Once Upon a Time: New Fairy Tales Paperback

He shrugged. “Cat and Fox: when we meet it always ends like this.”


He looked at Julian. “You’re still confused by what’s happened. You wonder about my motives.” He showed Julian the goofy young man who was Puss’s first owner swimming bare assed in a pond while Puss called out that the Marquis of Carabas had been robbed of his ? 143 ?

? Tales That Fairies Tell ?

clothes and a king and his lovely daughter stopped their carriage.

Because of a cat’s schemes the young man married far above his station. He came close to ruining his life a dozen times thereafter.

On each occasion Puss was delighted to step in.

“His antics gave me pleasure for his lifetime. When he died (mortals are given such a short span of years) I found another.”

“So my being a failure . . . ” Julian began. The Cat just shook his head and smiled a cat’s smile.





6.


Veronessa, in an antique 1940s dress with shoulders that were almost wings, brought Julian (wearing a very nice suit Puss had bought him) to Angelica Siddons’ lunch at Airmail Express where men dressed as stewardesses in long-gone twentieth century U.S. airlines brought airplane dinners and martinis. Earlier that day, Tales That Fairies Tell had named Mrs. Siddons “Fairy Godmother of this Epoch.”

“She certainly has been for you!” Veronessa said on the drive there.

“And she’s so anxious to meet you,” she added.

“Why all this with fairy tales?” he asked.

“The craving for fairy tales appears when a world is changing from one of magic to one of science and vice versa.”

“But you don’t believe in them.” They’d slept together a couple of times and it had been fun, but not magic.

“My mother was part Fey.” He narrowed his eyes. She waved a hand and a butterfly appeared. It fluttered around in the back seat of the car. She opened her palm and it landed. She closed her hand and opened it and the butterfly was gone. She was amused by his silence.

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.

? 144 ?

? Rick Bowes ?





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.