Once Upon a Time: New Fairy Tales Paperback(39)

They buried him three nights later. Fearful of his curse, the women of the town went to Mrs. Crouch, to help prepare her to go to his grave.

She said, “He was repulsive alive. I cannot lie with him dead. And you know he was a cruel man; he means to damage me. Destroy me.”

She refused to go that first night. The next day ten fields were found withered.

She refused to go that second night and the next day the clinic for the unwell was burnt down. Many would have been lost were it not for the early-rising Doe and her mother, who sounded the alarm.

The villagers went to Mrs. Crouch to beg her to lie with her dead husband. “He will take the children next. You know he will,” they said.

She refused. “He means to destroy me. Mar me for life, haunt me into eternity, kill me.”

They turned from her, distraught but not surprised. She was selfish and cruel and didn’t care about the rest of them.

“I am driven by bad fortune! All my life!” she called after them, as if that made a difference.

Doe had led a blessed life, really. Full of good fortune and windfalls.

She went to Mrs. Crouch, who sneered at her as she always did.

“My deepest sympathies,” Doe said, and she held Mrs. Crouch close, squeezing until the woman made an imprint in Doe’s soft body.

In the bakery, she mixed dough, let it rise, punched it down, shaped it, let it rise again.

She baked this bread hard and brown. She baked Mrs. Crouch with her eyes closed.

As the moon rose high, she carried the bread lady to the cemetery.

It was light, as good bread should be.

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? Karron Warren ?

She laid it on Mr. Crouch’s grave. “Darling,” she called out. “Darling, I’m here.”

Then she tripped away to hide.

At first, there was stillness, a terrible quiet that made her doubt her ears. Then a disturbance in the dirt, a writhing, then four nubs appeared, then eight, like pink growing tendrils of an unpleasant plant.

He rose up naked and fully erect.

He fell upon his bread lady, roaring, biting, thrusting, filled with lust and fury. Doe looked away and she thought, I will tell her I understand. What woman could lie with this man and ever feel clean again?

He fell upon his dough-wife, the Lady Bread, and his sweat, his juice, the dampness of the air, helped to dissolve the bread into a pale mush. He did not seem to care. He stood up, shook himself like a dog, then nodded and sank into his grave.

All at once, sound returned; the rustling leaves, the howling dogs, and Doe felt that she could leave.

In the morning, the only tragedy found was Mrs. Crouch, strangled with her own hands clenched around her neck, her eyes wide, tears dried in a map across both cheeks.

There was reward to be had though.

On clearing the Crouch’s house, their secret fortune was found, and this was shared amongst them all. Not only that, but for a dozen years to come the crops grew tall and golden and brought good fortune to them all.

As for Doe . . . as her mother aged, they looked for a baker to take her place. One day he came to them, and Doe felt soft on the inside as she had never felt before.

His hands were warm and she could feel her flesh shift at his touch.

He could mold dough like an artist and needed only four hours sleep a night.

All the village was happy for their Doe.

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? Born and Bread ?

And that is all to explain why, each year on December the twenty-first, the villagers all buy the perfect Lady Bread, thus bringing good luck upon themselves and upon the village and all who pass through her.

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Kaaron Warren has lived in Melbourne, Sydney, Canberra, and Fiji, She’s sold many short stories, three novels (the multi-award-winning Slights, Walking the Tree, and Mistification) and four short story collections. Two of her collections have won the ACT Publishers’ and Writers’ Award for fiction, and her most recent collection, Through Splintered Wal s, won a Canberra Critic’s Circle Award for Fiction and is shortlisted for nine Australian SF awards. Her stories have appeared in Australia, the U.S., the UK, and elsewhere in Europe, and have been selected for both Ellen Datlow’s and Paula Guran’s “year’s best” anthologies.

You can find her at kaaronwarren.wordpress.com and she tweets @KaaronWarren.

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The story “Tales That Fairies Tell” seemed like a natural for me.

The invitation to contribute to this anthology came as I was working on a collection of modern, feminist-centered fairy tales — The Queen, the Cambion and Seven Others: eight fairy tales generously illustrated with art by Arthur Rackham and Gustave Doré. Recently published by Aqueduct Press, it also includes my essay, “A Secret History of Small Books,” tracing the path of literary fairy tales back to the late seventeenth century and Charles Perrault’s Histoires ou contes du temps passé, in which Puss—featured in this story—makes a memorable first appearance.