***

Out of Oral Tradition, Into The Salon

Although “Once upon a time” began as a way to avoid censure from the powers-that-be, it became a self-fulfilling prophecy. Fairy tales, rather than being concretely linked to a specific time (or place, considering the “in a land far, far away” bit) became universal, allowing and encouraging writers from generation after generation to adapt the tales and make them their own. Originally, our stories were not divorced from time and place in this fashion: When we read the Greek myths, we see the markers of time and place which tell us that this story happened in Athens, Cythera, Mycenae, Crete; before, during, after the Trojan War. But when fairy tales were in their prime, circumstances bade otherwise.

Fairy tales enjoyed their heyday in seventeenth century France, during the reign of the Sun King, Louis XIV. Two thirds of their tellers were upper class women, writing about the things which were of primary concern to their peers: marriage, childbirth, and inheritance, as Terri Windling has said. The young heroines of the tales were substitutes for their authors, as were the heroines’ wise advisors: the fairy godmothers. In fact, it is the fairy godmother who has given her name to the fairy tale. These French stories were known as the contes des fées, the tales of the fairies, a phrase which can be interpreted as being about the fairies or by the fairies. Their authors were known as conteuses.

The original fairy godmothers were very like their authors: They were aristocratic, typically nobility among the fairies; they were cultured and educated, with much emphasis placed upon their wit; and, perhaps most important of all, they were neither omniscient nor omnipotent. As the authors of the fairy tales had to be cunning in order to accommodate the demands of the Sun King and the world of men, so too were their creations. For example, the first and greatest of the conteuses, Mary Catherine d’Aulnoy, married against her will to a man more than twice her age, schemed to remedy her circumstances by having him condemned for treason. When her plotting was discovered and she was banished, she reportedly acted as a spy for Louis XIV in England, whereby she won the right to return to Paris. There she established her salon and began writing her tales.

Her creations exercise similar guile: Merluche, the godmother to d’Aulnoy’s Cinderella-prototype character Finette Cendron, most seriously counsels her protégé to abandon her wretched sisters and let them starve preemptively lest they betray her. Finette, like a good fairy tale princess, declines. Finette needs no one to rescue her, but happily beheads ogres, triumphs over her sisters, and wins the heart of her prince with little more than good advice, good sense, and the loan of a fairy steed.

So how, then, did we move from Cinderellas who readily swung axes to Disney’s Cinderella, who needed to be rescued by singing vermin? (As Jane Yolen put it, “Poor Cinderella. Poor Us.”) She didn’t do it to herself. From the sixteenth century onward, the popularity of the fairy tale rose with the exponential growth of literacy. While the fairy tale had once depended upon individual storytellers to carry it hither and thither and alter it slowly, print culture took the fairy tale princess and bent her to its own needs.

***

To The Mass Market To Buy Me a Tale

The literary fairy tale’s popularity in France brought it next to Germany, riding a wave of immigration fueled by French refugees. As the Brothers Grimm embarked upon a project of story collection in the interest of preserving their Teutonic heritage, they had no idea how much these new arrivals would change their project.

The Grimms set out to capture German folktales, but their process of collection was contaminated by secondary orality. Tales which had been published fifty years earlier in France were retold verbally by recent immigrants to their first-generation children and native German neighbors, sometimes introducing new stories into their lexicon, sometimes altering the details of old ones. And while the Grimms had imagined their work as a scholarly endeavor, annotated and footnoted and destined for the dusty stacks of libraries, upon the publication of the first edition of the Children’s and Household Tales in 1812, they found that the majority of their correspondence came from the burgeoning, newly prosperous, newly literate middle class.

They heard specifically from the mothers of young children who desired to inculcate their offspring into their rapidly fading heritage, who implored the Grimms to edit out the … less palatable … details of the old stories, which had most decidedly not been composed with children in mind. In the six editions that followed, the tales grew less and less subversive, and more and more conventional. So, too, the godmothers and the princesses inside the tales—the former growing ineffectual, the latter simply … passive.

In short order, the British, at the nexus of prosperity, imperialism, and European literature, proceeded to repeat the process, first publishing a translation of the Grimms’ tales in 1823 before proceeding to translate and normalize the fairy tales of various nations, molding them into the uniform “once upon a time” and “happily ever after” brackets that we still keep to today. The godmothers, and, indeed, all the fairies, were quite literally diminished from their ancient grandeur and dignified seventeenth-century French elegance into the minute, garden-dwelling, flower-bedecked, harmless, be-winged, and—there’s simply no other word for it!—twee figures with which we still associate the word today. And as for the princesses? Passivity became their middle name, an image enhanced by their passage into and representation by yet another medium which increased their visibility in the twentieth century: cinema, as envisioned by Walt Disney.

***

Disney’s Perfectly Passive Princesses

Disney selected and adapted the tales with an eye toward reinforcing certain specific princess-y traits, and there’s no coincidence that the heroines of two of the first Disney movies, 1937’s Snow White and 1959’s Sleeping Beauty, spend much of their tales not just helpless, but unconscious. At a time when America, and, indeed, the majority of the first world grew more democratic and less concerned with the quality of one’s blood and the rank into which one might be born, the image of the princess became more and more desirable. This can be attributed, first, to the social mobility which made it possible for even those who were “common as mud” to aspire to the trappings of royalty. Second, we have the conflation of “princess” with both the concepts of “femininity” and “just reward”—consider Frances Hodgson Burnett’s A Little Princess, originally published as a novel in 1905 and adapted into a movie starring no less than Shirley Temple in 1939, just two short years after the release of Disney’s Snow White and The Seven Dwarfs. Burnett’s story emphasizes the innate nobility which belongs to any little girl who is kind and generous … and the bounty which is sure to follow. And third, we have the gradual transition to a focus on the commercial and material aspects of princess-hood—the trappings!—which focus less on inheriting a kingdom, and more on wearing the proper attire (the phrase “princess dress” brings to mind a very specific image).

This last element can certainly be attributed in no small part to the Disney company’s ever-burgeoning marketing schemes. They began by developing and advertising books related to the movies, grew into designing and selling character-related accessories, and eventually found a way to sell entire personas taken from the films. Only consider the fact that Disney markets both baby accoutrements and princess-themed wedding gowns. Should a woman choose to subscribe to the hegemony of the fairy tale princess, Disney is ready to carry her through her entire life cycle.

***

A Royal Renaissance

How to rebel, you might ask? Many contemporary authors are doing so by reclaiming the image of the princess and recasting her. Their predecessors, the Victorians, responded to the co-optation of the fairy tale form by writing original fairy stories, such as John Ruskin’s “King of the Golden River” and Charles Dickens’s “The Magic Fishbone.” This eventually led to the birth of the field of fantasy. Many of these writers’ efforts, such as William Morris’s early novels, would eventually be published under Lin Carter’s Sign of the Unicorn imprint, which brought about a resurgence of interest in the idea of fairy tales not for children.

Much of the credit for the contemporary re-conceptualization of princesses should be granted to Terri Windling. Windling almost single-handedly began the fairy tale renaissance during her tenure at Tor Books, masterminding the creation of the Fairy Tale series (publishing authors such as Tanith Lee, Greg Frost, Patricia McKillip, and Charles de Lint, to name only a few) and editing the Red as Blood, White as Snow collections with Ellen Datlow, among other projects. Stories edited by Windling tended to feature deliberate twists upon tired roles and unexpected role-reversals: tales in which Snow White was the villain and the stepmother the victim, where Beauty preferred the Beast to the prince, where Sleeping Beauty saved herself. Patricia C. Wrede and other authors like her presented princesses like Cimorene, of the Enchanted Forest Chronicles, princesses who were practical, competent, and wholly fit to perform the most crucial actual function of royalty (so oft ignored): to prepare to rule. And today, writers are re-imagining not just the nature of the princess and the fairy tale, but the form in which she is presented. Authors like Catherynne M. Valente and Seanan McGuire are reenacting the salons of the seventeenth century conteuses on their blogs, telling stories not purely for financial gain, but also to amuse one another, expand shared universes, and, in the process, critique the world around them, their princesses, their emissaries (I highly recommend seeking out McGuire’s “Wicked Girls Saving Themselves” cycle).

Looking at these contemporary visions of the princess—the animated and highly marketed Disney princesses versus the princess heroines dreamed up by rising stars in the fantasy genre—reveals a dichotomy. In some ways, it appears the stereotyped image of the princess, passive and in need of rescuing, is quite dead; in others, the princess takes an inspiration from some of her most famous avatars, Snow White and Sleeping Beauty, and seems magically resuscitated. The princess is dead: Long live the princess?

“Swans” was originally published in the young adult anthology A Wolf at the Door: And Other Retold Fairy Tales (edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling), in which thirteen authors recreated thirteen traditional stories. While Link has written many re-imagined fairy tales, “Swans” was the first to be marketed to a YA audience.

When asked about the major distinction between “adult” and “young adult” fiction, Link explained, “I’ve heard many editors and writers say that the major distinction between adult and young adult is that a young adult narrative is one in which the protagonist is encountering something for the first time—entering a new realm of responsibilities, or powers. There’s often a sense of immediacy to YA fiction. I’ve also heard people say that YA writers shouldn’t ‘talk down’ to their readers, but then again, nobody should talk down to their readers.”

Still, as she noted, “‘Swans’ is probably more accurately ‘middle grade,’ or on the very young side of YA.”

If a YA story describes a first encounter with a new realm of responsibilities, Link’s story creates a new encounter with classic fairy tales by fusing multiple narratives into a single story. “Swans” combines specific details from multiple traditions: Cinderella’s stepmother and fairy god[father], Rumpelstiltskin’s straw spinning, and, of course, magical transformations from the Wild Swans.

“I’m usually borrowing from more than one source,” she said, on writing re-imagined stories. “Maybe I ought to try reworking a fairy tale while sticking strictly to one narrative.”

If a single narrative may influence a future story, multiple sources help facilitate the depth of setting within “Swans.” Emma’s world is fairy tale meets middle school. Link infuses a contemporary suburb with castles and fairy godparents; she melts evil stepmothers, frustrated librarians, and ribbon-cutting kings into one cohesive unit. Link’s story reminds readers young and not-so-young of the magical influence fairy tales so often have on adolescence.

Link, for one, noted the place of fairy tale collections in her childhood reading. She remembered, “I read all the usual stuff, the Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Anderson, etc. I also read Robin McKinley’s Beauty, Angela Carter, Eudora Welty’s The Robber Bridegroom, and Jack Zipes’s Don’t Bet on the Prince, and of course all of Terri Windling’s and Ellen Datlow’s anthologies. Later on, as an adult I read Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Poacher,” which is still one of my favorite stories, as well as a slightly uncomfortable metaphor for how a writer like me uses (and inhabits) fairy tales.”

In Le Guin’s “The Poacher,” a young protagonist spends his adolescence hacking through an enchanted hedge. Inside, he finds a sleeping kingdom. An unprivileged outsider cannot wake the court, and he must wait instead for a prince who belongs within the magical world.

If Link has inhabited a similar enchanted metaphor, she has no trouble waking any fairy tale character. Instead, she ushers readers into Emma’s place of quilts, enchanted swans, and library books, where outsiders leave the traditional fabric of fairy tale to be blanketed in a world of Link’s unique creation.

Yesterday my stepmother pointed her pinkie finger at my brothers and turned them all into swans. They were being too noisy. I’m never too noisy. I don’t talk at all.

This year I was failing choir. I opened my mouth to sing, and nothing came out. I hadn’t been able to say a word since my mother died. In my other classes, it was okay. Homework was okay. Math was okay, and English. Art was okay. I could write down answers on the black board. I carried around a pad of paper and a pen. You’d be surprised how often you don’t actually have to say anything. Mostly if I just nodded, it was okay. But choir doesn’t work that way. You can’t sing by writing on a pad of paper. But nothing came out of my mouth when I opened it.

Last year I had lots of friends. This year I didn’t have any. What happened in between? My mother died. I stopped talking. No more friends. Really, I’ve been too busy to have friends, I suppose.

