Fierce Fairytales Read online

  All I want to say is this: I am sorry

  but I do not say it for forgiveness’ sake.

  There are no asterisks here.

  Your feelings are completely valid,

  you are under no obligation to pardon me,

  I have yet to earn it for putting you through fear.

  What I am trying to say is,

  I know now that becoming kind

  is worth every single exhausting effort

  and sometimes it takes a thousand years.

  Today, I apologised to someone

  I owe an ocean full of amends to.

  Tomorrow, I will teach myself

  the kindness alphabet from scratch.

  If this is not what an apology looks like,

  if this is not what growth looks like,

  I do not know what they are.

  Why Tinkerbell Quit Anger Management

  I had to give up on their remedies.

  They kept trying to make me less angry,

  but I refuse to surrender my rage.

  Because whole kingdoms have already spent

  millennia trying to keep women subdued,

  only to be discarded in old age.

  My fury gets things done,

  it has saved lives, it has made the world listen

  where I could not speak, my anger has screamed.

  Think Helen of Troy when they took her freedom.

  Think the Rani of Jhansi leading rebellions.

  Think Joan of Arc leading armies on what she dreamed.

  So now I love my tinderbox heart

  so easy to light up,

  all it takes is half a spark.

  A woman’s anger can change the world,

  I know mine can and this is not a gift

  I will give away.

  I am small and I am angry,

  it is how I channel my energy

  and I like me that way.

  Boy Lost

  Picture a sunset in a small port town by the sea. Two teenaged boys sitting on the docks watching the ships as they fly across the water. One reaches out and takes the other’s hand. In this brush of skin for skin, a thousand unspoken promises erupt between them, and both are determined to keep them. This is what youth is. The sheer belief that you will be able to keep every promise you made to someone else. That you will be able to love someone into a forever when you do not even understand what forever means.

  An evening spent in the headiness of love, they go back to their respective homes. One boy helps his mother with cooking and cleaning and looking after his little sister. His father is a good man, a sailor who brings home with him meagre wages, but a heart full of love and a quicksilver tongue that tells stories of faraway lands to enthral them all. But this boy, despite his blessings, is not happy. He may have been blessed with a loving family, but that faraway look is made of unrest and wanderlust, something about him says fae, changeling, wearing the skin of a boy who was always destined to fly, to leave.

  The other boy returns home to a father who drinks and a mother who works so hard that she is never there. He is the unwanted creature in this home, a beating waiting for him at every corner. His father’s temper is a beast so powerful that a boy made of paper bones barely held together cannot fight him. He hides in his room. He lives for a boy at sunset, hope made into a human being.

  Now picture this. This boy of paper bones alone at the docks the next sunset. And this boy alone on the docks again on a rainy day. And this boy alone on the docks every day after, waiting for someone who promised him forevers he never intended to keep. This boy becoming a man, a heart wounded so young in youth that it never quite healed right. Imagine him becoming a sailor, searching land after land for a boy he once loved, thinking he was hurt, or stolen, just needing to know what happened to him.

  Now see him finally finding out that the boy he loved in his boyhood ran away to a magical land where he never grew up. That without a second glance, he just forgot every promise of forever. Imagine his rage, that ancient pain turning to a terrible anger and escaping from the forgotten attic of his mangled heart. Think of what happens when immense love turns into immense hate. An anger so intense it cannot be controlled. What he would give up to avenge the boy he once was, paper-boned, standing on the docks, broken without a single person to love him, simply all alone. A hand is a small price to pay for a magical ship that will take him to Neverland, a place that lives on a star. Becoming a villain called Captain Hook is a small exchange to show Peter Pan that you cannot throw away love and think you will get away unscarred.

  Wendy

  No one talks about what happened to Wendy Darling after they returned from Neverland. No one speaks of Wendy Darling anymore. The truth is, whilst her parents were able to convince her brothers that Neverland never happened, that all children must grow up, that it was all just a dream, Wendy knew better and she vehemently believed.

  She believed when her friends made fun of her in boarding school. She wished for the fairies to save her when she went to the headteacher’s office and her parents were forced to remove her. She even spoke to Peter after that when she was home-schooled by her governess. As she grew older, the visions of Neverland never quite ceased and she painted and drew pictures showing her wonderful adventures with Peter and the Lost Boys. She didn’t realise her parents were slowly growing concerned and wrung their hands about how she would ever find a man to marry, if she still believed in all this nonsense.

  Things came to a head when Wendy refused to marry. Soon they grew so worried that they had Wendy placed in an asylum, claiming her hallucinations were so terrible that they needed tending. You would think the story would end there, but Wendy had a powerful faith in herself and in the strength of her own mind and memory.

