Fierce Fairytales Read online

  Copyright

  Copyright © Nikita Gill 2018

  Illustrations © Nikita Gill 2018

  Cover design and illustration by Tomás Almeida

  Cover copyright © 2018 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  Author photograph © Peace Ofure

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  First published in Great Britain in 2018 by Trapeze, an imprint of The Orion Publishing Group Ltd.

  First U.S. Edition: September 2018

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  Library of Congress Control Number: 2018948935

  ISBN: 978-0-316-42074-7 (trade paperback); 978-0-316-42073-0 (ebook)

  E3-20180817-JV-PC

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  A Universal Truth

  Once Upon a Time

  Once Upon a Time II

  For the Cynic

  Somewhere Across the Universe, This Intergalactic Fairytale Is Being Told

  A Tale of Two Sisters

  The Fable in Thermodynamics

  The Woods Reincarnated

  Whispers from the Wicked Woods

  The Miller’s Daughter

  Half of Rumpelstiltskin Seeks Redemption

  Why Tinkerbell Quit Anger Management

  Boy Lost

  Wendy

  Child’s Play

  The Red Wolf

  Cinderella’s Mother Sends Her a Message from Heaven

  The Stepmother’s Tale

  Lessons in Surviving Long-term Abuse

  Fairy Godmother

  Two Misunderstood Stepsisters

  Trapped

  Badroulbadour

  The Shoemaker’s Son

  Scheherazade the Clever

  Wonderland Villain

  The Hatter

  How a Hero Becomes a Villain

  Beauty and Bravery

  Cry Wolf

  Jack’s Fable Unfalsified

  Goldilocks

  The Three Times You Rebuilt Your House-shaped Heart

  Take Back Your Fairytale

  The Dragon Witch’s Daughter

  Waking Beauty

  Seven

  The Evil Queen

  Gretel After Hansel

  Hansel’s Letter to His Son

  Belladonna

  The Little Mermaid’s Mother Speaks to Her Unborn Baby

  The Sea Witch’s Lament

  An Older and Wiser Little Mermaid Speaks

  Lessons from the Not-So-Wicked Witch for Dorothy

  Rapunzel, Rapunzel

  Rapunzel’s Note Left for Mother Gothel

  Baba Yaga

  Why the Sun Rises and Sets

  Why the Leaves Change Colour

  Why It Rains

  The Moon Dragon

  The Tale Weaver

  The Modern-day Fairytale

  Ode to the Catcaller Down the Street

  The Girl Goes After the Wicked King Who Trapped Her in the Tower

  Pandora’s Mind

  The Trolls (After Shane Koyczan)

  Difficult Damsels

  Hunger: The Darkest Fairytale

  Vengeance Born

  The Art of Emptiness

  The Moral of Your Story

  The Looking Glass

  The Giant’s Daughter

  Charming

  Metamorphosis

  Princess Plain

  Phoenix Blood

  Man Up, Hercules

  Devour Your Monsters

  In Absentia: A Common Curse

  Of Kings and Queens

  Svengali Girl (After Simon Says)

  The Ogre

  Mothers and Daughters

  In the Old Days

  In the Old Days II

  How You Save Yourself

  Nothing Soft About It

  Motherly Advice

  Skeletons in the Garden

  The Shapeshifter

  What’s in a Name

  For All Our Hidden Witches

  Question the Fairytale

  Kiss the Dread

  Four Spells to Keep Inside Your Mouth

  Forest Person

  The Healing

  Happily Ever After

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Nikita Gill

  Newsletters

  For you,

  who has never forgotten

  the magic.

  It wants you to know

  it remembers you too.

  A Universal Truth

  We all have storms and stories

  inside our starmade bodies

  that even the night sky cannot hold.

  This is why we are on this earth;

  to learn how to love and each other,

  to learn how to love and hold ourselves.

  Once Upon a Time

  Once upon a time,

  Matter dreamed up an idea.

  It was a small hopeful dream

  a thought with the wings of the fairy.

  But as with all things full of hope

  it would be terribly difficult to birth.