When I first stopped talking, no one noticed. Not until Mom’s funeral, when we were all supposed to stand up and say something. I stood up, but nothing came out when I opened my mouth. First my father sent me to see a psychologist. I just sat on her couch. I looked at pictures, and wrote down what they looked like. They all looked like flowers, or birds, or schnauzers. Then my fairy godfather came to the palace.

My fairy godfather is a little man with red hair. His name is Rumpelstiltskin. He was a friend of my mother’s. He’d been away on business for a few months—he’d missed the funeral. His eyes were all red, and he cursed a lot. He’d loved my mother a lot. He sat with me for a long time, brushing my hair, and patting my hand.

Finally he said, “Well, you certainly don’t have to talk until you want to. Keffluffle. Excuse my French. What a mess this is, Emma.”

I nodded. I wrote down on my pad of paper, I miss her.

“Fudge, I do, too,” my godfather said. “Excuse the French.”

He tapped me on the nose gently. “You know your father is going to have to get married again.”

I wrote, I’ll have an evil stepmother?

“That evil stepmother stuff is just a pile of horsepucky,” he said, “excuse me. It’s just baloney. Whoever he marries will be just as afraid of you and your brothers as you are of her. You keep that in mind.”

To my father, he said, “Emma just needs a piece of time. When she needs to say something, she’ll open her mouth and say it.”

He hugged my father, and he hugged me. He said, “I have a commission for you, Emma. I have a godchild who is going to a ball. All she’s got to wear are rags. She needs a fancy dress. Not pink, I think. It wouldn’t match. She’s got lovely red hair, just like me. Maybe a nice sea-foam green. Right down to the ankles. Lots of lace.”

I wrote, When do you need it?

“When she turns seventeen,” he said. “That’s not for a bit. I’ll send you her measurements. Okay?”

Okay, I wrote and kissed him good-bye.

***

When my mother was young, she was famous. She could spin straw into gold. Her name was Cleanthea. A year ago, she went jogging in the rain, and then she caught cold, and then she died.

My mother’s quilts were famous. Famous quilts have their own names. She made crazy quilts, which are just bits of scraps sewn together, and then decorated and embroidered with fancy stitches—wheat stitches, briar stitches, flowers, birds, little frogs, and snowflakes. She made Log Cabin quilts and Wedding Ring quilts, and she also made up her own patterns. Her quilts had names like Going Down to the River and Snakes Fall in Love and Watering the Garden. People paid hundreds of dollars for them. Every bed in the castle has a quilt on it that my mother made.

Each of my brothers had a quilt that my mother made just for them. She made my brother Julian a Star Wars quilt, with X-Wing Fighters and Death Stars. She made my oldest brother an Elvis quilt. Up close it’s just strips and patches of purple cloth, all different patterns. But when you back away, you can see that all the bits of different colors of purple make up Elvis’s face—his eyes, his lips, his hair. For my youngest brother, she made a Cats Eat Birds quilt. She sewed real feathers into the cats’ mouths, and little red cloth-patch birds into their stomachs.

She never finished my quilt. We were working on it together. I’m still working on it now. I don’t really want to finish it. In fact, it’s gotten a little bit big for my bed. When I spread it out, it’s almost as big as a swimming pool. Eventually, it will fill up my whole room, I guess. Every night now I sleep on a different bed in the castle, under a different quilt. I pretend that each quilt is a quilt that I have never seen before, that she has just finished making, just for me.

***

I should tell you about my father and my brothers. I should also tell you about my stepmother. My father is very tall and handsome, and also very busy with things like affairs of state and cutting ribbons at the grand openings of grocery stores and presenting awards to writers and musicians and artists and also going to soccer games and football games so that photographers can take his picture. That was how he met my stepmother. He was at the zoo, which had just been given a rare species of bird. He was supposed to be photographed with the bird on his shoulder.

When he arrived, however, the keepers were distraught. The bird had disappeared. Even worse, a naked woman had been found wandering around the grounds. She wouldn’t say who she was, or where she came from. No one could find her clothes. The keepers were afraid that she might be a terrorist, or an anarchist, come to blow up the zoo, or kill my father. It would be bad publicity for everyone.

“Nonsense,” my father said. He asked to meet the woman. The zookeepers protested, saying that this was a bad idea. My father insisted. And so my father’s picture appeared in the papers, holding out his hand to a woman dressed in a long white T-shirt and a pair of flip-flops that one of the keepers got out of the lost and found. The picture in the paper was blurry, but if you looked closely you could see the look in my father’s eyes. He looked like he’d been hit on the head. He looked like he was falling in love, which he was.

The woman, my stepmother, looked small and fragile in the photograph, like a Christmas tree ornament. She had long, feathered hair. The T-shirt hung on her like a tent, and the flip-flops were too big for her.

We still don’t know much about my stepmother. She was from a faraway country, we thought, because she had a slight but unrecognizable accent. She was a little bit cross-eyed, like a Siamese cat. She never brushed her hair. It stuck up in points behind her ears, like horns. She was very beautiful, but she hated noise. My brothers made too much noise. That’s why she turned them into swans.

They came and stood on the lawn this morning, and I fed them dried corn and bits of burnt buttered toast. They came back early, while my stepmother was still sleeping. They honked at me very quietly. I think they were afraid if they were loud, she’d turn them into something even worse. Snails, maybe, or toads.

Some of the other girls at school thought I was lucky to have so many brothers. Some of them said how handsome my brothers were. I never really thought so. My brothers used to pull my hair and short-sheet my bed, and they never helped with my homework unless I gave them my allowance. They liked to sit on top of me and tickle me until I cried. But when my mother died, they all cried. I couldn’t.

My brothers’ names are George, Theodore, Russell, Anthony, William, and Julian. George is the oldest. Theodore is the nicest. Anthony is the tallest. Russell has freckles, and he is allergic to milk. William and Julian are twins, and two years younger than me. They liked to wear each other’s clothes and pretend that Julian was William, and William was Julian. The thing is, all of them look alike now that they’re birds. They all look like twins.

***

My father told us that my stepmother didn’t like noise. They got married at the beginning of the summer. We got to throw rice. We’d only seen my stepmother twice before—once in the newspaper picture, and once when my father brought her home for dinner. There were a lot of important people at that dinner. We ate in the kitchen, but afterward we stood in the secret passageway and spied through the painting that has the eyes cut out.

My future stepmother didn’t eat much dinner, but she had three helpings of dessert. This is when I first became suspicious that she was magic—a witch, or else under an enchantment. Witches and people under spells, magic people, always have sweet tooths. My fairy godfather carries around sugar cubes in his pockets and stirs dozens of them in his coffee, or else just eats them plain, like a horse. And he never gets cavities.

When my father and stepmother came back from their honeymoon, we were all standing on the palace steps. We had all just had baths. The palace steps had just been washed.

My father and stepmother were holding hands. When they saw us, my stepmother let go of my father’s hand and slipped inside the palace. I was holding up a big sign that said, welcome home, dad. There wasn’t any room on the sign for stepmother.

“Hey,” my brother George said, “what did you bring me?”

“Anthony stole my rocket launcher,” Russell said. “It wasn’t me,” Anthony said, “it was Theodore.”

“It was NOT me,” Theodore said, and William and Julian said, “Emma made us brush our teeth every night.”

Everyone began yelling. My father yelled loudest of all.

“I’d really appreciate it if you all tried to be quiet and didn’t yell all at once. Your stepmother has a bad headache, and besides, she’s very shy, and not at all used to loud children,” he said, looking at my brothers. Then he looked at me. “Emma,” he said, “are you still not talking?”

I took out my notepad and wrote yes on it. He sighed. “Does that mean ‘yes, you are talking now,’ or ‘yes, you still aren’t talking’?”

I didn’t say anything. I just smiled and nodded. “Maybe you’d like to show your new stepmother around the castle,” he said.

***

My stepmother was in the library, reclining on a sofa with a damp cloth over her eyes. I stood there for a bit, and then I tapped my foot some. She didn’t move. Finally I reached down and touched her shoulder. Her eyelids fluttered.

I held up my pad of paper. I wrote, I’m Emma. I don’t talk.

She sat up and looked at me. She wasn’t very big. When she stood up, I bet that we would have been the same height, almost, except she was wearing pointy black shoes with tall heels to make her look taller.

I wrote, Dad asked me to show you the castle.

I showed her around the castle. I showed her the kitchen with the roasting spit that the dogs turn, and the microwave, and the coffeemaker. I showed her the ballroom, which is haunted, and the dungeon, which my father had converted into an indoor swimming pool and squash court, and I showed her the bowling alley, which is also haunted, and the stables, and the upstairs bathroom, which has modern plumbing. Then I took her to my mother’s room. The quilt on the bed was Roses and Cabbages Growing Up Together, all pieced together from old green velvet hunting coats and rose-colored satin gloves.

My new stepmother sat down on the bed. She bounced experimentally, holding her head. She stared at me with her slightly crossed eyes. “A nice bed,” she said in a soft, gravelly voice. “Thanks, Emma.”

My mother made this quilt, I wrote. Her quilts are very valuable. Please be careful when you are sleeping. Then I left her there on my mother’s bed. The next day she turned George into a swan. He was practicing his saxophone.

George is my father’s heir. George doesn’t want to be king. George wants to be a saxophonist in a heavy metal band. I was listening to him in the ballroom. He isn’t very good yet, but he likes to have an audience. I sit and listen to him, and he pays me five dollars. He says someday it will be the other way round.

I was embroidering the back of a blouse with blue silk thread. I was trying to embroider a horse, but it looked more like a crocodile, or maybe a dachshund.

My stepmother had been swimming in the pool. She was still in her bathing suit. She came into the ballroom and left puddly footprints all over the waxed and polished black walnut floor. “Excuse me,” she said. George ignored her. He kept on honking and tootling. He smirked at me. “Excuse me,” our stepmother said, a little bit louder, and then she pointed her pinkie finger at him. She flicked her pinkie up at him, and he turned into a swan. The swan—George—honked. He sounded surprised. Then he spread out his wings and flew away through an open window.

I opened my mouth, but of course nothing came out. I stared at my stepmother, and she shrugged apologetically. Then she turned and left, still dripping. Later that afternoon when Anthony set off Russell’s rocket over the frog pond, my stepmother turned him into a swan, too. I was up in the tree house watching.

You’re probably wondering why I didn’t tell someone. My dad, for instance. Well, for one thing, it was kind of fun. My brothers looked so surprised. Besides, at dinner no one missed Anthony or George. My brothers are always off somewhere, camping with friends, or else sleeping over at someone else’s house, or else keeping vigil in the haunted bowling alley. The ghost always shows up in the bowling alley at midnight, with his head in his hand. The pins scream when he throws his head down the lane.

My stepmother had three helpings of pineapple upside-down cake. After dinner, she turned Theodore and Russell into swans. They were banging down the grand staircase on tin trays. I have to admit this is a lot of fun. I’ve done it myself. Not turning people into swans, I mean, sliding down on trays.

I had to open up a window for Theodore and Russell. They honked reproachfully at me as I pushed them out over the windowsill. But once they opened up their wings, they looked so graceful, so strong. They flew up into the sky, curving and diving and hanging on a current of air, dipping their long necks.

How do you do that? I wrote down on my pad. My stepmother was sitting down on the staircase, looking almost ashamed.

“I don’t know,” she said. “It just seems to happen. It’s just so noisy.”

Can you turn them back? I wrote.

“What an excellent inquiry,” she said. “I do not know. Perhaps and we shall see.”

***

William and Julian refused, as usual, to brush their teeth before bedtime. Loudly. I told them, Be quiet, or else.

“Or else what?” Julian screamed at me, his face red with temper.

New stepmother will turn you into a swan.

