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April 23 - April 26, 2021
You may recognize this quiet as you stand in what was once Suitors’ Square, staring up at the grand facade of a crumbling palace and the little window high above the street, its casement carved with lilies. This is the sound of a heart gone silent. Velisyana is a corpse.
“Papa,” Yeva said to the duke, desperate to stand beneath an open sky again. “Why must I be the one to hide?”
Yeva sighed, weary of asking questions that went unanswered. She kissed her father’s cheek and went to say her prayers.
“I am no blunt knife to cut your sorry bread,” it said. “I feed the fields and drown the harvest. I am bounty and destruction.”
“It was I who built the tower of trees,” said the river. “And I who earned the mirror from Baba Anezka. It was I who found the magic coin. And now I say to you, Yeva Luchova: Will you remain here with the father who tried to sell you, or the prince who hoped to buy you, or the man too weak to solve his riddles for himself? Or will you come with me and be bride to nothing but the shore?”
A wonderful sapphic twist
remember that to use a thing is not to own it. And should you ever take a bride, listen closely to her questions. In them you may hear her true name like the thunder of a lost river, like the sighing of the sea.
The Soldier Prince - the nutcracker
“The childhood trauma visited on me by The Velveteen Rabbit and the distressing idea that only love can make you real took a different shape in “The Soldier Prince.””
This is the problem with even lesser demons. They come to your doorstep in velvet coats and polished shoes. They tip their hats and smile and demonstrate good table manners. They never show you their tails.
Droessen was not just unusual in his talents or his habits, but also in his greed.
Wanting is why people get up in the morning. It gives them something to dream of at night. The more I wanted, the more I became like them, the more real I became.”
They are not charming or pretty, but they live even when no one is looking. I have made a life in the walls with them, unwatched and undesired. I know who I am without anyone there to tell me.”
“Who knows what the clocksmith loves? Best not to ask. I think the answer would please no one.”
“You are mad.” “And you are made of wood.”
“My heart beats. I breathe.” The clocksmith’s grin widened. “A bellows breathes to grow a fire. A clock ticks. Are those things alive?” Maybe, thought the nutcracker. Maybe they’re all alive.
You screamed and screamed until I took your vocal cords and made your throat a hollow I might fill with silence or any words I liked.”
When Water Sang Fire - referenced in The Lives of Saints
“As for my mermaids, while Hans Christian Andersen’s original tale served as a point of departure, it’s worth mentioning that Ulla is the Swedish diminutive of Ursula.”
This is the problem with making a thing forbidden. It does nothing but build an ache in the heart.
But in others, in girls like Ulla, the current caught on some dark thing in their hearts and eddied there, forming deep pools of power.
but mostly Ulla wished that she could kill the thing inside herself that still longed for their approval.
For the briefest moment, Ulla despised Signy, as we can only hate those who rescue us from loneliness.
“The sound was so ugly.” “Was it?” Ulla asked, a hard carapace glinting from beneath all her gems. “Or was it just something you hadn’t heard before?”
“Magic doesn’t require beauty,” she said. “Easy magic is pretty. Great magic asks that you trouble the waters. It requires a disruption, something new.”
“What would you know about ambition?” she scoffed. But the prince had only winked. “I know that you should keep it like a secret, not shout it like a curse.”
But hope rises like water trapped by a dam, higher and higher, in increments that mean nothing until you face the flood.
There is no pain like the pain of transformation. A mermaid does not simply shed her skin and find a mortal body beneath. To walk on land is to have your body cleft in two, split into something other.
Ulla watched the mortal king smile and preen and pour wine into a silver cup, little realizing that this treasure had come from wrecked ships, gifts from dead men, their bones rotting at the bottom of the sea. What did mortals care? Treasure was treasure.
can he really tell the future?” she asked, her curiosity getting the best of her. “He can tell the king what he wants to hear, and that’s more important than knowing the future.”
Books had a scent, she realized, as they passed level after level of libraries and laboratories, shelves lining their round walls, packed with brightly bound volumes in tight rows.
Ulla knew a bad bargain. Maybe this boy held secrets, but whatever knowledge he might possess would not be worth the price.
“I will never leave you. I have no wish to be his bride.” Signy’s laugh was bitter in the dark. “He’s a prince, Ulla. He will have what he wants.”
How easily princes played. How easily they spoke of dreams they had no business offering.
“He will drive himself mad,” said Signy as they shivered beneath the covers one night. “I doubt he has the focus for it.”
“We were not made to please princes.”
“There is no magic that can make them love you.”
“I have been a friend to you, haven’t I, Ulla? Don’t you care for me at all?” “Enough to keep you from this wickedness.”
I will not do it, Ulla vowed, watching Roffe stride across the gardens. He cannot make me. But he was a prince and Ulla was wrong.
Signy pressed a kiss to her friend’s cheek. “There is nothing you cannot do.” And nothing I will not do to protect you, Ulla vowed. The bargain is made.
You were as eager as I, as hungry. You just wouldn’t look your ambition in the eye.”
What gave her strength then? We cannot know for sure. That contrary thing inside her? The hard stone of rage that all lonely girls possess?
They forgot old grievances. Not so Ulla. She held each sorrow like a chafing grain of sand and grew her grudges like pearls.
In many ways, that unease has guided me through these stories, that note of trouble that I think many of us hear in familiar tales, because we know—even as children—that impossible tasks are an odd way to choose a spouse, that predators come in many guises, that a prince’s whims are often cruel.
I hope you enjoy these stories and the world they populate. I hope you read them aloud when the weather turns cold. And when your chance comes, I hope you stir the pot.
