A Spindle Splintered (Fractured Fables #1)

by Alix E. Harrow

SLEEPING BEAUTY IS pretty much the worst fairy tale, any way you slice it. It’s aimless and amoral and chauvinist as shit. It’s the fairy tale that feminist scholars cite when they want to talk about women’s passivity in historical narratives.

Romantic girls like Beauty and the Beast; vanilla girls like Cinderella; goth girls like Snow White.

Only dying girls like Sleeping Beauty.

It was my own shitty story made mythic and grand and beautiful. A princess cursed at birth. A sleep that never ends. A dying girl who refused to die.

I consider trying to explain that my world doesn’t have curses or fairies. That my fate was determined by lax environmental regulations and soulless energy executives and plain old bad luck. “Sure, yeah,” I say instead. “Except I’m going to die, not sleep, and there’s nothing anybody can do to save me.” But hope flutters in my chest again. I’m in a land of magic and miracles now, not ribosomes and proteins. Who knows what is or isn’t possible?

Because I’ve fallen out of my own story and into one that might have a happy ending. Because this is my last chance to have a real adventure, to escape, to do more than play out the clock.

In the end I just write i’ll come back. cross my heart, before turning my phone off. Then I wallow my way out of Primrose’s ridiculous bed, steal a gown from her wardrobe, and slip out the door after her.

“And it is my even greater pleasure to announce my daughter’s betrothal!” I guess exclamation points are inheritable. “To none other than the good Prince Harold of Glennwald!” It’s only then that I notice the person standing on the other side of the thrones: a twenty-something man wearing a tunic and an expression of criminal smugness. He’s handsome, in that generic, Captain America–ish way that does absolutely nothing for me, and I can tell from the briefest glance at Primrose that I’m not alone.

I know this story really, really well: after the curse is broken, Prince Charming marries the princess and they live happily ever after, the end. But this version has slid sideways somehow, like a listing ship. The curse isn’t quite broken, the prince isn’t quite charming, and that’s not a happily ever after I see swimming in the princess’s eyes.

(I know they promoted a reductive vision of women’s agency that privileged traditionally male-coded forms of power, but let’s not pretend girls with swords don’t get shit done.)

portkey? there’s no such thing as portkeys asshole. A brief pause. and i thought we agreed never to mention joanne or her works ever again

Strangers tend to imagine that sick people are looking for ways to die with dignity, but mostly we’re looking for ways to live.