Once Upon a Time: New Fairy Tales Paperback

When at length the evening reached us, Lizzie and I took up our

pitchers to fetch water from the reedy brook, and did not speak of goblins or of fruit, but went along peacefully, as we did at the end of each day. Kneeling by the brook, we dipped our pitchers into the water to fill them with the brook’s rippling purple and rich golden flags, and when we stood again, the crags of a nearby mountain were flushed red with the setting sun.

“Come, Laura,” Lizzie said. “The day is ending. Not another

maiden lags. The beasts and birds are all fast asleep, and soon too shall we be.”

I loitered by the reeds, listening for the sound of their voices,

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waiting to hear a bow eke a tune from the strings of a violin, or a first rush of breath fill the pipes and bring the glen alive with music. “It’s early still,” I said. “The dew is not yet on the grass, no chill has settled into the wind.”

Lizzie, though, was not having any of my excuses. “It’s them you’re waiting for,” she said, “isn’t it?”

I turned to face her, and said, “Yes,” and said, “If you but tasted their fruit, you would understand me as you once did.”

“Then why do you wait?” Lizzie said. “Go to them. They are there,

after all, calling for us to join them. Come buy, come buy! It is an ugly sort of commerce, Laura. I don’t know what you are thinking.”


“Wait?” I said. “I wait to hear those voices. You hear them?”

“Yes,” Lizzie said, and lifted her chin to gesture toward the glen across the flowing water. “They are there already, waiting for you to return to them.”

I nearly spun on my feet like a top to look where Lizzie gestured, but when I faced the glen, I saw nothing but the empty pasture where I had danced and eaten the night before. I heard nothing but the sound of the brook flowing by me. “Where, Lizzie?” I asked. “I see nothing, I hear nothing.”

“Good, then!” Lizzie said with a glee that angered me. “Come home

with me. The stars rise, the moon bends her arc, each glowworm

winks her spark. Let us get home before the night grows dark, for

clouds may gather though this is summer weather, put out the lights and drench us.”

I stood still as stone, and felt cold as stone through and through.

“Really, sister?” I said, my eyes wide with fear. “Do you hear them truly, or are you trying to hurt me?”

“Come buy, come buy! ” Lizzie said again, mocking their voices, making them sound like terrible creatures. “It is good that you cannot hear them,” she said. “It means your heart is still your own.”

She held her hand out then, and curled her fingers inward. “Come,

Laura,” she said. “Let us be home again.”

I did not want to take her hand—I wanted to take the hand of the

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goblins whose voices I could no longer hear, whose masked faces I

could no longer see—but in the end it was the hand offered me, and it was the hand I took.

We went to bed that night and curled around each other as

we used to, and for a while I thought that I was better off for not hearing the voices of goblins. But before our twistings and turnings could reach a satisfactory moment, I felt all passion leave me, like a cork released from its bottle, and lay in the dark, wondering about the strange people who had shown me a glimpse of a life I would

now never know. Lizzie patted her kisses upon my cheek, upon my

shoulders, and stroked my side and waist with her nimble fingers,

but the fingers I had longed for in the past few weeks when she had kept them from me, those fingers and their touch no longer held me in the spell they once cast over me.

When Lizzie finally fell asleep, I sat up and looked out the window at the moon hanging low, caught up in the branches of a tree. I cried, silently, and gnashed my teeth like a starved animal, and held the howls of yearning inside my body so Lizzie would not wake and ask

me what was the matter.