Once Upon a Time: New Fairy Tales Paperback (17 page)

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• Tales That Fairies Tell •

Reynard was out of the room and in the hall. The roommates asked

if they could send their resumes. But, apparently, he didn’t hear.

For a few minutes afterwards his roommates barraged Julian with

questions. “What are your plans for tonight, for tomorrow, for your

life? Are you getting a personal assistant, talking to the media, doing a show? Is it possible you’ll need to hire a private pedicab, a tour guide, companion? Couldn’t his art tie in with music, dance, film?”

As they talked, Julian became aware of another presence. He

closed his eyes and saw a huge figure that smelled of rotted meat. An ogre in clothes of fine velvet, stained with food and drink, sporting an elaborate beard and immense hairy eyebrows, stared down at him.

“When I consume a cow I have a gentle, calm disposition,” it

said. “When I dine on a child, I become innocent. When I eat a king

(preferably simmered in a robust wine sauce from a traditional

family recipe), I am majestic. You look at me and you don’t believe

it. Well think again, my friend! When I devour you I will be a witless young man.” Julian began to scramble to his feet.

But the ogre turned into Puss. When Julian opened his eyes, it

was just Puss and him in the apartment. The Cat had bribed the

roommates to go away.

“One great difference between ogres and cats is that cats never

talk about themselves,” Puss said. “But others talk about us. You must know the story of how I dealt with the ogre.

Julian saw through cat eyes Puss challenging the monster to turn

into a lion, an elephant, and finally a mouse; watched the cat kill and eat the mouse.

“Just as the ogre changed with what he ate, when I devoured

him, I inherited his ability to change shapes and came into my

dominion.”

Right in front of Julian the cat turned first into a hawk, then a

bear, and again into a fat, hairy ogre. Julian was terrified. He thought of the contract he’d signed with Reynard.

• 142 •

• Rick Bowes •

“Never fear me.” Puss was once again a smiling cat. “You’ve met

my old . . . acquaintance.”

“He said . . . ”

“ . . . many things.” The cat shook his head, “Young men are so

foolish.” But he seemed charmed by that fact.

The apartment door opened. “Movers,” said Puss. “Ones you

can trust. Show them what has to be taken from here. I’m placing

you in more suitable quarters.” The movers set to work and Puss

disappeared.

Later that evening, Veronessa and Julian sat in the back seat of

a car carrying them through Central Park to her townhouse in the

East 70s. He stared, fascinated and shocked, at her vivid, barbaric

vest of red fox fur.

She noticed this and gave a nod and a smile. “Jack Reynard will

not be back. At least not in this incarnation,” she said, patting the fur.

Julian wondered if having your dreams and ambitions realized

always left you as tense and confused as he felt. “I hope my staying at your place is okay . . . with you . . . ” he began.

She smiled, reached over and stroked the back of his neck like

a pet. His nerves were so relaxed at her touch that it felt like he

was sinking into the cushions. “Richelieu’s’ kittens,” she said, “were treasured by those to whom the Cardinal gave them.”

“If they knew what was good for them,” Julian remarked and was

surprised at himself.

“Ah,” Veronessa said with a small frown. “It is not wise to be wise

so soon.”

Puss was there when they arrived. His hat bore a red fur tail with

a white tip in place of the white plume. “The Fox has the strengths

of the trickster: misdirection, a quick eye, and a fast tongue. But . . . ”

He shrugged. “Cat and Fox: when we meet it always ends like this.”

He looked at Julian. “You’re still confused by what’s happened. You

wonder about my motives.” He showed Julian the goofy young man

who was Puss’s first owner swimming bare assed in a pond while

Puss called out that the Marquis of Carabas had been robbed of his

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• Tales That Fairies Tell •

clothes and a king and his lovely daughter stopped their carriage.

Because of a cat’s schemes the young man married far above his

station. He came close to ruining his life a dozen times thereafter.

On each occasion Puss was delighted to step in.

“His antics gave me pleasure for his lifetime. When he died

(mortals are given such a short span of years) I found another.”

“So my being a failure . . . ” Julian began. The Cat just shook his

head and smiled a cat’s smile.

Veronessa, in an antique 1940s dress with shoulders that were almost wings, brought Julian (wearing a very nice suit Puss had bought him) to Angelica Siddons’ lunch at Airmail Express where men dressed

as stewardesses in long-gone twentieth century U.S. airlines brought airplane dinners and martinis. Earlier that day,
Tales That Fairies Tell
had named Mrs. Siddons “Fairy Godmother of this Epoch.”

“She certainly has been for you!” Veronessa said on the drive there.

“And she’s so anxious to meet you,” she added.

“Why all this with fairy tales?” he asked.

“The craving for fairy tales appears when a world is changing

from one of magic to one of science and vice versa.”

“But you don’t believe in them.” They’d slept together a couple of

times and it had been fun, but not magic.

“My mother was part Fey.” He narrowed his eyes. She waved a

hand and a butterfly appeared. It fluttered around in the back seat of the car. She opened her palm and it landed. She closed her hand and

opened it and the butterfly was gone. She was amused by his silence.

Julian was working on a collage and had sent Mrs. Siddons a

sketch. It was his stepmother and father standing in their kitchen,

Clemenso naked in the midst of his fashion show, Jack Reynard’s

deserted townhouse (he had been missing for weeks) but with bricks

fallen off and a fox gazing out of a broken window. It was a world

poised on the edge of catastrophe. But the colors were lovely, and

Mrs. Siddons was especially charmed by the fox.