“Liar,” William said loudly. He said it again, even louder, experimentally. My stepmother, wearing pink flannel pajamas, was standing there, just outside the bathroom door. She stuck her head in, looking pained. Julian and William pretended to be afraid. They screamed and giggled. Then they pretended to be swans, flapping their arms. My stepmother waved her finger at them, and they sprouted wings. They sprouted feathers and beaks, and blinked their black beady eyes at her.

I filled up the bathtub with water, and put them in it. It was the first time they ever seemed to enjoy a bath. Even better, they didn’t have any teeth to brush.

Then I put them outside, because I wasn’t sure if they were house-trained.

The next morning I woke under my favorite quilt, the Rapunzel quilt, with the gray tower, and the witch, and the prince climbing up the long yellow braids. I ate breakfast and then I went outside and fed my brothers. I’d never had pets before. Now I had six. I tried to decide what I liked better, birds or brothers.

When I went back to get more toast, my father was sitting in the kitchen, reading the morning paper. He was wearing the striped purple bathrobe I’d made him for Christmas three years ago. Mom had helped with the cuffs. The hem was a little bit frayed. “Good morning, Emma,” he said. “Still not speaking? Where are the rest of you, anyway?”

I wrote down, New stepmom turned them into swans.

“Ha,” he said. “You’re a funny girl, Emma. Don’t forget. Today I’m dedicating the new school gymnasium. We’ll see you about two-ish.”

***

First there were speeches. I sat with the rest of my grade, in the bleachers, and looked at my new stepmother. I was thinking that the smart thing would have been to buy her earplugs. Whenever my principal, Mr. Wolf, put his mouth too close to the microphone, there was a squeal of feedback. My stepmother was looking pale. Her lips were pressed tightly together. She sat behind Mr. Wolf on the stage, beside my father.

Sorley Meadows, who wears colored lip gloss, was sitting next to me. She dug her pointy elbow into my side. “Your stepmother is, like, tiny,” she said. “She looks like a little kid.”

I ignored her. My father sat with his back straight, and his mouth fixed in a dignified, royal smile. My father can sleep with his eyes open. That’s what my mother used to say. She used to poke him at state occasions, just to see if he was still awake.

Mr. Wolf finished his speech, and we all clapped. Then the marching band came in. My father woke up. My stepmother put her hand out, as if she were going to conduct them.

Really, the band isn’t very good. But they are enthusiastic. My stepmother stood up. She stuck out her pinkie finger, and instead of a marching band there was suddenly a lot of large white hissing swans.

I jumped down out of the bleachers. How mortifying. Students and teachers all began to stand up. “She turned them into birds,” someone said.

My father looked at my stepmother with a new sort of look. It was still a sort of being hit on the head sort of look, but a different sort of being hit on the head. Mr. Wolf turned toward my father and my stepmother. “Your Royal Majesty, my dear mademoiselle,” he said, “please do not be alarmed. This is, no doubt, some student prank.”

He lifted the little silver whistle around his neck and blew on it. “Everyone,” he said. “Please be quiet! Please sit back down.”

My stepmother did not sit back down. She pointed at Mr. Wolf. Mrs. Heliotrope, the French teacher, screamed suddenly. Mr. Wolf was a swan. So was Mrs. Heliotrope. And as I watched, suddenly the new gymnasium was full of birds. Sorley Meadows was a swan. John Riley, who is someone I once had a crush on until I saw him picking his nose in the cloakroom, was a swan. Emma Valerie Snope, who used to be my best friend because we had the same name, was a swan. Marisa Valdez, the prettiest girl in the seventh grade, was a swan.

My father grabbed my stepmother’s arm. “What is going on here?” he said to her. She turned him into a swan.

In that whole gymnasium, it was just me and my stepmother and a lot of swans. There were feathers floating all over in the air. It looked like a henhouse. I pulled out my pad of paper. I jumped up on the stage and walked over to her. She had just turned my whole school into a bunch of birds. She had just turned my father into a bird. She put her hand down absentmindedly and patted him on the top of his white feathery head. He darted his head away, and snapped at her.

I was so angry, I stabbed right through the pad of paper with my ballpoint. The tip of the pen broke off. I threw the pad of paper down.

I opened my mouth. I wasn’t sure what was going to come out. Maybe a yell. Maybe a curse. Maybe a squawk. What if she turned me into a bird, too? “WHAT?” I said. “WHAT?”

It was the first word I had said in a whole year. I saw it hit her. Her eyes got so big. She threw her arm out, pointing her pinkie finger at me. I was pointing at her. “WHAT?” I said again. I saw her pinkie finger become a feather. Her arms got downy. Her nose got longer, and sharp. She flapped her wings at me.

She wasn’t a swan. She was some other kind of bird. I don’t know what kind. She was like an owl, but bigger, or maybe a great auk, or a kiwi. Her feathers looked fiery and metallic. She had a long tail, like a peacock. She fanned it out. She looked extremely relieved. She cocked her head to one side and looked at me, and then she flew out of the gymnasium.

“WHAT?” I screamed after her. “WAIT!” What a mess. She’d turned my family, my entire school into birds, and then she flew away? Was this fair? What was I supposed to do? “I want to be a swan, too! I want my mom!”

I sat down on the stage and cried. I really missed my mom.

Then I went to the school library and did a little research. A lot of the swans came with me. They don’t seem to be house-trained, so I spread out newspaper on the floor for them.

My fairy godfather is never around when you need him. This is why it’s important to develop good research skills, and know how to find your way around a library. If you can’t depend on your fairy godfather, at least you can depend on the card catalog. I found the section of books on enchantments, and read for a bit. The swans settled down in the library, honking softly. It was kind of pleasant.

***

It seems that to break my stepmother’s pinkie spell, I need to make shirts for all of the birds and throw the shirts over their necks. I need to sew these shirts out of nettle cloth, which doesn’t sound very pleasant. Nettles burn when you pick them. Really, I think linen, or cotton, is probably more practical. And I think I have a better idea than a bunch of silly shirts that no one is probably going to want to wear again, anyway. And how are you supposed to sew a shirt for a bird? Is there a pattern? Down in the castle storerooms, there are a lot of trunks filled with my mother’s quilting supplies.

I miss my mother.

Excuse me. I just can’t seem to stop talking. My voice is all hoarse and croaky. I sound like a crow. I probably wouldn’t have gotten a good grade in choir, anyway. Mrs. Orlovsky, the choir teacher, is the swan over there, on top of the librarian’s desk. Her head is tucked under her wing. At least I think it’s Mrs. Orlovsky. Maybe it’s Mr. Beatty, the librarian. My father is perched up on the windowsill. He’s looking out the window, but I can’t see anything out there. Just sky.

I think I’m going to finish the quilt that my mother and I started. It’s going to be a lot bigger than either of us was planning on making it. When I finish, it should be big enough even to cover the floor of the gymnasium.

It’s a blue quilt, a crazy quilt. Silk, corduroy, denim, satin, velvet. Sapphire, midnight blue, navy, marine, royal blue, sky blue. I’m going to patch in white birds with wide white wings on one side, and on the other side I’m going to patch in little white shirts. When I finish, I’m going to roll it up, and then throw it over all the swans I can find. I’m going to turn them back into people. This quilt is going to be as beautiful as sky. It’s going to be as soft as feathers. It’s going to be just like magic.

© 2000 by Kelly Link.
Originally published in A Wolf at the Door and Other Retold Fairy Tales,
edited by Ellen Datlow & Terry Windling.
Reprinted by permission of the author.

***

Cooperation Versus Independence

Dogs establish a communicative relationship early. Ethologists, animal behavior experts, demonstrate the difference between dogs and wolves by presenting the two species with a task: to extract a piece of meat from a cage. The cage is designed so it’s impossible for either species to do so without human intervention, and after a few quick tugs and prods, dogs will invariably look to their human companions with an expression that unmistakably reads, “Give me a hand here, won’t you?” When they run into difficulty, their instinct is to communicate a request for help.

But not the wolf. She will circle the cage, knock it over, and inspect it for structural flaws. She will not look to a human, even a friendly human, to open it. Put next to a dog, the wolf is the model of self-reliance and intellectual curiosity. It doesn’t matter whether the wolf is raised by hand or in the wild; left in your house she will tear open the walls searching for the source of a television broadcast while your dog happily watches reruns of Dora the Explorer.

This doesn’t mean that wolves aren’t remarkably attuned to human communication. Our nearest cousin, the chimpanzee, cannot comprehend the meaning of a human’s pointing gesture. If a researcher presents a chimpanzee with two overturned cups, one empty and the other concealing a tasty treat, and points to the treat-laden cup, the chimp will ignore the gesture, selecting a cup at random. Though dogs and human-reared wolves respond to human pointing gestures imperfectly, they still perform significantly better than random chance. Although chimpanzees have a whole range of gestures that they learn with each other and have been known to approximate American Sign Language, this simple gesture eludes them, even when food is on the line. Perhaps that is one of the reasons ancient humans invited wolves beside their fires: They saw a cognitive kindred spirit, one who could understand their most basic communications, and all the better that it came with warm fur and sharp teeth.

***

Filtering Out the Lies

Of course, what a wolf is capable of and what it is naturally inclined to do are two entirely separate things. A 2009 study published in the journal Public Library of Science One found that while adult human-reared wolves performed as well as dogs in a certain pointing exercise, four-month-old wolf cubs perform significantly worse than similarly aged puppies. Not only that, the wolf cubs are slow to make eye contact with the person doing the pointing. A wolf can be trained to understand what you’re trying to convey, but it’s not in her nature to pay attention.

And why should wolves listen to us? After all, human communication can be confusing and deceptive. If a human shows a dog that he is hiding a desirable object in a certain location—let’s call it Location A—over and over again, then he is conveying to the dog that Location A is where the object lives. If the human then hides the object in a new location (Location B) while the dog is watching, the dog will frequently go to Location A to look for the object. They put their trust in what they were taught by the human, not what they see the human doing.

Dogs make this mistake more often when the human gives communicative signals when hiding the object in first Location A then Location B—such as saying the dog’s name and making eye contact—than when the human offers no communicative signals, suggesting that dogs believe what humans tell them over their own observations. Human infants, with their constant drive to puzzle out what adults are telling them about the world, tend to make the same cognitive mistake; human-reared wolves do not. The wolf’s innate inclination to ignore human social cues focuses her attention on what is actually happening rather than what we are trying to convey. They go to Location B, and never mind what they’ve been told.

***

Only Dogs Talk Back

Even in those instances where wolves listen to us, they may not have much to say in reply. In addition to their keen attention to human speech and body language, dogs developed their own signals for communicating with their human companions. Most dog owners are very used to having conversations with their pets. Dog barks are a language unto themselves, one that humans can recognize given enough time and experience. Dog owners can listen to recordings of dogs barking—dogs they’ve never encountered in their lives—and correctly identify the barks as a warning, an invitation to play, or a demand for food. But dogs don’t only communicate the necessities. To deepen their relationship with humans, dogs use everything they have. They make eye contact with us, wag their tails, and utilize other clear communicative signals. When they want to go out, they’ll stand by the door. When they want a walk, they’ll grab their leash. When they want food, they’ll flip their dishes. All of these are attempts to get humans to understand what’s on their minds.

The wolf is, by contrast, a sphinx. Barking is a rarely used skill among wolves. Even when wolves bark it’s a quick, sharp noise that’s a far cry from the prolonged, rhythmic barking we associate with dogs. They don’t want human attention, or help. They just want to pass quietly by. Perhaps that is part of our fascination with these creatures: They possess some ability to understand us, but little interest in being understood. A dog will tell you what is on her mind; to learn what is on a wolf’s mind, we must do much more than merely listen.

I think the first question has got to be the most obvious: Why Brooklyn?

First, because I’ve stayed there a lot over the last few years, and have come to be fond of it, and it is an iconic place. But the real genesis of this story is that a friend of mine, who lives there, made a blog post one night. Very simply, just about going out to dinner or something. But this was during the first big snowstorm of last winter, and after talking about the unfriendly weather, she closed the post by saying: On our way home, we were eaten by wolves. The story just unspooled itself in my head.