  So from the asylum she began to write stories and paint pictures of Neverland for children, impressing every doctor, soothing the patients to the point that her doctor, a kind-hearted man, began to send her work to publishers. Wendy, slowly but surely, became so adamant and so polite to her doctors that they began to question their own sanity, because she remained so unfalteringly faithful to her story. However, if she had no means of supporting herself, she would never be able to leave this asylum, and knowing this was going to be her fate, Wendy once again wished upon the fairies.

  They had never paid her any mind before, but her fervour made them pay attention. Because they guided her to send her writings and paintings to a publisher who absolutely loved what she was doing. They offered her enough money to leave the asylum, which she could when she turned 21, and support herself; something almost unheard of in their circle of society.

  Wendy died a happy old maid, with a dozen books she had written, a stunning library, and a host of friends and nephews and nieces that absolutely loved and thought the world of her.

  But this is the reason why no one talks of Wendy Darling anymore. Because the most successful children’s books of her time, the adventures in Neverland, were never published under the name of Wendy Darling, but simply under ‘Wendy’.

  Child’s Play

  It always begins when we are children

  with imaginations so big we put

  whole universes to shame.

  Whilst running and playing

  and shouting in the white-hot sun

  before prejudices stop our feet.

  We tell each other stories

  layered with childlike epiphany

  and fiery self-belief.

  We squabble over who

  gets to play the princess

  or the hero prince.

  None of us want to be

  the dragon that is slayed

  nor the ogre nor the witch.

  Right there in our child’s mind

  we decide everyone can

  only be very evil or very good.

  We never stop to consider

  that all of us are capable

  of doing terrible things.

  But if we look back


  and we try to truly understand

  we will remember what we should.

  We have all taken turns

  being Red Riding Hood

  and we have all been the wolf.

  The Red Wolf

  Children go missing all the time.

  Sometimes it is faeries who steal them.

  Other times, they trust a wolf.

  Even in times of war, children are innocent to the true ways of the world. Their mothers are always wiser.

  This is because most mothers know that the softest people with the biggest hearts are the ones who hold the truest magic of them all; purity of this kind can not be bought from the Gods themselves, and it was the greatest target of the devil-souled.

  When Little Red Riding Hood went missing, a girl so beloved by her mother that she always told her she could be anything she wanted to be, her mother never ever left the place where she had grown up, hoping against hope that the trees, the woods, would one day return her child.

  Every day, she stood at the edge of the woods, looking into the dark, hoping to find a wisp of her forest-hearted child somewhere within the leaf-strewn wild. Every day, she took a step closer to the darkness, hopelessness making her courage steadfast, stronger.

  Grief makes unlikely warriors out of us all.

  So when she saw the two lamp-like eyes in the dark one day, she was not afraid. Instead she asked, ‘Brother wolf, are you the one who has stolen my child from my arms and taken her away?’

  ‘Not I,’ said the wolf before disappearing.

  The next day, she took another step closer to the woods she had once searched every inch of and another pair of eyes glowed through the darkness, red like the colour of her child’s cloak.

  ‘Brother wolf, are you the one who pulled my child away from me with just a look?’

  ‘Not I,’ said the red-eyed wolf before turning away.

  A wolf began to visit her almost every day. And every day she would ask the same question a different way. She found herself getting closer and closer to the heart of the forest, and the wolves never ever attacked her. She began to wonder if what the woodcutter had told her was true, that a wolf had eaten her child for its supper.

  On the day she reached the heart of the forest she began to realise that although she had thought she had been here before, this lush, dense part of the woods was a place she had never been. There was something both familiar and unsettling about it, almost like a place not meant to be seen.

  A lair where a thousand eyes, lamp-like eyes, watched her from the fog and the dark, and when the fog cleared away and the light came through she found what she was looking at was enough to make her fall apart. On a throne amongst wolves of all sorts and sizes, a young girl sat. She wore a red wolf’s skin on her body and two swords sheathed behind her back.

  Slow recognition crept over her face, she ran to the older woman and, after hugging her, finally told her why she had never come home.

  ‘Dear Mother, I am sorry I never ever came home. The evil woodcutter and his friends were trying to destroy this forest world. When I came through the woods I happened to hear of all of their plans. They saw me listening, followed me to grandmother’s, killed her, and tried to burn her house down with me in it so they could continue their wicked plans. The wolves came to rescue me, and trained me to be one of them. I am now the Alpha and protect them from the woodcutter and his evil friends.’