  Several events needed to come together

  in the millisecond of the time it took to build Earth.

  It depended on a 1 in 102,685,000 chance of existing.

  A 1 in 20,000 chance meeting between two beings.

  An ancestral heritage that goes back 4 billion years

  all the way to single-celled organisms.

  And only then can this idea be so finely crafted

  into a gift with actual presence.

  Imagine how much the universe must have loved

  this thing to make it happen.

  Imagine how many stars gave up their hearts

  to bring this into fluid motion.

  Does it make you curious?

  Make you wonder what could be so marvellous?

  That idea … it was you.

  You are the universe’s fairytale come true.

  Once Upon a Time II

  But the universe never promised

  you this would be easy,

  after all, you are the hero here.

  And heroes are meant

  to be forged golden

  from the blaze.

  It is up to you to rise again

  from the fragmented shards

  your foes left of you.

  You must lift a sword

  with reborn strength and take on

  the demons in your ribcage.

  You must devastate the chains

  every violent person

  has brutally placed on you.

  And you must show them all

  how they were simply

  characters in your story.

>   But you, you are the author

  of this spellbinding tale

  built of hope and bravery.

  Out there may be monsters, my dear.

  But in you still lives the dragon

  you should always believe in.

  For the Cynic

  Our current cosmic address

  is a small flying piece of rubble

  travelling through an endless black void,

  surrounded inexplicably

  by seven other pieces of flying rubble.

  All of these pieces harmoniously

  rotate around the same giant fireball

  without ever crashing into each other,

  or hurtling themselves

  into said fireball.

  And if that isn’t random enough,

  out of all those pieces of rubble

  ours is the only one that sustains

  an environment that gives life

  to billions of different life forms,

  including a multitude

  of flowering plants

  and oxygen-giving trees,

  a plethora of wildlife,

  and eight billion human beings.

  And somehow,

  you still

  genuinely think

  that magic does not exist,

  that fairytales aren’t real,

  that the way people

  find each other

  at just the right time

  at just the right moment

  isn’t the most powerful sorcery.

  Somewhere Across the Universe, This Intergalactic Fairytale Is Being Told

  In the far corner of the Virgo supercluster, a small galaxy called the Milky Way exists, and in one of the further spirals of that galaxy there is said to be a tiny planet called Earth. At a cursory glance, there is nothing seemingly unique about this planet, even though it is simply beautiful, cloaked in calypso blue with an oscillating belt of green. It is, in fact, one of millions like it that live in just this universe.

  The extraordinary thing about this planet though, are the beings that exist on it. They have been through war after war. Empires that promised to burn brighter than their resident star, the sun, and disappeared in the blink of an eye. Savage rulers, dictators have destroyed entire portions of it, and yet … they simply refuse to stop existing, it is like they have this treasured thing within them to keep them surviving, and to keep knowing.

  Look closer now, oh passer-by, look closer at these beings. They are survivors with a sense of awe and curiosity at everything around them. Sometimes they have lost their way, but this is a thing they never seem to lose, because they are so full of potential.

  Promise. This planet may be called Earth, but it should have been called Promise.

  If you do not believe this little story, and dismiss it as a silly old wives’ tale, a thing which cannot possibly exist, then I hope you come upon their legendary message. You see, 40 years ago, these beings sent out a message on a space probe that has travelled 20.5 billion kilometres, hoping to meet one of us in space. In it lies a message, the definition of this entire species, and it reads simply:

  ‘This is a present from a small distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts, and our feelings. We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours.’

  The Voyager is still out there, waiting for someone to come upon it. Maybe that someone is you. Maybe you will remind that species of the greatness that lies in their potential, their promise. Maybe you will be the being that turns that fairytale planet of promise into an intergalactic legend of green and blue.

  A Tale of Two Sisters

  In the beginning, there was oblivion.

  A vastness, and an abyss comprised

  of darkness and nothingness

  … until there were two sisters.

  One was made from the interconnectedness

  of all things, a precipice of stories,

  a treasury of things gone and things to come.

