A Spindle Splintered (Fractured Fables #1)

by Alix E. Harrow

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.

It’s a lie but I let it stand because she did the same for me, and sometimes lies are lifeboats.

(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.)

Unless we change them. Unless we grab our narratives by the ear and drag them kicking and screaming toward better endings. Maybe the universe doesn’t naturally bend toward justice either; maybe it’s only the weight of hands and hearts pulling it true, inch by stubborn inch.

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

You might not have a degree in this shit but you’ve seen enough Disney movies and picture books to know there’s supposed to be a handsome prince and true love and a kiss, which can’t be consensual because unconscious people can’t consent, but at least it breaks the curse and the princess wakes up.

“You are accustomed to thinking of fairy tales as make-believe.” Dr. Bastille looked straight at me as she said it, her face somehow both searing and compassionate. “But they have only ever been mirrors.”

“The heaviest burdens are those you bear alone.”

In that moment he reminds me of Charm’s parents, or maybe my own: a person whose love is a burdensome thing, a weight dragging always at your ankles.

don’t understand.” His eyes are on Primrose and Charm, on the place where their hands are joined together so tightly they look like a single creature. “Well, Harold,” I say gently. “They’re lesbians.”

I’ve always resented people for trying to save me, but maybe this is how it works, maybe we save one another.

I should have spent more time thinking about your life than worrying about your death.”