One line in the story really jumped out at me. Anna is talking about the movie planned about the wolves, and she lists off one of the complaints locals have about the movie: “It’ll just bring stupid kids out here wanting to be part of it.” In the movie Shortbus, Justin Bond talks about how all the kids flock to New York because of 9/11, because it stands out as this remarkably authentic event in a time when much of what happens is so shallow. Is authenticity a theme you’ve wrestled with before?

Wow, that’s very perceptive! I love that line and I think it’s very true. As someone who was never drawn to New York like many people are, but came to love it, I’m fascinated with reasons for coming there, reasons for staying. I think there’s this idea that it’s America’s beating heart, and people do go there seeking some kind of authentic experience—and are derided for it, only to become natives in their turn and deride the next wave.

We’re all seeking authenticity because our culture is a culture of images, and saturated with images we start to feel unreal—and so many books and movies and television have told us that urban experience is more real than rural experience, and New York experience the most real of all. Layers of reality interest me—when Sarah Palin talked about her version of real America she was trying to cast a kind of magic spell, to define what was and was not at the most basic level. But she can’t fight against the onslaught of stories that tell us real America is New York (of course it’s all real and I know that, but as long as we keep spinning a narrative of real/unreal I’ll keep poking at it). New York is where the sitcoms are set. It’s where New Years come in. And it’s a place where sometimes terrible things happen.

In fact, after finishing the story, I joked that only now was I a real writer, having written a New York story. Other than London and possibly Paris, I can’t think of another city so often storied, made into narrative.

Anna says she always wears red. In a story about wolves, this definitely raises up visions of “Little Red Riding Hood.” Is this the first time you’ve played with this fairy tale? Do you have any favorite retellings of “Little Red,” or favorite riffings?

[Laughs.] Fairy tales and I go way back. I wrote The Orphan’s Tales, which is a series of novels that contain dozens of original fairy tales in an Arabian Nights structure, as well as Deathless, my most recent adult novel, a retelling of a Russian fairy tale set in Leningrad during WWII. I’ve also written many stories and poems that retell and remix folklore. It’s an obsession of mine.

So yes, of course Anna’s clothes are meant to invoke Red Riding Hood—but she is not Red Riding Hood. Part of the reason I like fairy tales so much is that without really thinking about it or meaning to, we walk in them every day; we organize our lives according to their principles (or the tales reflect our principles, or both—it’s very circular, when you grow up inundated with these stories). We obey the rule of three, we think there is one true love for everyone, and when wolves are about, we sometimes wear red.

I love Anna’s outfit, with the gold ropes and strappy ballet shoes. What inspired it? Actually, there’s a whole lot of fashion going on in this story. How did that element wind up in the piece?

I love fashion, and though I have little or no sewing talent, I love to write about it—clothes are how we present ourselves to the world. Clothes say everything, even the geek choice of “eschewing” fashion and sticking to black t-shirts with ironic/hip slogans on them and jeans—well, that’s a choice, a decision to express a certain statement (i.e., not wearing pink or orange but black; what cultural item the shirt references). It’s a huge gateway into a character; it can say everything about them. It seemed like a natural element here, in such a fashion-conscious city.

This is a new story for you—did you write it since you took the helm over at Apex Magazine? And has digging into editorial work within the realm of short fiction affected your approach to creating short stories?

I did write it since taking over—in fact I think it’s the first short story I wrote since taking over the magazine. I don’t think my own stories have changed because of my editorial work—perhaps I am more conscious of the value of a first line, of what is tired and what isn’t, but mainly I keep the two kinds of work separate. I’ve been experimenting with a more stripped-down, talky style in some of my short fiction, which seemed to fit well with this kind of magical realist story. However, that was in swing before Apex.

Is there anything else you’d like to share, either about the piece or anything new and exciting coming up for you?

Whenever I go back to Brooklyn I think of my wolves, now. I think that’s my favorite part of this piece, how it changed the way I saw the city.

These days, we go to work. We come home. We put on dresses the color of steel and suits the color of winter. We go to cafes and drink lattes with whiskey and without sugar or bars where we drink whiskey without ice and without water. Bars aren’t noisy anymore. It’s a murmur, not a roar. They keep the music turned down so we can talk. So we can tell our wolf stories. Outside the windows, where the frost crackles the jambs, they stand and press their noses to the glass, fogging it with their breath.

Camille sits with her elbow crossing her knee, her dress glittering ice because they like it that way. They watch you, when you shine. Her lavender hair catches the lamplight, expensive, swooping and glossy, rich punk girl’s hair. She says:

“I was walking to the store for coffee. We always run out; I just never think of it until it’s already gone. I thought I’d get some cookies, too. The kind with jam in the middle, that look like a red eye. I guess that doesn’t matter. You know, I always fuck up jokes, too. Anyway, it was snowing, and I just wanted some coffee and cookies and then it was walking next to me. He was walking next to me. A big one, as big as a horse, and white, so white in the snow and the streetlight, his fur so thick your hands could disappear in it. All I could think of was the horse I used to love when I was a kid. Boreal. My mom used to drive me to the stables every morning and I’d brush him and say his name over and over, and the wolf was white like Boreal, and tall like him, and I started running because, well, shit, he’s a wolf. Running toward the store, like I could still get coffee and cookies. He ran with me. So fast, and I had my red coat on and we were running together through the snow, his breath puffing out next to me, and I saw that his eyes were gold. Not yellow, but gold. I was red and he was gold and we were running so fast together, as fast as Boreal and I used to run; faster. We ran past the store, into the park, and snow flew out under my feet like feathers. I stopped by that little footbridge—the wolf was gone and I had just kept on running out into the frozen grass.”

The wolves never cross the bridges. Sometimes they run right up to them, and sniff the air like Brooklyn has a musk and it fades at the edges, like they accidentally came too close to the end of the world. They turn around and walk back into the borough with their tails down. They stop right at Queens, too. They won’t cross the borders; they know their home. For a while no one talked about anything else, and all our friends in Manhattan wanted to come and see them, photograph them, write about them. I mean, wouldn’t you? But there were incidents—like any dog, they don’t like strangers. This girl Marjorie Guste wanted to do a whole installation about them, with audio and everything. She brought a film crew and a couple of models to look beautiful next to them and she never got a shot. The wolves hid from her. They jumped onto the roofs of brownstones, dipped into alleys and crawled into sewer gratings. We could see where they’d gone sometimes, but when MG swung her lens around they’d be gone, leaping across the treetops in the snow.

Geoffrey, despite the name, is a girl. It’s a joke left over from when she was a kid and hated being the four hundredth Jenny in her grade. She’s got green sequins on, like a cigarette girl from some old movie theatre. I love how her chin points, like the bottom of a heart. We dated for awhile, when I was still going to school. We were too lazy, though. The way you just wake up sometimes and the house is a disaster but you can’t remember how it really got that way, except that how it got that way is that you didn’t do the dishes or pick up your clothes. Every day you made a choice not to do those things and it added up to not being able to get to the door over the coffee mugs and paperbacks piled up on the floor. But still, she was at my house the night the wolves came, because laziness goes both ways.

She says: “Most of the time, you know, I really like them. They’re peaceful. Quiet. But the other week I was down on Vanderbilt and I saw one come up out of the street. Like, okay, the street cracked open—you know there’s never any traffic anymore so it was just cold and quiet and the storm was still blowing, and the street came open like it had popped a seam. Two white paws came up, and then the whole wolf, kicking and scrabbling its hind legs against the road to get a grip on it. Just like a fat little puppy. It climbed out and then it bit the edge of the hole it had made and dragged the street back together. I looked around—you know how it is now. Not a soul on the sidewalk. No one else saw. The wolf looked at me and its tongue lolled out, red in the snow, really red, like it had just eaten. Then it trotted off. I went out and touched the place where it broke through. The road was hot, like an iron.”

The wolves have eaten people. Why be coy about it? Not a lot of people. But it’s happened. As near as anyone can figure, the first one they ate was a Russian girl named Yelena. They surrounded her and she stood very still, so as not to startle them. Finally, she said: “I’m lonely”—it’s weird but you tell the wolves things, sometimes. You can’t help it, all these old wounds come open and suddenly you’re confessing to a wolf who never says anything back. She said: “I’m lonely,” and they ate her in the street. They didn’t leave any blood. They’re fastidious like that. Since then, I know of about four or five others, and well, that’s just not enough to really scare people. Obviously, you’ll be special, they’ll look at you with those huge eyes and you’ll understand something about each other, about the tundra and blood and Brooklyn and winter, and they’ll mark you but pass you by. For most of us that’s just what happens. My friend Daniel got eaten, though. It’s surprising how you can get used to that. I don’t know what he said to them. To tell you the truth, I didn’t know Daniel that well.

Seth’s eyes have grown dark circles. He came wearing a threadbare 1950s chic suit: thin tie, gray lapels, wolf pack boy with a rat pack look. The truth is I’ve known Seth since seventh grade, but we never talk about it. We lived on the same sunny broad Spielbergian cul-de-sac. We conquered the old baseball diamond where we, the weird bookish kids, kept taking big steps backward until we were far too outfield to ever have to catch a ball. We’d talk about poetry instead: Browning (Elizabeth only), Whitman, Plath. We came back east hoping to be, what? A writer and a dancer, I guess is the official line. We run with the same crowd, the crowd that has an official line, but we’re not really friends anymore. We used to conjugate French verbs and ride our bikes home through the rain.

He says: “I came out to go to the restaurant one morning and one was sitting in my hallway. He still had snow on his ears; he took up the whole stairwell. He just stood there, looking at me, the snow melting into his fur and the light that never gets fixed flickering and popping. His eyes were dark, really dark, almost black, but I think they might actually have been purple, if I could have gotten close enough. He just stared, and I stared, and I sat down on my doorstep eventually. We watched each other until my shift would have ended. I reached out to touch him; I don’t know why I thought I could, I just liked how black his nose was, how white and deep his fur looked. He made me think of—” And Seth looks at me as though I am a pin in his memory and he wants to pull me out, so that the next part can be his alone, so that I can retroactively never have pulled down willow branches for a crown. “—of this one place I used to go when I was a kid, in the woods by my school, and I’d make little acorn pyramids or mulberry rings on the ground before first period, and they were always gone when I got back, like someone had taken them, like they were gifts. The wolf looked like the kind of thing that might have seen a bunch of sticks and moss and taken them as tribute. But he didn’t let me touch him, he howled instead—have you heard one howl yet? It’s like a freight train. The lightbulb shattered. I went inside like that was my shift, sitting with a wolf all day not saying anything. The next morning he’d gone off.”

Seth was my first kiss. I never think about that anymore.

I know this guy named David—he never comes out to the cafe, but I see him sometimes, sitting on a bench, his long thin hair in a ponytail, punching a netbook with a little plastic snow-cover over it. The snow never stops anymore. You do your best. He’s trying to track them, to see if they have patterns, migration or hunting or mating patterns, something that can be charted. Like a subway map. A wolf map. He thinks he’s getting close—there’s a structure, he says. A repetition. He can almost see it. More data, he always needs more data.

Ruben always looks sharper than the rest of us. Three-piece, bow tie, pocket watch and chain, hair like a sculpture of some kind of exotic bird. Somehow his hair doesn’t really look affected, though. He looks like he was born that way, like he was raised by a very serious family of tropical cranes. He wasn’t, though. He’s a fourth generation why-can’t-you-marry-a-nice-Jewish-girl Brooklynite. He belongs here more than any of us.

He says: “I keep wondering why. I mean, don’t any of you wonder why? Why us, why them, why here? I feel like no one even asks that question, when to me it seems such an obvious thing. I asked my uncle and he said: Son, sometimes you have to just let the world be itself. I asked my mom and she said: Ruben, sometimes I think everything is broken and that’s its natural state. And, well, I think that’s bullshit. Like, okay, it’s either zoological or metaphysical. Either they are real wolves and they migrated here, or they didn’t, and they aren’t.”

