A Spindle Splintered (Fractured Fables #1)

by Alix E. Harrow

for everyone who deserves a better story than the one they have

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.

(hey your parents are calling me now and idk what to say so if you’re alive NOW’S THE TIME BITCH).

Lol

I start to type back an apology then pause, wondering about data rates between Ohio and wherever the hell I am and how exactly I have cell signal,

How tf??

sorry babe. got spider-verse-ed into a fairy tale.

Lmfao!!!!!!

is this a joke to you Followed by: i thought you were dead/abducted!!! what the HELL zin???

I squint at her—this slender golden princess limned in dawn light, her cheeks flushed and her eyes shining—and slowly raise my phone, take her picture, and send it to Charm with the caption not joking.

“Should I call for a healer?”

Healer? Shes not in Ohio anymore toto!

The bubble reappears. who is thjat *that

“I am Princess Primrose of Perceforest. And who are you?”

“Zinnia Gray of, uh, Ohio.” My eyes return to my phone. Princess Mothereffing Primrose, apparently, I type. dude, where did you get that spinning wheel??

I scroll through the ten or fifteen messages I’ve missed from Charm (are you okay tho? are there pharmacies in fairyland??) and type back: I only have 35% battery so I’m turning this off in case of emergencies. xoxo ummmm this IS an emergency. why are you not freaking out. why are you not trying to come back.

i’ll come back. cross my heart,

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

I think: oh, shit. I say, “Oh, shit.” The princess doesn’t flinch, so either they don’t have swears in Fake-ass Medieval Fairy Land or Primrose isn’t as proper as she seems.

(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.)

I riffle through my mental box of inspirational quotes and come up with a Dylan Thomas line that I actually know from Interstellar. “Do not go gentle into that good night, princess. I beg of you.” She must be susceptible to begging too, because she stares at me for another breathless second before inclining her head infinitesimally. “All right.”

“Swell. Now do you happen to have a magic sword or anything? An enchanted amulet? A shield imbued with special powers?”

This girl is a hoot!

I consider explaining about internal combustion engines and state highways and asking if she’d like to try driving a stick shift with a sketchy second gear. I shrug instead.

Primrose would think you are a witch for sure

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 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.”

I used to see Sleeping Beauty as my wildest, most aspirational fantasy—a dying girl who didn’t die, a tragedy turned into a romance. But suddenly I saw her as my mere reflection: a girl with a shitty story. A girl whose choices were stolen from her.

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.