  Her mother promised her that she would never tell another soul where Red Riding Hood was. The secrecy was their only weapon against the woodcutter and his horde. Over and over again, Red Riding Hood and the wolves bravely defended the woods and woodland creatures from extinction. They bravely fought, and her mother soon came to live with them and aided them in their battle.

  So when you tell the story of Red Riding Hood, remember this too:

  Her mother told her

  she could grow up to be

  anything she wanted to be,

  so she grew up to become

  the strongest of the strong,

  the strangest of the strange,

  the wildest of the wild,

  the wolf leading the wolves.

  Cinderella’s Mother Sends Her a Message from Heaven

  When you were just a little girl, I told you to have courage and to be kind, and that is how I will be with you throughout your life.

  You were so small and so sweet when I left you alone in this world. It hurt you so much that you took those words, gently wrapped them in one of my silk handkerchiefs, slept with them under your pillow every night.

  When your papa brought a new mama home for you, you tried, you really tried. You cooked and you cleaned, wore your little body into cinders and bloodwork for her and her daughters, who spoke about you like you were never there, even when you were fixing their corsets, mending their dresses, helping them dress. Not a word of thanks fell from their lips. They sent you as far away as they could, to the cold attic, but you made the best of their cruelty, didn’t you, my sweet girl? You slept like a small bird on a nest you made from tattered clothes and hay, befriended the mice up there, shared your meagre food with them instead of keeping them at bay.

  Darling, some people wear the word ‘family’ as a disguise for their intentions and who they are. Darling, I should have taught you this, should have reminded you of what you are. I should have told you be kind, but remember, kindness does not mean being covered in soot, and used, and laughed at, and forgotten. I should have taught you courage means standing up for yourself, and what self-worth truly means.

  You do not need to wait for permission; no one will think less of you when you decide to take back what has always been rightfully yours. No one deserves the right to steal from the garden of your heart that you so lovingly grew, and swallowing your own pride should not be one of your chores. Let no one tell you that kindness and courage can only wear the skin of giving up your self-worth, that you cannot wear your self-respect like it is armour. Stand up for your own human dignity and roar.

  The Stepmother’s Tale

  People are going to betray you the way

  Judas betrayed Jesus,

  the way Brutus betrayed Caesar,

  and you will love them anyway.

  And betrayal comes

  in so many different shapes and forms.

  No one ever tells you

  how death too

  is a form of betrayal.

  How life too betrays you

  by robbing you of the person

  you depend on, your soulmate.

  She didn’t start that way. None of us is truly born evil. Evil is man-made. Once, she was a beautiful young girl who grew up working in her father’s flour mill; a good daughter with a light heart, as girls were expected to be during that time, and she never complained, no matter how hard or burdensome the work was.

  When she turned 18, she began to accompany her father to the market to sell the flour they made, and a rich, handsome merchant saw her, this lovely, hardworking young woman with an easy smile. Unlike most men of his time, he was progressive. Instead of asking her father’s permission immediately to marry her, he asked permission from her first, and then her father if he could court her. He wasn’t handsome, but he had a soft look about his eyes and gentle hands, and it was long into their courtship that she fell in love with him. They married and had two little daughters, and, as fairytales like this go, should have had a happily ever after.

  But life instead had a tale of woe in plan for this woman and her girls.

  Soon after the seventh birthday of her second daughter, her husband took ill and died. And whilst grieving for the man she loved, she learned how unkind the world is to a single mother of daughters. Where she once had plenty of comfort to live in and provide her children with, soon the debt collectors started appearing at every hour and a quarter. She looked for work but found nothing suitable for the mother of two small children. Months faded to years, and slowly they grew more and more destitu
te until she did the only thing she could do in dark desperation. She found another man, one she did not love, but who was grieving his lost love too, and married him, promising to give his orphaned child a mother.

  Desperation turns people sour, and she now saw life as an open wound. A shallow promise. A dark thing that should have loved her but instead tried to drown her. Her beauty fading, she recognized that she had failed to pass on her looks to her two daughters. And now she knew how important it is for a woman to be beautiful, as it is the only currency she truly had in this world, she became even more bitter. So when she saw Cinderella and her goodness and her beauty, all she could think is, That used to be me. And the more she saw the kindness that was in Cinderella, the more she wanted to take it from her, so Cinderella would understand how awful life can be.

  She is cruel to Cinderella because she wants to teach her in her own terrible, misguided way that,

  ‘Life is not going to be kind

  just because you are pretty,

  and yet your beauty

  is your only true currency.

  If I can just teach you how to be