Camille interrupts him. She puts her hand on his knee. She says: “Does it matter? Does it really matter?”

He glares at her. You aren’t supposed to interrupt. That’s the ritual. It’s the unspoken law. “Of course it matters. Don’t you ever wake up and hope they’ll be gone? Don’t you ever drink your coffee and look out your window and eat your fucking cruller and think for just a moment there won’t be a wolf on your doorstep, watching you, waiting for you to come out? They could leave someday. Any day.”

But we all know they won’t. We can’t say how we know. It’s the same way we know that Coca-Cola will keep making Coke. It’s a fact of the world.

Ruben is really upset—he’s breaking another rule, but none of us say anything. We don’t come here to get upset. It doesn’t accomplish anything. “I asked one of them once. She’d followed me home from the F train—what I mean is she’d been all the way down on the platform, and when I got off she trotted up after me and followed me—me, specifically. And I turned around in the snow, the fucking snow that never ends, and I yelled: Why? Why are you here? What are you doing? What do you want? I guess that sounds dumb, like a scene in a movie if this were happening in a movie and DiCaprio or whoever was having his big cathartic moment. But I wanted to know so badly. And she—I noticed it was a she. A bitch. She bent her head. God, they are so tall. So tall. Like statues. She bent her head and she licked my cheek. Like I was a baby. She did it just exactly like I was her puppy. Tender, kind. She pressed her forehead against mine and shut her eyes and then she ran off. Like it hadn’t even happened.”

There’s going to be a movie. We heard about it a couple of months ago. Not DiCaprio, though. Some other actor no one’s heard of. They expect it to be his big breakthrough. And the love interest has red hair, I remember that. It seems so far away; really, it has nothing to do with us. It’s not like they’ll film on location: CGI, all the way. Some of the locals are pissed about it—it’s exploiting our situation, it’ll just bring stupid kids out here wanting to be part of it, part of something, anything, and they’ll be wolf food. But shit, you kind of have to make a movie about this, don’t you? I would, if I didn’t live here. Nothing’s real until there’s a movie about it.

Of course people want to be a part of it. They want to touch it, just for a second. They come in from the West Coast, from Ohio, from England, from Japan, from anywhere, just to say they saw one. Just to reach out their hand and be counted, be a witness, to have been there when the wolves came. But of course they weren’t there, and the wolves are ours. They belong to us. We’re the ones they eat, after all. And despite all the posturing and feather-display about who’s been closest, deepest, longest, we want to be part of it, too. We’re like kids running up to the edge of the old lady’s house on the edge of town, telling each other she’s a witch, daring Ruben or Seth or Geoff to go just a little closer, just a little further, to throw a rock at her window or knock on the door. Except there really is a witch in there, and we all know it’s not a game.

Anyway, the outsiders stopped showing up so much after Yelena. It’s less fun, now.

But it’s the biggest thing that will ever happen to us. It’s a gravitational object you can’t get around or through; you only fall deeper in. And the thing is we want to get deeper in. Closer, further, knocking on the door. That’s why we dress this way; that’s why we tell our stories while the wolves watch us outside the cafe window, our audience and our play all at once.

“Anna,” Seth says to me, and I warm automatically at the sound of his voice, straightening my shoulders and turning toward him like I always did, like I did in California when I didn’t know what snow looked like yet, and I thought I loved him because I’d never kissed anyone else. “You never say anything. It’s your turn. It’s been your turn for months.”

I am wearing red. I always wear red. Tiny gold coins on tinier gold ropes ring my waist in criss-crossed patterns, like a Greek goddess of come-hither, and my shoes have those ballet straps that wind all the way up my calves. My hair is down, and it is black. They like it, when my hair is down. They follow me with their eyes. I’ve never said so to Ruben but they are always there when I get off the train, always panting a little on the dark platform, always bright-eyed, covered in melting snowflakes.

I say: “I like listening. They do, too, you know. Sometimes I think that’s all they do: listen. Well. After Daniel—I knew him, I’m not sure if I’ve ever told you guys that. From that summer when I interned downtown. After Daniel, I started feeling very strange, like something was stuck in me. It’s not that I wanted revenge or anything. I didn’t know him that well and I just don’t think like that. I don’t think in patterns—if this, then that. The point is, I started following one of them. A male, and I knew him because his nose was almost totally white, like he’d lost the black of it along the way. I started following him all over the place, wherever he went, which wasn’t really very far from my apartment. It’s like they have territories. Maybe I was his territory. Maybe he was mine—because at some point I started taking my old archery stuff with me. My sister and I had both taken lessons as kids, but she stuck with it and I didn’t. Seth—well, Seth probably remembers. There was a while there when I went to school with a backpack over one shoulder and a bow over the other. Little Artemis of Central California. I started doing that again. It didn’t seem to bother the wolf. He’d run down Seventh Avenue like he had an appointment, and I’d run after him.

“And one day, while he was waiting for the light to change, I dropped to one knee, nocked an arrow, and shot him. I didn’t mean to do it. I didn’t set out to. It doesn’t seem to have happened in a linear way when I think about it. I mean, yes, I followed him, but I wasn’t hunting him. Except I guess I was. Because I’d packed a big kitchen knife and I don’t even remember doing that. You know there’s never any traffic down there anymore, so I just gutted him right there on the median, and his blood steamed in the snowfall, and I guess I brought a cooler, too, because I packed all the meat away that I could, and some organs. It took a long time. I skinned him, too. It’s really hard work, rendering an animal. But there’s an instinct to it. Everyone used to know how to do this. I took it all home and I separated everything out and started curing it, salting it, smoking it.” I twist a big orange glass ring on my finger and don’t look at anyone. “I have wolf sausages, wolf cutlets, wolf bacon, wolf roasts, wolf loin, even wolf soup in plastic containers in my fridge. I eat it every day. It tastes …” I don’t want to talk about how it tastes. It tastes perfect. It tastes new. “They all know me now, I’m pretty sure. Once, a younger one, skinny, with a black tip on her tail, saw me by the co-op and crawled toward me on her belly, whining. I watched her do it, bowing her head, not looking me in the eye. I reached out my hand and petted her. Her fur felt so rough and thick. We were … exchanging dominance. I’ve had dogs before. I know how that works. And I started wearing red.”

I tell them they can come by. There’s plenty of meat to share. It never seems to run out, in fact. They won’t—most of them. They don’t look at me the same way after that. In a week or so Seth will show up at my door. He’ll just appear, in a white coat with fur on the hood, full of melting snowflakes. And I’ll pour the soup into steel bowls and we’ll sit together, with our knees touching.

This is what Brooklyn is like now. It’s empty. A few of us stayed, two hundred people in Williamsburg, a hundred in Park Slope, maybe fifty in Brooklyn Heights. Less towards the bay, but you still find people sometimes, in clusters, in pairs. You can just walk down the middle of any street and it’s so silent you forget how to talk. Everyone moved away or just disappeared. Some we know were eaten, some—well, people are hard to keep track of. You have to let go of that kind of thinking—no one is permanent. The Hasidim were the last big group to go. They called the wolves qliphoth—empty, impure shells, left over from the creation of the world. A wolf swallowed a little boy named Ezra whole. He played the piano.

It snows forever. The wolves own this town. They’re talking about shutting off subway service, and closing the bridges, too. Just closing up shop. I guess I understand that. I’m not angry about it. I just hope the lights stay on. We still get wifi, but I wonder how long that can really last.

We go to the cafe every night, shining in our sequins and suits, and it feels like the old days. It feels like church. We go into Manhattan less and less. All those rooftop chickens and beehives and knitters and alleyway gardeners comprise the post-wolf economy. We trade, we huddle, nobody locks the doors anymore. Seth brings eggs for breakfast most mornings, from his bantams, those he has left. Down on Court Street, there’s a general sort of market that turns into dancing and old guitars and drums at night, an accordion yawns out the dusk and there’s a girl with silk ribbons who turns and turns, like she can’t stop. The wolves come to watch and they wait in a circle for us to finish, and sometimes, sometimes they dance, too.

One has a torn ear. I’ve started following her when I can. I don’t remember picking up my bow again, but it’s there, all the same, hanging from me like a long, thin tail.

Readers responded enthusiastically to Carey’s edgy mixture of intrigue, adventure, and eroticism. She went on to write two more Phèdre novels in the Kushiel’s Legacy series, as well as the Imriel trilogy, which follow the adventures of the young slave-turned-prince Imriel de la Courcel.

In between Kushiel projects, Carey wrote the The Sundering duology, comprised of Banewreaker and Godslayer. The Sundering, a heroic tragedy in the tradition of Tristan and Isolde, has been famously described by George R.R. Martin as “a retelling of The Lord of the Rings from the point of view of Sauron.” Carey also wrote the stand-alone Santa Olivia, an urban fantasy set in the near future. It follows Loup, a genetic hybrid of human and wolf, growing up in the military-occupied town of “Outpost No. 12” (once Santa Olivia, Texas).

Most recently, Carey has penned her third trilogy in the celebrated Kushiel’s Legacy series. Naamah’s Kiss and Naamah’s Curse follow Moirin, a “bear-witch” of the Celt-like Maghuin Dhonn, whose affinity with the titular goddess of love and desire leads her on a series of far-flung adventures. The final volume of the Naamah series, Naamah’s Blessing, will be published in June. Carey recently revealed that she is writing the first book in a new series, tentatively titled Pemkowet Tales.

***

On your website you just announced that you’re working on a new “not-exactly-urban” fantasy trilogy. How long has this been going on? What turned you on to the urban fantasy genre?

I’ve actually been thinking about it for quite awhile but I’ve only been working on it for a couple of months. Honestly, I live in a really quirky little resort town and I’ve always thought it would be fun to do something that was set here.

Do you have any favorite urban fantasy writers or particular tales that have influenced your take on that genre?

It feels like the opposite of that in a way. As I’ve been thinking about this I’ve done a lot of reading, mostly looking for the sort of niches that haven’t been filled. I guess if you go to the original impetus for me in the genre it would be a classic like [Emma] Bull’s War for the Oaks, but there’s been so much flooding the market that I’ve mostly been reading to look at what hasn’t been done.

You’re an author who has pioneered some very strong and unique heroines over the course of your career. I’d be interested to know what you think about the current status of women in fantasy. Do you think we’re seeing more interesting female characters emerge in today’s science fiction and fantasy writing or do you think we could still make some progress in that respect?

I definitely think there’s room for improvement. Obviously in some of the genres—like the explosion of paranormal and urban fantasy—there are a lot of strong female characters, but in classic epic fantasy I would think there’s still quite a dearth. I’ve read several very successful, highly regarded debuts in the last few years that had very, very few female characters.

If I mention a few specific heroines could you give me your thoughts on them?

I’ll try!

Lisbeth Salander from Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

You know, I really don’t like to speak ill publicly of other authors … I didn’t care for those books. I read The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and it was pretty much your classic rape/revenge fantasy. It did not do a lot for me. It was one of those really big buzz books that just left me kind of tepid.

How about Scarlett O’Hara?

Boy! It’s been so long since I’ve seen the movie or read the book … I think she’s a wonderfully iconic character.

Bella Swan from Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series?

[laughs] Pretty passive.

A big theme in your writing is romantic love. You’ve created some very wonderful romantic couples over the course of your career: Phedre and her protector Joscelin from Kushiel’s Dart, the doomed Cerelinde and Tanaros from The Sundering, Loup and Pilar, two teenage girls in love in Santa Olivia. Are there any love stories—real or fictional—that have inspired how you approach the idea of romance in your writing?

Not really! [laughs] I feel bad giving a brief “no” answer to a thoughtful question, but … no. Not that I’m conscious of. That’s one of the tricky things: We’re not always aware of what our influences are.

Much of your work strikes me as operatic in scope. Like an opera, you deal with big emotions, star-crossed lovers and sweeping locales. I know you’re riffing on Tolkien in your Sundering series but there’s just something about it that strikes me as Wagnerian—and when I started reading Santa Olivia I noticed there is a character right up front who lives in a dusty border town and whose sense of love is described as a “little bird” that lives in her heart…. This strikes me as being almost verbatim to what Bizet’s heroine sings about. I have to ask: Are you an opera fan? Do you have a favorite composer or opera?

