Twice Told Tales

(I stole that from Hawthorne. Sorry Natty.)
Retold faerie tales are such fun to read. You get to experience the writer's thoughts on a traditional tale, sometimes told in a familiar manner, oftentimes as a completely new approach. I haven't read many novels of retold tales, but I have volumes of anthologies of them. Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling gave us these magnificent collections of tales: Snow White, Blood Red; Black Thorn, White Rose; Ruby Slippers, Golden Tears; Black Swan, White Raven; Silver Birch, Blood Moon; Black Heart, Ivory Bones. I bought Snow White, Blood Red when I was a senior in high school; it took me 25 years, but I now own the whole set. (I neglected homework for 3 days while I read the whole set back to back. It was a wonderful weekend.) Tanith Lee produced Red As Blood, or Tales From the Sisters Grimmer, giving her readers a heartbroken dying god as the Pied Piper and a woefully misunderstood queen in Snow White. Angela Carter started it all with The Bloody Chamber, and Theodora Goss curated her own collection in Snow White Learns Witchcraft. Scholar and storyteller Jack Zipes has several collections of retold tales (the best is Don't Bet on the Prince) I'm not anywhere near to scratching the surface of the vast amount of retold tales available for fantasy and faerie fans, these are just the ones on my shelves. With so many great names of literature retelling traditional tales, who am I to turn my nose up at it? (Then again, who am I to think that I can meet those greats?) Here is a snippet of a new piece I am working on, a YA retelling of Twelve Dancing Princesses, set in nineteenth-century Massachusetts.

Twelve Dreaming Princesses by Nicole Kapise-Perkins

Every summer of my childhood, as far back as I can recall, my family traveled to the coast. We’d stay in our ramshackle cottage perched on a bluff overlooking the ocean, shadowed by monstrous pines, mysterious in their darkness. My eleven sisters and I would dance in a ballroom of trees to the waves’ orchestral movements, twining flowers and vines in our hair as we dreamed of the time when we would be permitted to attend a real ball, wrapped in cobwebby silks.

Our parents indulged us, allowing us to scramble all day among rocks and flotsam washed up by the waves. Shells and stones were our jewels, and we packed them carefully in oak chests hand-carved by our father with scenes from our favorite bedtime tales and our names inlaid in the cover with ivory. Each box sat at the foot of each bed, all twelve in a row under the eaves of the cottage roof, each covered with a quilt hand-stitched by our mother in each of our favorite colors and shades. The quilts, a rainbow with peach, lemon, seafoam, starlight, scarlet, lavender, pine, sky blue, rose, sunset orange, midnight blue, even one black, were a cacophony of cloth, as our mother had stitched them from satin, wool, silk, cotton, linen, brocade, and panels of lace. The walls of our attic room were unadorned plain wood, the only ornament being snowy white gauze curtains hanging at either end of the attic.

Bedtime was when we were sleepy, meals when we hungered. It seems we always ate outside, the dining room being too small for the crowd of daughters our parents were raising; regardless, the scarred nine-foot table hosted only eight mismatched chairs, while the small butcher-block kitchen table stood with only two tall backless stools. A cracked ceramic bowl filled with apples sat in the middle of the table, apples picked from the tree that grew beside the door of the cottage and stored in the cottage’s cool cellar pantry through the winter, apples that my sisters and I refused to eat, fearing the dark power we were convinced their starred centers held. Bread, fresh and fragrant, and golden honey, thick frothy cream from the spotted cow our parents kept, this comprised our meals. We would gather strawberries from the field surrounding our cliff-top home and cherries from the trees at the foot of the cliff. These sweet jewels were safe to eat, the blossoms safe to pluck and toss in a snowfall of petals. All the flowers of that seaside paradise were ours to play with. All but the apple blossoms. We felt their sinister magic in their (always at a safe distance) and warned our children of the dangers to be found in the lovely tree. “Beauty is only skin deep,” we warned our dollies, then rushed off to seek more seaside treasure, to feast on more golden clover-scented honey or ruby fruit.

Inevitably summer would draw to a close; the fragrant gilded days made way for twilights spicy with wood smoke and crisping leaves. The apples on the tree would darken from a maiden’s blush to lurid wine, all but oozing their hidden poison. Cherries and strawberries became past perfumes ghosting through our long curls; spiced pears melted on our tongues instead. My sisters and I always mourned summer’s death. It was the end of our carefree days, and we knew that as soon as the seasons turned we would be bundled along and carted away from sunlit sea breezes to stone walls and dark walnut wainscoting, from beautiful quilts made just for each of us to dark tapestries stitched to tell of knights’ deeds and deaths.

We would look behind watching our shabby cottage fade away, seemingly swallowed by the kingly pines and the apple tree that lurked by the door; then, with a sigh, one by one we would turn our faces homeward, watching as the dark house rose from the depth of moor and mist. Princesses no longer, we would be shepherded into the shadowy house and sent to our rooms, only two to each instead of all twelve together. No more nights spent spinning tales of princes and adventure with the breeze dusting through the open windows; now our nights were filled with tomes of literature and history, antagonistic Latin and brooding German, read by lamplight that flickered off barred windows matted by thick woolen drapes.

Laughter faded in the forbidding halls of our ancestral home. Shadowed corners swallowed light and ghouls of past glories haunted our quiet steps. Dinner was spent in the majestic formal dining room, six of us on each side of the great table with our mother at one end and Father at the other, or, if he was away at sea, his throne-like chair stood watch. No play here, only quiet voices, proper manners, and the occasional recitation as Mother required it, to judge our progress at our lessons. Occasionally one of us elder girls would look up and start to find her watching us, a calculating look in her light eyes. We were unsure if we were found wanting, or meeting approval. We wished not to know.

(copyright 2018)

Please enjoy, please share, but please remember to credit me for this work.
If you are interested in any of the collections I mentioned, I purchased all of them from Amazon (They really like me lately!).