  Her name was Cosmos.

  The other was made from the tricorn

  of darkness, black magic waiting to be born,

  inkwells of feral power and rebel thoughts.

  Her name was Chaos.

  Before they had floated into the abyss,

  as all celestial beings were left to do in the end,

  their father told them to be a binary system,

  to never ever let go of each other.

  He warned them that together they could

  build everything, but apart, nothing could exist.

  So the two came together and imagined a tapestry

  of moving, living stars that inhaled around each other.

  They pictured impossible things like planets

  that help thousands of different beings

  and balls of fire to keep them warm

  and whole atmospheres to help them breathe.

  And this was how the love of two sisters

  wrote the first ever eternal poem into magical

  loving existence. A single poem

  they christened, ‘The Uni-verse’.

  The Fable in Thermodynamics

  The first law of thermodynamics states this:

  ‘energy can neither be created nor destroyed.’

  Which is that everything around us is recycled energy:

  you, me, your dog, those we love and those we avoid.

  Which is to say that the energy that makes us

  is as ancient as the beginning of time itself.

  Which is to say that our bones could have been

  fragmented together from the ashes of the library of Alexandria.

  Which is to say our sinews and spine were crafted from the

  end of a hundred-year-old oak tree and our smiles a comet.

  Which is to say our hearts could be Achilles’ spirit

  when he battled at Troy, bringing his enemies down with it.

  Which is to say, when we feel like life is overwhelming,

  we must remember that we’re just sparks of energy borrowing skin.

  That no matter how much this pain feels everlasting,

  this is just the temporary fabric we are in.

  The Woods Reincarnated

  We traded the woods for high-rises,

  the wolf became the boy next door,

  soft brown eyes and close-lipped smiles

  to hide the flash of fangs instead of teeth.

  The huntsman became the ‘nice’ man

  that happened to live down the street

  whose laugh never quite reached his eyes,

  and the beaten track gets hazy

  between grandmother and beast.

  I wonder where the wildest things go

  when the devilled copse is no longer there.

  When the forest paths

  become the backstreets of a city,

  where predators learn a sweeter language

  accented with false niceties.

  The stories where little girls

  need to be street-smart to survive

  and sometimes they don’t win,

  sometimes it’s the wolf that thrives.

  What happens to the fairytale

  when the woods have been replaced by cities;

  and a concrete jungle that comes to life?

  Whispers from the Wicked Woods

  Where are the stories for the wicked girls,

  the ones where they are told perfection is a lie?

  Where are the legends fashioned from nuance,

  the ones that cause the hero and the villain to blur lines?

  Where are the myths for darker things,

  the ones of us who were never snow-white pure?

  Where are the lessons for naughty children,

  the ones who want to be lost in the forest and folklore?

  If you’re looking for secrets you will find them here,

  these words have been resurrected from old fairytales’ rui
ns.

  This is the place where those stories come to be reborn

  and from the wreckage emerge things

  more human than humans.

  The Miller’s Daughter

  The queen addresses her firstborn

  after the fall of Rumpelstiltskin:

  Maybe magic ends with me

  and it will never cross your path

  but I want you to remember

  that survival is an art.

  The world is falsehood

  so you rely on your smarts.

  Princes fail all the time.

  Passion sometimes goes cold.

  And princesses on days of fortune

  can turn straw into gold.

  Kind kings become greedy

  and dragons can have soft souls.

  Fairies cast the wrong spells,

  mermaids can be drowned,

  goblins and trolls can be heroes

  and giants can fall without a sound,

  and even the darkest things can be defeated

  once their names are spoken out loud.

  Half of Rumpelstiltskin Seeks Redemption

  Half of Rumpelstiltskin

  speaks to the Miller’s Daughter:

  Since tearing myself in two,

  the half of me that remains

  has been learning how to grow

  and craft an apology worthy of you.

  I offer no tricks, only regret

  for not understanding in my childhood

  that guilt is sometimes necessary,

  a way to remember good and never forget.

  I have heard that excuses make

  for bad apologies, so I’ll stop there.