Once Upon a Time: New Fairy Tales Paperback(100)

smell its ripeness, and my mouth watered, hungering for its juices.

“I have no money to buy your fruit, sir,” I said, turning my face to the ground to hide my embarrassment. Here I had come in order to hurt Lizzie, here I had come to join the goblin festivities, and yet I was not prepared to purchase their goods at all.

The cat-whiskered goblin’s fingertips found my chin, and lifted

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ever so gently, so that I stared up into his yellow-green eyes, which seemed to sparkle in the fading light, and in that moment I saw that his whiskers and his fur were no more than a mask he had placed upon his face. “You need no money here, my lady,” he said. “That is the currency of humans.”

“Are you not human, then?” I asked, and could not help but hear

a quiver enter my voice.

The cat-masked goblin shrugged, pursing his lips as if he’d tasted something sour. “I have not lived as those in towns live for a long time now, and I do not miss their ways. They are ever so proper, don’t you think? And ever so dull-witted with their cordial and celebrated proprietary agreements.”

He sighed, grinning with only one corner of his mouth as he

removed his fingertips from my chin, and offered me the peach

again. “I would take a lock of your hair as payment,” he said, almost breathless. “No coin could contain the value of the gold in those locks.”

I blushed, for more reasons than I would have liked to. I blushed

because he had found a way into my center, into the soft and tender part of me that wished others to see me as valuable, as something

beautiful, as something that could not be ignored or forgotten as

Lizzie ignored and forgot me. And I blushed because I had let him

see my weakness. No woman who sets her sights on a better life

should be so visibly vulnerable, yet there I was, blushing as though I were worth nothing.

A tear fell from my eye as I stood there. He caught it on the edge of his finger, then lifted it to his lips to sip at it.

“Exquisite,” he said, after swallowing the tear in a theatrical gesture, and I laughed a little in nervousness, but his eyes never strayed from mine during our entire exchange. Not even when he put out his hand to offer me a pair of scissors, and said, “One lock, my dear, and you may join us.”

I took the cold metal in my hands and lifted it to my head, pinched a long strand between thumb and forefinger, then slid the blades of ? 307 ?

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the scissors closed. The lock shorn, I dropped it into his outstretched palm, and he closed his hand upon it.

“Your peach, fair maiden,” he said, and then placed the fruit into my palm. He held my hand between his own for a long moment,

lingering, still holding my gaze steady. Eventually he lifted my hand, and the fruit with it, up to my mouth for me.

I hesitated, but then opened my mouth to take the fruit between my teeth, and when I bit through the downy skin, juice sweeter than any honey from the rock, juice stronger than any man-rejoicing wine, juice clearer than any water flowed into me. Within a moment I was dizzy, but I could not resist the taste, and so sucked and sucked and sucked at the peach, until only its wrinkled pit remained, which I let fall to the ground as I turned toward the cat-masked goblin man’s table, to pluck up another and another and another of his fruits, sucking and tearing at the flesh, swal owing as if my life depended upon it, and could not tel night from day any longer, as strange lights filtered through the canopy of the trees, spreading leafy shadows across the masked faces, and the goblins again struck up their music and began to dance around the glen.

One took me by the arm and twirled me into the center of them,

where yet another took me up and I gasped to see her long yellow

hair and soft round lips before me, the rise of her breasts beneath her tunic. We danced and danced and danced, she and I, spinning

and twirling until I could no longer see anything but her face, until I was spun out of the circle like a whirlwind, and only by chance did I catch hold of a tree trunk, where I braced myself against its sturdy body and breathed heavily for a long time while the fireflies fired their bodies around me.

The female goblin left the dancing circles when she noticed I had

not been able to continue twirling, and came to find me at my steady tree, still gathering my wits, as if I had just awoken from a deep dream.

“More fruit?” she asked, switching the tail she wore on her bottom back and forth. “I have fruit of my own you have not yet tasted,