Not as much as I wish I was. I went through a couple of years where I was going to the opera quite regularly and really enjoyed it. Of those I’ve seen I’d say that Turandot is my favorite. You’re the second person who has pointed out the Carmen connection. That’s not something that was conscious, but it very well may have been a connection my subconscious made.

Has any of your work been optioned for graphic novels or movies?

No. That’s something where every couple of years somebody in the industry expresses an interest and it’s never panned out. The length of my books has always been a challenge for adaptations. The feedback we’ve gotten regarding the movie rights has been a sort of one-two punch: budget and erotic content.

How very ironic, given our sex-obsessed culture.

I know. Fantasy is the one genre that, until quite recently, has been reluctant to explore anything potentially sexy. Although the adaptation of George R.R. Martin’s novel, A Game of Thrones, on HBO could be a game changer.

You recently contributed to one of Martin’s anthologies; Songs of Love and Death. Did you get to work closely with him at all or was it strictly editorial?

He just sent out an invitation and invited me by email. Our communication was pretty minimal—although he plugged Banewreaker and Godslayer, the two books that make up The Sundering, on the “Currently Reading” section of his website a couple of years ago and I had scores of people emailing me to tell me about it. I think it gave my most neglected literary children a little boost!

I have to say that The Sundering may be my actual favorite of what you’ve written. There are pictures of me at the age of six, sitting on my dad’s lap while he’s reading me The Lord of the Rings, so, of course I was really tickled by the way you revised Tolkien in those books.

I’m very fond of them. I think they actually suffered a little from the success of the original Kushiel triology. When I delivered the manuscript the reaction was like: “Oh! This really is different.” I don’t think they were packaged and marketed in such a way that played to their strengths. I wish we could have made people aware that The Sundering is a great big crashing crescendo of a tragedy!

My friend who works with audiobooks reports that the audio recordings of your work are very popular. Have you listened to the audio versions of your work and, if so, has hearing those recordings affected how you perceive your writing?

I have listened to just some small snippets. There’s something about it that makes me acutely self-conscious.

I was just reading somewhere that there’s a school of thought which says an author shouldn’t spend time on little details such as a character’s clothing—but I’m guessing you would disagree with that? I’ve noticed that clothing, especially in the Kushiel series, plays a very integral part in indicating character and also establishing the world.

Oh absolutely. Particulary in Phèdre’s trilogy. I’ve been known to get hung up and unable to progress if I could not envision a significant garment. I wanted to convey this sense of opulence and that’s one of the ways that you can both do that and further character development.

Your fans have also responded enthusiastically to the idea of costumes. You feature many pictures of fans dressed up in Kushiel garb or sporting their tattoos on your website. How does it feel to have inspired people in that way?

When it comes to the tattoo phenomenon it’s pretty humbling. I feel in a lot of ways as though it really has nothing to do with me. I often say that no two people read the same book—reading is such an interactive experience and your imagination is part of what brings the story to life. To know that I’ve written books that have struck such a resonant chord with so many readers is, as I said, humbling. Although, every now and then, just to remind me that it’s really not all about me, I’ll hear of somebody who got the tattoo of Phèdre’s marque—which she earns over the course of her service in the Night Court—just because they liked the design. [laughs] I’m like: “You really should have read the book!”

As far as the costumes go, that’s just pure fun. I love seeing them. I’m delighted there are such creative readers out there who want to take things a step further.

You’re part of a Mardi Gras krewe in your home state. What costumes have you worn for that?

The most memorable costume that comes to mind is Snow White. We always get beads to throw for the event and there was one year when someone got panties: little Mardi Gras thongs. I didn’t realize when I threw my first one that you really had to wrap something around them to give them heft … I saw a friend several rows deep and I thought “Oh! I’ll throw her some panties!” I chucked them into the crowd and they immediately opened up and wafted down towards these two little boys who looked at them and then looked at me with this “Snow White just threw us panties!” expression. I thought: “Ohhhhhh … that’s going to be a weird association for them….”

Switching gears to Santa Olivia: I get the sense that it was very freeing to move from the high fantasy tone of the Kushiel series to the more down and dirty tone in Santa Olivia. What was it like writing that book after having spent so much time perfecting a more elegant tone?

Freeing is definitely a good description. It was a lot of fun. For so long during my struggling writer years I was actually trying to curb what is my naturally baroque voice. All conventional wisdom said “No, no, no! Clean, straightforward prose!” It wasn’t until I began writing the book that became Kushiel’s Dart that I let my natural voice loose. But then, after so many volumes, I felt that I wanted some restraints and a more muscular lyricism. It was a lot of fun to butch things up.

Santa Olivia is also your first novel in a contemporary setting and it explores some contemporary fears including viral contagion and the idea of military occupation. How influenced was that book by current events?

Quite a bit. There are issues I follow closely, or loosely. The idea of building an actual wall to seal off the border of Mexico is one that you see floated out there in the fringe. I did not expect Swine Flu to hit right around the release of the book!

In general, how much of a role do current events play in your writing? Do you find yourself referencing them even when you’re writing in your high fantasy milieu?

Absolutely. Kushiel’s Avatar in particular was written against the backdrop of the beginning of the war in Afghanistan. Paying attention to the actual human toll that violence takes informs my work a lot.

In books like Santa Olivia you capture the sense of high school intrigue very well—and also the sense of being separate or different from your peers. I was wondering if that was your experience growing up, too?

Well, I spent a few years, actually ninth and tenth grade, in a boarding school. It was basically a hundred kids in the woods. Half of them were there, as I was, for higher academics and something that was more stimulating and challenging than public school was offering. The other half was there because they had been kicked out of a larger, more expensive boarding school. It’s a very intense atmosphere emotionally and psychologically—a bunch of adolescents without parental supervision … I think that’s part of the perennial appeal of boarding school novels, in fact: that it is such a crucible of the adolescent experience. Maybe because I had a vivid time I’m still able to access what those years felt like.

After Santa Olivia you returned to Terre D’Ange with Naamah’s Kiss and a new heroine: Moirin of the Maghuin Dhonn. Moirin is a comparatively more sedate heroine than what we’ve seen from you before. After having created so many edgy, dark characters was it challenging to write from the perspective of a character who is comparatively more lighthearted?

Actually it was pretty refreshing. We’d had an awful lot of angst in the Kushiel series and it was refreshing to write a character who was more sort of straight forward. Moirin’s kind of a sensualist. One of the scenes that I felt summed her nature up for me is very early in Naamah’s Kiss when somebody has left her a gift of eggs. Moirin picks one up and licks it to see what it feels like and tastes like. That, to me, just summed up her essential nature.

In both Naamah’s Kiss and The Sundering you do some very interesting things with dragons. How did you want your dragons to be different from dragons we’ve seen before?

In The Sundering I was thinking that, for me, Ursula K. LeGuin’s dragons are always the ultimate dragons. I think I wanted to write a dragon who knows justice. In Naamah’s Kiss I was playing off the idea that, in Chinese culture, these are elemental creatures. He’s so very much a creature of his place, only he’s been deprived of that.

In a similar vein, your characters often seem to have passionate relationships or connections with animals. There’s Moirin and the Great Bear, Loup, who’s sort of wolfy, Carmen’s sense of love being described as a bird, Princess Snow Tiger who has a close connection with the dragon in Naamah’s Kiss … There are many examples of characters being closely linked to animals. I was wondering what your relationship to animals is in your life? Do you have any pets?

I share my house with two cats and one neurotic dog. I have only personally owned one other dog, who was with me for fourteen years, and he was a really excellent companion. So I certainly understand that bond.

You’re known for your strong research skills and you’re now working on your sixth series. Has the amount of research needed to flesh out so many unique worlds ever grown overwhelming?

Yeah, actually. In the process of writing Naamah’s Blessing I kind of hit the wall a bit. Part of it is set in the New World so I’m riffing on, initially, Aztec culture and in addition to all of the logistic research to bring the world to life, trying to really wrap my head around human sacrifice was a toughie.

You have definitely delved into some darker subjects. For the first Kushiel trilogy you researched BDSM and for the Imriel cycle you explored the experiences of abused children. I’m imagining that at some point that research tested your comfort level. Did you ever encounter anything that was just too dark?

Honestly, the research is not as challenging as bringing it to life. I would say that easily hands down in terms of both research and writing, writing the whole sequence in Daršanga in Kushiel’s Avatar was the most difficult. Even though in research you’re reading real stories and real incidents, to bring them to life when writing you have to internalize it to so much more of a degree that for me, personally, it’s more challenging.

Has your research ever brought any new practices or beliefs into your life?

I’m sure it has. I can’t think of anything off the top of my head.… Actually, my interest in Yoga probably followed the writing the Naamah books.

What aspects of your writing do you feel have grown easier over time?

I can’t really say that it gets easier! [laughs] Each book has its own unique set of challenges and in some ways, having written so many big, sprawling books with a heck of a lot of plot in them I do find myself, as I cycle though ideas throughout the day, going “Ooo! What a great id—oh no. I did that.” There are only so many literary tropes and finding a way to make them fresh can be challenging. Like, in Kushiel’s Mercy I thought, “Am I really going to do the amnesia thing? How can I make this creative and fun and interesting and compelling?” What I came up with was to kind of double down on the whole thing and have two characters, not remembering either who they are or aspects of their lives, go through the entire process of falling in love again.

So when you are struggling to come up with ideas, what’s a bad day of writing?

This is actually an area where I can say things have gotten easier in that I’m experienced enough that I know when to push and when not to push. A bad day would be not knowing and trying to push through and keep writing when what I really need to do is step back and give myself twenty-four hours away from it.

What’s a really good day?

There are always really juicy, fraught scenes that I know are going to take place in the future. Working towards those is a reward for all the transitional or expository bits that aren’t quite as exciting until you get to one of those really good ones. When you’re writing it, nailing it, that’s a perfect writing day.

As your readers know and as you recently reiterated on your website you like to play with conventional storytelling tropes. You’ve written about women who are refreshingly unashamed of their sexuality and bad-guys who are more compassionate than good guys. Are there any tropes you are hoping to explore in the future?

Not that I can articulate at this point.

So we’ll just have to wait and see?

[laughs] Hopefully it will be worth the wait.

How did you decide to center your story around the song of the nightingale? What is it about this sound that makes it so evocative?

This story was originally published eight years ago in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, so I find myself reaching into dark territory to answer your question. Truthfully, I don’t remember why I made the choices I did. I wrote it initially as part of a failed novel in which the protagonist was dealing with the traumatic issues of the “novel’s” inciting incident by writing retellings of mythic stories.

I think the idea of a bird singing to the dark creates a tension that exists in opposites, in this case, a pleasing tension. One function of tension in fiction is to create a pull between opposites, which gives a sense of stretching space. Within that space there is opportunity for a reorganization of reality, and thus a foundation for story.

I often like to pull questions directly from the text: “Why uproot the beautiful flower to expose its ugly source?”

Well, you know, no one has to. I suppose there are people who live completely productive, happy, generous lives without even considering the ugliness of humanity. But in considering questions of what it means to be human, one has to look at it entirely.

Why would Pandion give Procne to Tereus?

Pandion considered his daughters to be his property. Tereus had helped Pandion out and he offered his daughter as property.

The story of Procne and Philomela is ancient and has been told and retold many times by many storytellers, from Ovid to Sophocles to Chaucer to Margaret Atwood. What is it about this story that makes it so timeless? When sitting down to write this story, why did you think it deserved another retelling?

