Once Upon a Time: New Fairy Tales Paperback(14)

?

? 51 ?

The Spinning Wheel’s Tale ?





Jane Yolen


I worked all my life. Indeed, I worked for every hand that touched me: spinning a thread, spinning a tale, spinning a life. Yet all I am remembered for in this kingdom is the one death that was spun of a witch’s lies.

Blame her, not me, for the hundred years of devastation, the castle waiting while sleep stole breath after breath. Blame her for hedges run riot while gardeners dozed. Blame her for the loss of revenues, avenues, a major highway becoming a byway, a byway a path.

But do not blame me. I only spun what I was held to, did what I was told.

I was always a poor woman’s right hand, the small business base, not something fit for palaces. Yet here I was brought, set into curse and tale. We who are the workers have no say in the production. It is an old story, but a true one.

I remember the acorn, the sprout, the single green leaf. But that never features in this tale. The story begins with spinning, spinning the wheel, spinning the curse, spinning the lies that lie at the heart of a mouth, a castle, a hedge.

And of course it all begins with a witch.

Let us call her Malara. Or Maleficient. Or Maladroit. It is all the same. She was jealous, of course, of her twelve sisters, of her position ? 53 ?

? The Spinning Wheel’s Tale ?

in the middle of their pack. Not the prettiest, not the fairest, not the smartest, not the sweetest, not the eldest, not the youngest. All those get special mention in any recounting. She was, so she liked to say, the median, the middle, the muddle, and the mess.

Well at least in this she was honest, if in nothing else.

Everything Malara put her hand to was a failure. A wish for a woman’s fecundity produced a litter of babes too small and too early to live, and a blasted womb thereafter. A wish for a garden to produce led straight to a proliferation of weeds the likes of which had never been known in the land. A wish for the early marriage of a prince turned into an early funeral as well. She did not have a good head for wishing.

But oh, how Malara could curse.

She could cause the dead to rise, pennies on their eyes, and a death rattle in their mouths that went zero to the bone.

She could curse a man to impotence, a cuckold to impudence.

She could curse a purse to poverty, a poet to prosody, a singer to a sore throat, and a hangman to his own noose. She could curse a king to catastrophe, a princess to catatonia. She was herself the queen of curses.

No wonder she ceased to be invited to royal births, royal christenings, royal engagements, royal weddings. Even funerals were forbidden to her.

She was left with nothing—nothing to do, nothing to favor—and that led to her to having everything to do with what happened ever after.

Her sisters tried an intervention, tried to teach her the lighter side of magic: how to cause the lame to dance, milk to spring from a maiden’s breast. Tried to insert her as the muse in amusing histories.

But as with everything Malara did, things always turned to the worst.

And there it could have stood, with her sisters loving her and wishing to help. With them worrying over her, thinking she’d been damaged somehow, that none of this was her fault.

? 54 ?

? Jane Yolen ?

But when at last they understood how much she reveled in her talent for cursing, even her sisters left her alone.

And that is when she found me and made the last of her curses.

O acorn, that you never had known spring. O oak, that you never had grown limbs. O limbs, that you never were sawn, planed, bended, and bowed. O wheel, that you were never made.

Malara found me in a byre, set aside after a lifetime of use. Her fingers started me awhirl again and I was pleased to be found useful.

She tested the spindle, and I was delighted to feel magic. She wound wool through all my parts, and I was thrilled to be spinning anew.

I thought her no more then a solitary crone, for so she presented herself, as if touched by age, humped with it. We limped up to the forbidden tower.

There was such a sense of wonder in her touch I ignored the darkness in it. Stupid old oak.

There was warning in her songs. I thought them full of beauty.

Foolish acorn child.

I dreamed that I might be the one to spin straw into gold. Silly old wheel.

Instead of slowing my rotation, instead of tangling the yarn, I held my spindle upright. My wheel made many smooth turnings. I was addled with work, in love with production.

I did not see the world coming to an end.