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• Rick Bowes •

“How do you get inside my head?” Julian asked the Cat. They sat on

a small rise in what seemed to be a late seventeenth century formal

garden landscaped in the Dutch manner. The Cat was his size.

“A skill I took from Cassese, the last dragon in France,” was the

answer. The image of the monster appeared in Julian’s mind: huge,

fire breathing, wings flapping. All this he saw through the eyes of the hawk Puss had become. Cassese reached out and caught the hawk’s

mind with his. But by then, Puss was a bee and when Cassese grabbed

that tiny brain, Puss had already become a racing dove which moved

faster than the dragon could think.

It was as a bat that Puss flew into the darkness of Cassese’s left

ear. In the eye of the Cat, Julian saw the smoldering ruin to which

Cassese was soon reduced. Puss was a tiger eating the brains.

“The last but, perhaps, not the brightest dragon in France,” said

Puss. Julian felt a chill. “Yes, I am a monster, but never to you.” A large paw with its claws carefully retracted brushed his cheek.

A pond beautifully ringed with willows lay not far from them.

An avenue of cypress trees bordered a drive that curved towards a

chateau. Windows caught the afternoon sun. Birds sang.

Julian had read the story of Puss In Boots a hundred times in the

last couple of months. Would Puss order him out of his clothes and

into the water as he’d done with his first master? Wary but unwilling to abandon the life he’d been given, Julian wondered how many

afternoons he’d have to spend amusing Puss like this.

Aware of the questions Puss smiled and yawned as a cat does.

••

Richard Bowes
lives in Manhattan. He has won two World Fantasy Awards, a Lambda, an International Horror Guild Award, and a

Million Writers Award. Even aside from
The Queen, The Cambion and
Seven Others
, 2013 is a busy year. Lethe Press has just republished his

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• Tales That Fairies Tell •

1999 Lambda-winning novel
Minions of the Moon
(now available for the first time electronically). Lethe has also published his novel-in-stories,
Dust Devil on a Quiet Street
: tales told by an aging spec fiction writer and set in contemporary Greenwich Village. In September,

Fairwood Press will publish his
If Angels Fight,
a collection of recent stories and previously uncollected award nominees and winners.

Recent and forthcoming appearances include:
The Magazine of

Fantasy and Science Fiction
,
Icarus
,
Lightspeed
,
Podcastle
, and
The
Revelator
; and the anthologies,
After
,
Wilde Stories 2013
,
Ghosts:
Recent Hauntings
,
Handsome Devil
,
Hauntings
,
Where Thy Dark
Eye Glances
,
Weird Detectives: Recent Investigations,
Fiction River:
Unnatural Worlds
,
Daughters of Russ 2013
,
The Book of Apex
, and
The Time Traveler’s Almanac
.

••

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•

The way I understand it, fairy tales play two important roles: first, they are meant to provide us with templates of behaviors, and

second, to illustrate the values of the society that produced them.

When faced with a task of revamping a story to suit modern times,

both templates and values had to be drastically adjusted: after all, curses are very different now, and the idea of a magical kiss seems

downright reactionary. And the story of pediatric AIDS outbreak in

Elista has haunted me ever since it happened—besides the heartbreak, there is nothing else I can think of that showed me that times had

changed tragically, dramatically, and irrevocably. So this story is an attempt—however feeble—to extract some comfort from the terror.

(I guess there’s one more thing that fairy tales can do!)

Ekaterina Sedia

•

• 149 •

•

And this is how it begins: with a prick of a needle—a sharp point,

and the children are too small to understand—infants, they just

howl and squirm despite the reassuring
hush hush shhhh be quiet
of the nurse. So small that crying is just about the only thing they know how to do well. And for these children, soon enough it is the only

thing—they do not sleep or eat, they only cry and fade away, they

get sick and they cough, and strange white flowers bloom in their

mouths and soon enough one by one by one they die. Except . . . but

we will talk about her later.

It’s all in a prick of the sharp point, you see; this is how curses

work. Of course there is a castle there.

No, a temple. It is new, actually. Because after a curse is enacted, it will spread outward—from an injection site (vaccinations are

important) and through the blood vessels and capillaries, to the

translucent skin that is already covered in febrile blooms, to the very quiet ward (that just a few weeks ago was filled with weak crying),

to the families standing around dressed all in black, so quiet, to the borders of the republic and all the way to the capital, to the pages of the newspaper called
Komsomolskaya Pravda
. And as people there—

so far—shake their heads and whisper about the horrors of the new

disease, as the newspaper is congratulating itself for its newfound

freedom and bravery—because until very recently no one ever said

the word “AIDS” in print, it was all some mysterious virus X—as

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• Sleeping Beauty of Elista •

UNESCO and WHO get involved and outraged, the curse continues

to work inside the city.

Elista never had much to brag about, apart from troubled history

and the steppes surrounding it, where the grasses grew so green and

then abruptly yellowed. There were no thickets to ensconce it, to hide it away from the world—it was just the yellowing of the grass and

the distance, the slow falling-apart of everything inside, the hospital growing hollow and echo-filled under the curse.

It is a superstition to believe that the witch who cursed the town

had meant it somehow; most curses are not manufactured out of