wonder and horror. Getting lost is the price of admission for discoveries good and bad, and some lessons cost far more than others.
Thank you so much for finding this lost issue in your hands right now. It’s time for me to go. Please turn the page and lose me, lose yourself, lose track of time. You have important things to go find.
—A.N.
Note to Readers: all visual art in The Grey Issue appears in greyscale, to honor the theme.
SETH ABRAMSON
Three Poems
Paracosmics
They come from the woods three by three
and I pass the time a world or two
watching.
The great brown foxes’ bulb-dark noses bob
as they pass by
on two legs in black masks, burlap sacks
over their shoulders. Inside
the children. I smell in the deep of a sack
an unfortunate boy but for the eyelashes
who’s dreaming he’s in his mother’s womb
as she’s raped
by her work in the laundries.
Is this enough for you
he calls
and I see he means me. You just keep on,
boy, three by three as before.
With a clever little knife another one makes
a hole
and his eyes starpoke
from the black. Stars are just endless knots
says his fox
and sews his sack up. But we were speaking
of heaven and hard-ons,
that’s clear. An unfortunate boy but for all
those lashes, and yes I suppose
that does it for me. I forget to get a name
but I do shake the hand
of every passing burglar
but one. Him I roll because he’s took a girl
and we don’t. We won’t. She worms pinkly
onto the grass beside the track
and asks me to stay with her and she means
always. She’s asleep before I can answer her
with the one word
that makes this end and be like it never was.
The Better Kids
They cloudbank
in the windows, single-armedly brought up
from tiny hearts of meat
to tiny raised fists, out of snowed-up ways
where wolves in fantasies of histories
are nursing boys,
and where boys are pounding uphill
with a killing speed. Up into themselves
they launch themselves, up into monasteries
black behind the capes
of nightwatchmen, up into cymballic orgies
of women and men, half-women half-men
behind a seventh-story façade
the boys will not be joining them behind.
Growing lakes
beneath their feet. Growing agonies into
men, and meetings men will join like circled
cinder-blocks—
and unlike hunting parties, but like hunters’
foaming calico horses
some men are the men who don’t survive it.
And the girls are even worse at it than this—
the sad sex of sad boys.
Naughty Boys Well and Truly Punished
Beneath the trunk of limbs he keeps
a photograph of Adam and her
in which the two stand jowl to jowl
and they are naked
but confused. Nothing fits.
There is a second frame in an inset
in the first
in which he and she are bleeding
in an interesting way. There’s a limb
in the locked trunk
that attaches to similar effect. I am
at the beginning of things
and my blood
is well and truly concealed,
he thinks. He would snap each limb,
one by one,
but it’s not Friday
yet. Every boy’s blood is every boy’s,
so I cannot hide long
he thinks. But I also cannot bear her
seeing me. That makes it hard.
And so he turns away
and every boy on the block turns away
and Adam in his colorless garden
turns away
and every Friday up and down streets
and streets off streets
they bend their small willing bodies
in interesting ways
when she comes to the door and says
it’s happening.
MATT BEL
The Fingerling (an excerpt)
I had finished building the house, or nearly so, but we moved in both too fast and too early, before I had completed the furnishings, even before I had right-hinged all the doors, and in response to my worries my wife said there was no trouble, that she would finish what I had mostly made. Always I had loved her singing, had been moved and changed by its sound, but now it became something else, stronger upon the dirt, made more capable where it was the only such voice: With some power never exhibited throughout the days of their courtship, she began to sing into being all that I had not yet fully crafted, and from her voice there came to be a sofa and chair, then a linen closet packed with linen, a cupboard full of clay dishes. Our marital bed was already made, hewn from hard boards I had cut from the woods, but it was my wife that weaved our mattress, not from feather down and cloth but from song, and though the object worked the same as one made still I knew there was some difference, and also that all this aggressed upon the realm of my dominion. Always I had planned to be the maker of things, steward of artifice, and yet here she was, able to call from within what I had to cull from without, and in my anger I tested my wife’s powers, asked her to make various objects which I desired for the house, certain tools and utensils harder to craft, and also something else, something just for me: Some amount of steel, fashioned into traps, with which I might perhaps venture into the woods, intent after the fur and the meat of the small animals I had seen living among the bush and the bramble.
My wife frowned but did not deny me. In those days we refused each other nothing, or nearly so, certainly not the differences in our dreams of house, of home, of family, of husband and wife, father and mother, child and child, and of all the right occupations we would each take to occupy all of those roles, and so in the yard behind our house, she sang into existence the means of my trapping, a complement to my fishing tackle, the tools of my previous employment, which I had last worked when we lived on the other side of the lake, past the mountains beyond. With axe and saw, I built for myself a wagon into which to load my traps, but for a long time after I did not put them to work, because it was fishing I was best built for, and it was fish I wished most to eat, and so from the lake I at first took only such numbers as were necessary for our table, and while I fished my wife planted a garden behind the house, where she thought to grow some few tubers, some sparse assortment of herbs. From this simple existence sprouted the first days of our life together in that house, the first weeks and months, the first year, and at the end of that year we had much of what we needed for each other, for each other’s happiness. And yet still I was impatient, for it was a family I wanted most, that I wanted from her, my wife.
. . .
The earliest signs of my wife’s first pregnancy were attended with much joy and celebrating, and after some months had passed I put aside the implements of my fishing and with my hatchet returned to the woods to cut more lumber from its trees, so that I might craft both crib and bassinet, then a table for changing the diapers of our coming child, then all the other furnitures necessary for the rearing of that expected infant. As I completed each piece, my wife trailed after, supporting her belly with one hand as she raised and lowered her diaphragm, bellowed her lungs to sing a song over their recently-finished forms, taking the rude shapes I had made and adding to their function some ornate flourishes, prettifications: Now the bassinet was filigreed with ornate leaves, now the changing table was guarded on each corner not by a simple post but by a wooden bird carved as detailed as any ever born from egg. I marveled over the exactness of her touchless craft, the way that the syllables of her song-speech could produce such fine beauty from what I had already made, but when I was done marveling, I maddened, for who was she to change what I had created for our child?
Everything I made she improved, but it was not improvement I craved, only title, control, mastery, and now there was my wife always there to take from me what was first mine, and as she presented what she had done, there I was sure I saw a smile upon the pale shape of her face, another bright song already held behind her lips’ redness.
. . .
The dirt’s wettest season swelled, and then its hottest burst the world to bloom, and with those seasons my wife swelled too, expanded in both belly and breast until the leaves fell, and afterward there was no more growth for my wife either, instead only some stalling of the flesh gathering within her. Even before it was obvious that there would be no baby for us, even then my wife began to cry, to sing sadder songs that dimmed the lights of our already fuel-poor gas-lamps, or else that broke some dishes stored safely in our cupboards. Her frustrations made melodic, they darkened my moods too, and soon there were the first cross words between us, and for many evenings I went out the back of the house and sat in her garden, staring out its dirt to my wagon full of traps, still unused as the day she first sung them. Their sharp secrets gleamed in the starlight, but I did not move to touch their shapes, not yet. I was not then a trapper, despite the availability of necessary tools, nor was I to be a father, despite the earlier hopes of my wife’s first tumid months. How I angered