Once Upon a Time: New Fairy Tales Paperback

“Horrible woman,” he said. “That was my bath.”


“The water was getting cold while you were out there chasing birds, you old fool. I wasn’t going to let it go to waste. Did you catch it?”

“I did. We had a wonderful conversation, and then I let it go.”

“One bird brain to another. It doesn’t surprise me one bit.”

“Ach,” he said. “Have you used up all the heat yet? By God, I need some heat.”

“As it happens, I’m about finished,” she said. She rose from the tub, this plump old woman, this mother to his children and companion of his life, glistening like some bright mineral wrested from the earth, steam rising from her wet body as though she were a creature of some fabulous mythology, filling his home with heat as the snow fell softly beyond the glass.

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Nathan Ballingrud is the author of North American Lake Monsters, from Small Beer Press. Several of his stories have been reprinted in Year’s Best anthologies, and “The Monsters of Heaven” won a Shirley Jackson Award. He’s worked as a bartender in New Orleans, a cook on oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico, and a waiter in a fancy restaurant.

Currently he lives in Asheville, NC, with his daughter, where he’s at work on his first novel. You can find him online at nathanballingrud.

wordpress.com.

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Author A. C. Wise grew up obsessively reading and re-reading fairy tales from a lovely phone book-sized and phone book-style compendium containing several volumes of Andrew Lang’s fairy tale series with appropriately color-coded pages. Ever since discovering Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling’s retold fairy tale anthologies, Wise has aspired to writing (or rewriting) fairy tales of her own.

Fairy tales are a gateway, they hint at larger possibilities and worlds begging to be explored. They are skeletons wanting skin. Why did the heroine/hero/witch/evil step-relation/magical talking animal real y take that course of action? Fairy tales, as brilliant as they are in their own right, are also fresh stories waiting to be told. “The Hush of Feathers, the Clamor of Wings,” was born of the desire to give a voice to the cursed birds of the original story, while suggesting that not all of them might be innocent victims.

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The Hush of Feathers,





the Clamor of Wings


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A. C. Wise


It’s Liselle’s pain that brings me back.

I’ve been gone a long time. Sky-drunk, back to belly with the clouds, it’s easy to forget. With the city all small and gray, laid out quilt-wise below me, why would I ever touch the ground?

For Liselle. Because her pain smells of nettles, pricked fingers, and blood. Because it sounds like patience and silence. Because it feels like ice forming a skin across the pond, like winter coming too soon.

And I’m afraid I’m too late.

“What do you want more than anything in the world?” the witch asks.

She plants a foot on my shoulder, holding me at the bottom of the bed. She told me to call her Circe, and said it wasn’t her name.

“You.” I try to move, but she shifts her foot, ball planted against my collarbone, toes curled to dig in.

“Too easy.”

Light slants across the bed, pools at her throat, slides between her breasts, and drizzles, crisscrossed by shadow, over her belly like honey.

“Can’t you tell?” I grasp my cock, grin.

Just the edge of a frown tries her lips. They’re dark, darkened further as she sips wine from a goblet by the bed. Her eyes are the ? 287 ?

? The Hush of Feathers, the Clamor of Wings ?

color of lightning-struck stone, ever watchful. I can’t tell her age.

Maybe older than the world. She is beautiful, and terrifying, and if I don’t give her the answer she’s looking for, she’ll burn me to ash without ever raising her hand.

She pushes me back, setting me off balance. “Try again.”