Fairy Tale

by Stephen King

you can’t turn a pickle back into a cucumber, and God

don’t make junk,

“But miracles ain’t magic.”

And I never forgot the deal I made with God. If you do that for me, I’ll do something for you, I’d said. On my knees I said it. You just show me what you want

and I’ll do it. I swear.

felt that if I didn’t, God would take back the miracle and my dad would start drinking again.

You have to keep in mind that high school kids—no matter how big the boys, no matter how beautiful the girls—are still mostly children inside.

but sometimes I thought I could hear a heavenly whisper of disapproval: Not good enough, Charlie. Do you really think

picking up roadside trash is payback for the good life you and your father are living now?

I turned to go and then he spoke again, but I don’t think it was to me. “A brave man helps. A coward just gives presents.”

“We also say the past is history and the future’s a mystery.”

“Uh-oh, pack your bags, we’re going on a guilt trip,”

“In the Bible, Gog and Magog are the warring nations of the world. Did you know that?”

“Book of Revelations. Put them together and you’d have a real monster. One

“Time is the water, Charlie. Life is just the bridge it flows under.”

In the end it wasn’t cancer that got him. It was a heart attack. Except not really. It was the goddam shed.

It’s hard when a good dog gets old. And when they get to the end of it…” He shook his head. “It tears your heart out.”

A simple woodcutter, he’d said to me not all that long ago. The fairy tales are full of them

Adrian Howard Bowditch, in 1894. Which makes me just about a hundred and twenty years old.

“Fairy tales,”

Once I told you that a brave man helps but a coward only brings presents.

Grimm’s Fairy Tales

The original of “Goldilocks and the Three Bears” was an oral tale that had been around since the 1500s, and there was no little girl named Goldilocks in it.

The main character was a vile old woman who invaded the bears’ home, basically broke all their shit, then jumped out a window and ran away into the woods, cackling. “Rumpelstiltskin” was even worse. In the version I vaguely remembered, old Rumpel flew away in a huff when the girl tasked

with spinning straw into gold guessed his name. In the 1857 version of Grimm’s, he drove one foot into the ground, grasped...

How the carousel in Something Wicked was like the sundial in that land of Other, for instance. The secret of my longevity

Jack had stolen gold from the giant;

Mr. Bowditch had also stolen gol...

I saw similarities everywhere. My mother had died on a bridge spanning the Little Rumple River. And what about the little man with the funny voice? Wasn’t that how the story described

Rumpelstiltskin?

How many stories of make-believe featured a young hero (like Jack) on a quest in a fantastic la...

I thought of something Mrs. Silvius had said, not fee-fie-fo-fum, I smell the blood of an

Englishman but I still smell hooky. I smell it all over you

city with the green towers and find out if it really was Oz, only with a terrible monster—Gogmagog—at its heart instead of a humbug projecting his voice from behind a curtain.

Irony, it’s good for your blood.

and an old woman who lived not in a shoe but below the sign of one;

myself was a version of Jack the Beanstalk Boy, and isn’t Star Wars just another fairy tale, albeit one with excellent special effects?

Let me stop here and say I got some information from Leah by way of Falada,

“The littlest princess of them all, for there were four sisters who were older, and two brothers—princes, if you like. Her sisters are dead—Drusilla, Elena, Joylene, and Falada, my namesake.

story of Rapunzel when I couldn’t have been more than five. The memory was vivid because of the story’s ending: terrible cruelty reversed by love.

Finally he was reunited with Rapunzel, and her tears restored his sight.

“You can’t take credit for sobering him up, because he did that. And if he starts drinking again, you can’t take the blame, because he’d do that, too.”

Empis.”

What had I learned? That this was a place of magic operating under a curse. That the people who lived here were suffering some sort of progressive sickness

or disease.

Here is something I learned in Empis: good people shine brighter in dark times.

This is cool little sentence

“The King’s Road? That’s what you call it?” “Yes, but once it passes the fork, it’s Kingdom Road. If you were to choose to go left at the fork, you would be on Seafront Road.”

It risks Hana. She wasn’t there in Bowditch’s time. You may find your way past her if you’re careful… and lucky.

expected Gogmagog, but that wasn’t what he said. What he said was Flight Killer.

I believe Yolande still lives, but she wanders, insane.