Mythic tales tend to be formed within that tension of opposites, in a world where nothing is certain, even the behavior of the gods. In Literature and the Gods, Roberto Calasso quotes Stéphane Mallarmé (who is incorrectly translating the Reverend George W. Cox): “If the gods do nothing unseemly, then they are no longer gods at all.” Leaving aside the literary mystery of what was meant versus what was said, I do think this notion of god as possessing an expansion of human traits is particularly fascinating, comforting as it might be frightening (there’s that tension again) to a population often in search of redemption for the burden of human existence.

I’d like to take a moment to talk about structure. The central bulk of your story is a retelling of the Procne and Philomela myth. This myth is bookended by a series of questions, and the text contains scattered modern references throughout (i.e. “… candy games and Pokémon hours, teenagers glued to the power of screens, TV, computer, the messy world of tactile sensation diverged …”). How did this structure come about? What is the intended significance of the format?

Of the three myths I chose to retell for the failed “novel,” this was the one that retained its traditional setting, yet I did want it to speak to the modern concerns of the “novel’s” protagonist.

So, what’s next for M. Rickert? Any upcoming publications you would like to announce?

My recent collection, Holiday, came out this past November. I wrote the stories, so I can’t really comment fairly on that part of the content, but Tom Canty created beautiful art for the cover and interior illustrations.

I have a short story, “The Corpse Painter’s Masterpiece,” coming out in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.

I also have a short story, “Burning Castles,” coming out in a young adult anthology edited by Jonathan Strahan, tentatively titled Under My Hat: Tales from the Cauldron.

That’s it. After several failed attempts I am once again working on a novel. Send me good wishes or dark chocolate, for I am either a fool or a writer.

High schools still insist on a history prerequisite for graduation but let’s face it, our brightest minds are not in universities bent over papyrus and yellow-paged books, but surfing the Web and unleashing the awesome power of space, selling the present for brighter teeth and mobile lives and what’s really important here? Ghosts? Even those that drop feathers (germy, potentially full of disease) and sing golden songs in the dark? Very nice. But what’s the point?

Graveyards creak with too many bones, and the weight of headstones, and when the wind blows the air is dusty with the dead. Ah life, its hoary inevitability. What’s the point? Progress promises, as it always has, immortality, but for now there is only life and it points to death and after that, there are all sorts of theories, but the only thing certain is decay, the rattle of bones and dust. So who can blame us for loving the nightingale’s song in the dark and forgetting the rest?

***

THE STORY OF THE NIGHTINGALE’S SONG

Philomela and Procne are sisters who play in the grass or by the stream from a time when children played like that, with each other and imagination. But let’s not get too sentimental here. Things happened then that today, in all our imperfect knowledge, we would never thrust upon a young girl. Right? For instance, once, when there was a plague of locusts, green-eyed and scrying, the earth undulating with their greedy mandibles, a friend of theirs who menstruated in the corner of her house was forced out to walk amongst the insects and bleed over the crunch of them beneath her bare feet, to cast away the plague, with her womanly power, which was not immediately successful, and when she returned, weeping and bitten, locusts in her hair and on her skirt, the adults swatted at her as if she was one of them, until all the locusts were corpses, and in a way she was too, her eyes like shallow water.

And there was war. Great and savage battles where men actually saw who they killed and even had the blood of the dead on their hands and it splattered on their faces, in their beards, and it took weeks sometimes to comb it all out. The girls’ father, Pandion, was in just such a war, even as they played by the stream, he fought for the reason humans still fight.

In frustration Pandion calls for a mercenary, a great fighter who will help him to win, and Tereus takes the job and slays some men and also plots battle strategies that win the war. Tereus combs the blood from his beard with bones of Pandion’s slain, and when the other men complain, he laughs, because to him, it’s all the same. The dead are the dead, and that is the only victory.

Pandion thinks Tereus is like a son. A great warrior son. Come home with me, he says, we will settle payment there. You will feast with us and celebrate. Tereus doesn’t really care but he is hungry and likes the sound of sleeping in a bed, though in reality this disappoints him and soon he has set up a tent on the castle grounds which everyone thinks is really funny but nobody comments on, except the girls, who are innocent, and do not understand what Tereus does for a living.

What Tereus does now is sit in the tent and sharpen his swords and watch the girls playing by the stream. Procne, the older, her hair in a braid that comes undone as she runs in her muslin, still shaped more like bones than woman, and the little one, Philomela, her red hair long and in wild disarray of grass and clover, her dress stained with green, her little girl laughter and screams larking through the meadow, and for a moment Tereus stops sharpening and something like a smile plays at his lips.

Pandion, seeing this, celebrates the obvious. It is clear what Tereus wants for payment. Tereus nods, it’s true, and there’s no shame in it, for there’s no shame in him. When Pandion brings the wrong daughter, the older one, Procne, Tereus accepts her. What does it really matter? One thing Tereus knows is a body is just a body, one much the same as the other. Blood and bone. Skin and hair. Teeth.

What a wedding! What a feast! Roasted hummingbirds, and roasted larks. Sugared flowers and stag’s blood, and twelve pipers, and mead, pomegranates, and shank of deer and lamb and cakes decorated with violets; and dancing girls, and the young bride, her cheeks red as apples, her rounded lips, her eyes all shining. All this for me? she thinks. Then glances at Tereus. He sits grinning, the great warrior, watching Philomela, a brother to her now. What did they mean, the ladies who dressed her, warning her of his sword’s sharp thrust? He grins and claps. My husband, she thinks, I shall not fear him, he is dangerous only in war.

Well, innocence. Even now, we have our innocence. In spite of the worst that we know of ourselves, we still have innocence. The nightingale’s song, for instance. We hear only that, and forget the rest, just as generations to come will remember Columbine only as a flower.

So Procne had her innocence and it was thrust from her, given up by her father to Tereus, who enjoyed it, I guess you could say. Joy may not be the right word. At any rate, they were married and the marriage was consummated. He took her to Dailus, which lay in the high pass and she soon gave birth, in a torment of blood and pain, to Itys. She suckled baby and husband until her breasts were always sore and between these tasks she did needlework and thought often of her sister, dear, dear Philomela, who plays beside the stream and pretended they were still together, while Tereus, in a battle-free period, wandered restless through the fields, slicing wildflowers with his sword and also thinking of Philomela, her glorious red hair, her little girl smile.

When Tereus leaves, unexplained, to bring Philomela to Dailus, Procne does not guess the reason for his absence but shifts Itys to the right breast and remarks to the suckling babe, that whatever the reason for his departure, she is glad of it. Oh, but if only she could see her dear sister once more.

Why is it that evil is good’s opportunity? If only Tereus was speaking the truth when he told Pandion that Procne missed her sister so much he had come for her, to bring her to her sister as a sort of May Day gift. If only, as Philomela squealed with delight and packed her little sack with muslin dresses and needlework and flower garlands and colored ribbons, Tereus, who waited in the hall with Pandion, was thinking of bringing Philomela to her sister, of Procne’s smile, instead of Philomela’s pretty lips. If only he was interested in happiness.

Philomela is going on a journey! Philomela is going to see her sister. Goodbye Nurse. Goodbye Cook. Goodbye little dog. Goodbye birds. Goodbye Papa, goodbye. Goodbye house. Goodbye stream. Goodbye meadow.

Goodbye everything she ever was and dreamt of, though she does not know this as Tereus helps her to his horse, and wraps his great arms around her. Goodbye innocence. Goodbye.

Somewhere between Pandion’s castle and Dailus it happens. He takes her into the forest where she chats happily as she picks flowers for her sister until Tereus pushes her to the ground and rapes her. How much shall be described? The sky was blue with two fat clouds, one in the shape of a bird, the other like a sleeping dog. The ground was bumpy and a sharp stick jutted in her back. The sun shone through the leaves, that dappled color, as if she were a fish in the stream. There was one flower just near enough to observe closely, purple lips and a red center; the green stem bent slightly, a tiny white bug on the second leaf. When Tereus is finished he is not completely satisfied. This girl talks too much. He cuts out her tongue and casts it into the brush. She screams and bleeds and weeps. He salves the wound with curing plants he stuffs in her mouth and then, he rapes her again. The birds sing, the horse paws at the ground, a chipmunk twitters in a tree, a squirrel scurries past but she is silent. When he removes the curing leaves the bleeding has stopped. He mounts the horse, pulls her up in front of him. They continue on their journey to Dailus.

Why remember? Why tell this tale of horror? Why does evil happen? Why does it happen so often to children and what does the nightingale have to do with this tongueless child, this evil act, this sister with Itys at her breast who, like his father, never seems satisfied?

Tereus brings Philomela to Dailus but he does not bring her home. Rather, he brings her to his house in the country, where he locks her in a room. He hires good servants who are comfortable with keys, and unquestioning of tongueless, imprisoned girls, to bring her food and water, silks and threads to keep herself busy in between him until at last he leaves. She watches him from the window, riding away on his horse, she watches his great arms and broad back recede to a dot until he is gone and then she begins stitching, a picture story of sorts. When words are taken, what remains?

She sends back the trays of bread and cheese, meat and fruit. The cook frowns at the empty water bowl. What will happen if the prisoner dies while the master is gone? It is clear that is not his intention. Next meal the cook outdoes herself and prepares a meal of roasted quail stuffed with chestnuts and sliced apples dipped in honey and a bowl of sunflower seeds and millet. This time when the tray is returned the roasted quail is untouched and the sliced apples are brown and there are two flies in the honey but the sunflower-millet bowl is empty except for a small stitched cloth of a red haired girl smiling and this is the first time anyone, ever, has given the cook a present. The next day Philomela’s tray has four bowls of sunflower seeds and millet and even a little flower which is meant as decoration, but comes back with a crushed appearance as though Philomela had thrust it to her lips for its nectar so the next day the cook sends several flowers and six bowls of sunflower seeds and millet and all the flowers come back crushed, and five of the bowls empty and in the corner of the tray is a small square of fabric stitched with the picture of a sun, even though the day is rainy. The cook puts the fabric into her apron pocket and imagines collecting dozens of them and stitching them into a quilt.

And perhaps that’s what would have happened, if that’s all there was to Philomela’s needlework, but in her lonely little room she stitched the sad story of the girls playing, a wedding, the red haired girl alone, the groom’s return, the girl with him on the horse, the flowers she was picking, the man astride the girl, the knife near her throat, the tongue held up, the girl weeping, the house in the country, the window with the girl sitting in it, sewing. This she wrapped in a muslin dress and tied with ribbon addressed to her sister, returned on the tray with another package for the cook, who paid a messenger boy from her own savings to deliver the package safely and then unwrapped hers, a lovely shawl stitched with daisies which she took to wrapping around her shoulders at night, in her lonely little room off the kitchen, and even if no one saw, and it didn’t make sense to wear it, she loved to do this, and it became her favorite time of day, though never, for even one moment, did it occur to her to free the girl.

When Procne receives the package, she recognizes the muslin dress it is wrapped in and unfurls the ribbon eagerly. Itys sleeps, a rare occasion, and Tereus has gone to work, so for Procne this is a moment of peace, and now this missive from her sister, a moment of joy. She unfurls the ribbon, shakes out the cloth and reads the pictures in horror. She understands every unspoken word, every stitch. She recognizes the little house in the country, not even a day’s distance. She brings Itys to the wet nurse who secretly moans when she sees the greedy suckler and his mother approaching, mounts her horse and rides to free her sister, her little tongueless sister, who used to sing and chat so happily. Procne rides and plots endlessly. Revenge.

The human need for balance. Restitution. The endless accounting of gain and loss. The urge to unburden the evil act, return it to its source. What to do for the tongueless girl?

When Philomela hears the horse approaching she weeps in the corner of her room, she curls up into herself, like a little bird, her head beneath her arms, her bony elbows jutted out, she tries to make herself smaller and smaller as the footsteps approach and the keys rattle. When the door opens she does not look until she hears, no, it cannot be, but yes, she hears her sister’s voice. “Philomela,” her name lovingly spoken. She raises her face of tears and sees Procne, her dark hair wild from the ride; her purple gown all wrinkled, just as she used to be in the meadow, by the stream. Behind her stands the cook, her white pasty mouth open, the ring of keys in her doughy hands.

