Once Upon a Time: New Fairy Tales Paperback(46)

Julian was working on a collage and had sent Mrs. Siddons a sketch. It was his stepmother and father standing in their kitchen, Clemenso naked in the midst of his fashion show, Jack Reynard’s deserted townhouse (he had been missing for weeks) but with bricks fallen off and a fox gazing out of a broken window. It was a world poised on the edge of catastrophe. But the colors were lovely, and Mrs. Siddons was especially charmed by the fox.

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7.


“How do you get inside my head?” Julian asked the Cat. They sat on a small rise in what seemed to be a late seventeenth century formal garden landscaped in the Dutch manner. The Cat was his size.

“A skill I took from Cassese, the last dragon in France,” was the answer. The image of the monster appeared in Julian’s mind: huge, fire breathing, wings flapping. All this he saw through the eyes of the hawk Puss had become. Cassese reached out and caught the hawk’s mind with his. But by then, Puss was a bee and when Cassese grabbed that tiny brain, Puss had already become a racing dove which moved faster than the dragon could think.

It was as a bat that Puss flew into the darkness of Cassese’s left ear. In the eye of the Cat, Julian saw the smoldering ruin to which Cassese was soon reduced. Puss was a tiger eating the brains.

“The last but, perhaps, not the brightest dragon in France,” said Puss. Julian felt a chill. “Yes, I am a monster, but never to you.” A large paw with its claws carefully retracted brushed his cheek.

A pond beautifully ringed with willows lay not far from them.

An avenue of cypress trees bordered a drive that curved towards a chateau. Windows caught the afternoon sun. Birds sang.

Julian had read the story of Puss In Boots a hundred times in the last couple of months. Would Puss order him out of his clothes and into the water as he’d done with his first master? Wary but unwilling to abandon the life he’d been given, Julian wondered how many afternoons he’d have to spend amusing Puss like this.

Aware of the questions Puss smiled and yawned as a cat does.

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Richard Bowes lives in Manhattan. He has won two World Fantasy Awards, a Lambda, an International Horror Guild Award, and a Million Writers Award. Even aside from The Queen, The Cambion and Seven Others, 2013 is a busy year. Lethe Press has just republished his ? 145 ?

? Tales That Fairies Tell ?

1999 Lambda-winning novel Minions of the Moon (now available for the first time electronically). Lethe has also published his novel-in-stories, Dust Devil on a Quiet Street: tales told by an aging spec fiction writer and set in contemporary Greenwich Village. In September, Fairwood Press will publish his If Angels Fight, a collection of recent stories and previously uncollected award nominees and winners.

Recent and forthcoming appearances include: The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Icarus, Lightspeed, Podcastle, and The Revelator; and the anthologies, After, Wilde Stories 2013, Ghosts: Recent Hauntings, Handsome Devil, Hauntings, Where Thy Dark Eye Glances, Weird Detectives: Recent Investigations, Fiction River: Unnatural Worlds, Daughters of Russ 2013, The Book of Apex, and The Time Traveler’s Almanac.

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The way I understand it, fairy tales play two important roles: first, they are meant to provide us with templates of behaviors, and second, to illustrate the values of the society that produced them.

When faced with a task of revamping a story to suit modern times, both templates and values had to be drastically adjusted: after all, curses are very different now, and the idea of a magical kiss seems downright reactionary. And the story of pediatric AIDS outbreak in Elista has haunted me ever since it happened—besides the heartbreak, there is nothing else I can think of that showed me that times had changed tragically, dramatically, and irrevocably. So this story is an attempt—however feeble—to extract some comfort from the terror.

(I guess there’s one more thing that fairy tales can do!) Ekaterina Sedia

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Sleeping Beauty of Elista


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Ekaterina Sedia


And this is how it begins: with a prick of a needle—a sharp point, and the children are too small to understand—infants, they just howl and squirm despite the reassuring hush hush shhhh be quiet of the nurse. So small that crying is just about the only thing they know how to do well. And for these children, soon enough it is the only thing—they do not sleep or eat, they only cry and fade away, they get sick and they cough, and strange white flowers bloom in their mouths and soon enough one by one by one they die. Except . . . but we will talk about her later.