“Oh, sister, dear sister.” Procne bends to embrace her and Philomela flinches but then remembers who is with her and leans into the loving arms. Procne holds her and thinks how weightless she has become, as if her tongue was what held her to the Earth. She carries her out of the room and down the stairs and out the door to a horse, saddled and waiting as ordered. This she mounts with Philomela before her, a tiny package, a little girl, a living wound. She gallops off leaving only dust and the cook who dabs her eyes and wipes her nose and goes back inside to her pot of onion soup.

Procne brings Philomela to her house. Not their father’s, but who can blame her for this choice? After all, it is their father who gave them to Tereus, yes, innocent of his evil intentions, but perhaps he should not have been so gullible. At any rate, it is clear this matter rests in their hands. Tereus is still away, killing the enemy, no that’s not right, Procne amends, Tereus is still away killing. It is hard to remember that he has no enemy, only those he is paid to kill and those he is not, and they are interchangable. What ever was her father thinking to give her to such a man?

Procne retrieves Itys from the wet nurse and he immediately cries and grabs at her breast. She unlaces and lets him suckle greedily. Philomela flits about the room and shakes her head at the various plans of revenge Procne offers until at last, in exasperation, Procne says, “Well, what?” Philomela raises one small white hand and points at Itys who suckles with wide open eyes, the color of his father’s. Procne looks down at him and finds the answer to the question she most often thinks when he is suckling, will this never end? Will he want me with his teeth? She looks up at Philomela, who stands beside the fire, and she nods. Yes. Itys.

When news arrives of Tereus’s return from battle, Philomela hides in a great basket in the corner, curled up as if in a nest, and Procne turns the roasted meat on the spit, well done, they thought he’d return sooner, but this isn’t really about appetite anyway.

He roars into the house, the great beast of a man. Dried blood clings to his beard and eyebrows. He is hungry and lusty and says he will eat, then have her and then, he thinks he needs some time in the country. She feeds him the roasted child. He devours it … innocently. When done, he pats his full stomach, undoes his belt and this is when Philomela rises from the basket and he realizes he’s been found out. But oh well, he’s still the master. Then, Procne tells him.

“You just ate Itys.”

He roars, as you can imagine. He reaches for the fire ax and chases the two sisters, whose victory seems rather short. They are weeping, and he is screaming and the gods see this and decide it must be put to a stop. Why now, and not sooner? Where were they when he raped Philomela in the woods? Where were they when he cut out her tongue? Where were they when Itys reached for his mother’s breast and she unsheathed the knife instead? Where are the gods most of the time? But at last they stop it, with a wave of godly hands. Tereus is changed to a hawk, Procne a swallow, and Philomela, a nightingale.

Later, the child’s bones are found by the cook who unwittingly feeds them to the dogs. She thinks they have all gone to the house in the country and the cook there, wrapped in her daisy shawl, and fingering the fabric stitched of a smiling girl, thinks they all remain in town, and the hawk swoops down to catch a gopher, the swallow flies to Capistrano, and the nightingale discovers, on one dark and starry night, that she can sing, so she does.

***

At close, the questions remain. Why do people hurt each other? Is evil someone born, or something between us, something ephemeral that grows in circumstance that allows it? Why do girls and women, even today, in our modern and knowledgeable world, suffer rape, and mutilation? Why does anyone suffer? And what does fable, myth, story have to do with these important questions, certainly worthy of a search on the Web in between those auction sites where there are some really good deals, and at least the questions are real and the merchandise is real, even movies are real, sort of, because they have real people in them at least, but fiction? What’s the point? Everyone knows a bird is just a bird, a song is just a song, a story just a story. Why pretend it means anything?

How do stories help us solve the terrible riddle of being human? How do we take all our suffering, the rapes, and wars, and children dying, and turn it into something like a bird song in the night? How do we become better than we’ve been? And how do we get from here to there, when the gods seem so reluctant to help? Could it be, even they don’t know the answers?

Maybe inquiry isn’t what we need. Maybe the more we pick at the fabric of our beliefs, we find how fragile it all really is, and how there’s nothing behind the cloth except empty space, an infinite sky that cannot support the gravity of our assertions, how weightless we become without them. Maybe it’s better not to think about that.

Maybe it is just enough to know that the nightingale was once a brutalized child, and when all the world is dark, she sings.

© 2003 by M. Rickert.
Originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.
Reprinted by permission of the author.

***

The Weirdly Fantastic: Lovecraft Rock

Weird Tales was one of the earliest fantasy magazines, and H.P. Lovecraft made a name for himself in its pages. His work spans the sister genres of science fiction, horror, and fantasy. Lovecraft’s most important works establish a mythos he spun from science fictional elements (traveling space creatures that settled prehistoric Earth), folkloric references (at least one of his recurring monsters is drawn from Egyptian mythology), and his own alternate history of the occult. The result is a creepy fantasy universe referenced in books, games, and dozens of rock songs.

Many musical groups have taken their very identities from Lovecraft and his mythos. For example, the band H.P. Lovecraft was an early folk rock/psychedelia group that sought permission from the author’s estate before taking his name as their own (although later, the band would shorten their name to Lovecraft, and later still, Love Craft). H.P. Lovecraft is best known for their unique combination of operatic and folk singing, combined with rich orchestration to create a multi-layered eerie sound. Their most successful original work is the song “The White Ship” (inspired by the Lovecraft short story by the same name), released in 1967, but which you can still catch some late nights on independent radio stations.

Other bands styling themselves after Lovecraft’s works include Canadian rockers The Darkest of the Hillside Thickets, whose name references the Lovecraft short story “The Tomb,” a tale of a young man so obsessed with a mausoleum hidden in “the darkest of the hillside thickets” that he goes insane. Most of the band’s songs and albums explore Lovecraft stories. All in all, there have been four bands named “Arkham,” a town mentioned in several Lovecraft works, and one rockabilly group named The Arkhams. Even Lovecraft’s monsters have been honored with offerings of band names: Shub-Niggurath, a forest being, has given her name to both a French progressive rock group and a Mexican metal band.

But a band doesn’t need a Lovecraftian handle to be inspired by him. With works emphasizing the occult and dark forces, it’s no surprise Lovecraft’s fiction has made appearances in many metal songs. Black Sabbath produced the 1970 classic “Behind the Wall of Sleep,” based on the short story “Beyond the Wall of Sleep.” Metallica recorded “The Call of Ktulu” and “The Thing That Should Not Be”—each an homage to Cthulhu, a tentacled and winged monster appearing in several Lovecraft tales—and “All Nightmare Long,” inspired by a story about time-traveling monsters called the Hounds of Tindalos (the Hounds are inventions of Lovecraft’s, but the story Metallica referenced was “The Hounds of Tindalos,” by Frank Belknap Long, a good friend of H. P. Lovecraft). The monstrous Cthulhu is further described and even summoned in two songs by Michigan metal band The Black Dahlia Murder: “Thy Horror Cosmic” and “Throne of Lunacy.” And for those with a taste for more progressive rock, Dream Theater included a Lovecraft monster in their recordings—”The Dark Eternal Night” is about Nyarlathotep, a quasi-Egyptian creature from Lovecraft’s mythos.

With all of these musical offerings, Lovecraft’s tribute-hungry Elder Gods would be pleased with themselves. The magicians and wizards who toiled so hard to translate the forbidden works of Lovecraft’s fabled Necronomicon couldn’t have spread the message of the weird and otherworldly half as well as these hard-rocking bands.

***

Lord of the Rock: Tolkien

In The Lord of the Rings and its related texts, J. R. R. Tolkien created a detailed world of magic and personal valor. Its themes, settings, and creatures launched high fantasy as an important genre, and it didn’t take long for rock music to begin absorbing his creations.

Tolkien’s work drew significantly on Old English and Norse myths, and many readers have found connections between The Lord of the Rings and Wagner’s Ring Cycle. With these roots, it’s no surprise that several Scandinavian bands have played homage to his works. Amon Amarth, a Swedish death metal band whose music primarily focuses on Viking themes of war and adventure, took their name from one of Tolkien’s languages; Amon Amarth is one of the names for Mount Doom. And while metal giants Dimmu Borgir are best known for their darkly medieval look, their vocalist’s stage name (Shagrath) is borrowed from one of Tolkien’s orcs. Orcs were important to Norwegian band Burzum, too, whose name not only means “darkness” in Orcish, but whose original band name was “Uruk-Hai,” after a particularly violent troop of orcs. The group’s front man even went by the stage name Count Grishnackh, a moniker taken from the orc leader.

Many musicians have touched on Middle-earth in their songs. Led Zeppelin wrote at least two songs that have clear Tolkien references in the lyrics (“The Battle of Evermore” and “Ramble On”); Rush recorded the song “Rivendell.” But some bands made Tolkien’s world their own stomping grounds. Blind Guardian is so well known for their Tolkien references that in Metal: The Definitive Guide (Outline Press Ltd, 2007), Gary Sharpe-Young describes the band as “middle-earth metal.” The Finnish band Battlelore not only draws all its lyrical inspiration from Tolkien, but its members often perform in middle-earth styled costumes.

The depth and exuberance of Tolkien fan references in rock music has helped promote wide-spread acceptance of fantastical elements in the musical world. There are many bands who might not directly reference Tolkien’s characters or stories but who still enjoy a high fantasy motif in their appearance or lyrics. Groups like Dragonforce and Skyclad routinely write songs about dragons, swords, and nobility. And it’s hip to dress in fantasy costume. GWAR regularly takes to the stage in full-body armor, although their style is more over-the-top than stylish. But more fashion-conscious examples range from Stevie Nicks’s “hippie-elf couture” ensembles to Lady Gaga’s Red Queen costume. Fantasy is apparently an au courant flavor of rock.

***

From the Ministry of DIY Magic: J.K. Rowling

The newest wizard on the rock block is Harry Potter. The teenage wizard has spawned an active fan culture since his appearance on the literary scene in 1997, including a number of DIY pop bands. Fans dubbed the motley music scene “wizard rock,” and it stuck.

The first Harry Potter-themed song was probably “Ode to Harry,” written in 2000 by pop-punk band Switchblade Kittens, but two brothers in Massachusetts blew up the genre when they founded the band Harry and the Potters. Joe and Paul DeGeorge started making music about J. K. Rowling’s universe as a joke, but soon found themselves traveling the United States, playing gigs in libraries and backyards. They were joined by groups like Draco and the Malfoys, The Whomping Willows, and The Luna Lovegoods. The Wizrocklopedia currently lists close to 880 bands.

Most of these “wrock” bands perform in costumes pulled from J.K. Rowling’s books, with the musicians’ stage personas drawn from characters in the stories. Like the novels, there is a distinct element of social consciousness to wizard rock music; bands have created fundraisers to help fight social injustice and buy books for underprivileged children. Lyrics in many songs, especially by genre leader Harry and the Potters, reflect upon individual responsibility and friendship in dark times. It’s rock with consciousness—and magic.

***

There’s a reason fantasy writers J. K. Rowling, J. R. R. Tolkien, and H. P. Lovecraft have inspired so much great music. They are world builders par excellence, designers of universes big enough for not only their own imaginations, but dozens of other writers and musicians who have wanted to traverse the same realms. These three authors alone have created some of the most memorable occultists, magicians, and wizards in the genre.

Wizards and magicians play important roles in fantasy literature. They bring wisdom and magic to their universes. They even the odds in battles too large for ordinary people. These same qualities have brought them to the rock show. Fantasy rock music and fantasy novels offer their fans a place to escape the ordinary world with its prosaic difficulties. Listeners or readers can enfold themselves in themes that our hyper-rational modern society often downplays or denies: personal heroism, adventure, supernatural experience. These are components of human existence we hunger for. As the DeGeorge brothers said in their song “Voldemort Can’t Stop the Rock”:

We all know that there is nothing we like more
Than watching the wizards rock it out like this.

Sauron, Cthulhu, and Death Eaters be warned: Wizards were meant to rock.