Read Once Upon a Time: New Fairy Tales Paperback Online
Authors: Tanith Lee
hair and soft round lips before me, the rise of her breasts beneath
her tunic. We danced and danced and danced, she and I, spinning
and twirling until I could no longer see anything but her face, until I was spun out of the circle like a whirlwind, and only by chance did I catch hold of a tree trunk, where I braced myself against its sturdy body and breathed heavily for a long time while the fireflies fired
their bodies around me.
The female goblin left the dancing circles when she noticed I had
not been able to continue twirling, and came to find me at my steady tree, still gathering my wits, as if I had just awoken from a deep dream.
“More fruit?” she asked, switching the tail she wore on her bottom
back and forth. “I have fruit of my own you have not yet tasted,
mistress.”
She leaned down and placed her lips upon mine, and sucked at my
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flesh as I had sucked at the flesh of the fruits. I nearly fell into her arms as she took me into her mouth—I felt myself collapsing a little more with each kiss—but I managed to pull away before she stole my
last breath from me.
“I must be going,” I said, wiping my lips clean of her, blinking, in shock a little. Beneath the white moonlight, the smear of juice I had wiped away glistened on the back of my hand.
“So early?” the female goblin said, raising one sharply angled
eyebrow. “But the moon has just now risen.”
“My sister Lizzie,” I said. And as soon as her name left my mouth,
I began to remember myself, to recollect the argument Lizzie and I
had had that afternoon, to remember my love for her, the love she
said no one would call love should they ever discover it.
“You may find other sisters here, if you join us,” the goblin woman
said, trailing a fingertip down my cheek.
“But that is not love,” I said, as if I knew what love was wholly
from my feelings for Lizzie, as if that were the only love that could ever be.
“Love,” the female goblin whispered. She smiled with what might
have been sympathy, had I been able to see her entire face behind
the mask and know what the rest of her features might tell me. A
mask, I thought, was perhaps what I had needed when facing the cat-
whiskered man. A mask would have hidden my weakness. “Love,” the
female goblin said, “comes in many different shapes, my dear. Why
approve of only one? Particularly when no one else would approve
of the shape of your love anyway?”
I stood, trembling, wishing for an answer, but her question pierced
my reasoning through and through.
I turned quickly, and began to run, taken over by a fear that grew
in me like a dark tide. I had come to the brink of something. A great chasm of darkness lay before me in the glen, an uncertainty that
invited one to throw oneself into it, to lose my self, if I so wanted. But I ran from the sight of it, ran to rejoin the world I knew, regardless of its limitations.
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Behind me, the goblin woman shouted, “Do not forget us!” But I
did not look over my shoulder or give her a word in return, and only once did I stop to pick up the hard pit of a peach I had dropped earlier that evening, the first fruit I had tasted, which in the momentary
madness of my fleeing I thought I might plant and grow into a tree
of my own, to have that fruit available to me forever.
Lizzie. Oh how Lizzie will hate me for what I’ve done
, I thought as I crossed the brook and took the path home. And I was right. As I
approached the gate, she was already there, waiting for me with her
arms folded beneath her breasts, her form a daunting silhouette in
the silver moonlight, a guardian spirit to her father’s cottage.
“Laura,” she said, shaking her head, her voice filled with what
seemed like loathing for me. “Do you know what time it is? Do you
know how worried you’ve made my father and mother? Do you not
care what others might think? Don’t you remember Jeannie, after all, and what happened to her? The fate she suffered for going into the
night?”
I put my head down, shamed, and began to tear up a little. Jeannie.
Of course. Jeannie. I had forgotten about Jeannie, young Jeannie, who had gone off one night with a dark-skinned young man who they
said lived in the woods, and had returned home some days later, a
broken woman. The lovely, poor, ruined Jeannie, who withered like a
plucked flower until she died from either heartbreak or, as I secretly believed, from the coldness she was forced to endure from others
after returning from the woods. This was what concerned Lizzie,
then. What others thought of her.
“It was not as you think,” I murmured, preparing to explain myself.
But Lizzie’s sharp voice rose up again, barring me from speaking.
“I will not hear any of it, thank you very much,” she whispered,
shrill, in the late summer night air. “Do not speak a word. And do not return to the glen again, Laura, ever, or you will not be able to live here thereafter.”
I nodded, and wiped my face with the back of my hand, wishing
Lizzie might take my tears upon her finger as the cat-whiskered
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goblin man had done and relieve me of my regret and sorrow,
wishing she would at least be kinder.
After my acquiescence, though, she only turned and went into the
cottage without another word.
What would I have done without Lizzie and her parents? I would
have been an orphan in some other house, I’m sure. I might have
been given over to an innkeeper and his wife, or I might have been
placed as a worker in a factory, at the ripe age of sixteen, when my own parents fell ill and began to pass away before my eyes. Instead, Lizzie’s father promised my father, his oldest friend, a friend he called brother, that I would not fall into the hands of strangers and be left alone in the world to fend for myself.
And yet there I was, latching the gate to their cottage behind me,
alone, and latching the door of the cottage behind me, alone, and
creeping over the creaking floorboards until I could latch Lizzie’s
and my bedroom door behind me, as if I were a stranger stealing
through their property in the middle of the night. Lizzie had already put on her bedclothes and pulled the covers up to her chin. She lay
with her yellow hair streaming out on the pillow like an aura of light, her body curled into itself in the same way babies are born into the world. I changed my own clothes and slid into bed beside her, felt
the heat of her body warming her half of the bed, and nearly put my
hand upon her waist as I had grown used to doing all that spring and summer, before Lizzie grew afraid of our passion and told me it must end or we would burn in hell like poor Jeannie, upon whose grave
no grass would grow. I had once planted daisies for poor Jeannie,
who everyone shook their heads about whenever her name was
mentioned, but no blossoms ever came to bloom. Everything wilted
and withered, as Jeannie herself had wilted and withered after she
returned from the woods without her dark-skinned suitor.
“Are you awake?” I whispered into the dark that separated us.
Lizzie groaned and told me to be quiet.
“You shall see,” I told her. “Tomorrow, I will bring you the most
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delicious fruit—peaches, melons, fresh plums still on their mother
twigs, and cherries worth getting—and then you will no longer feel
such anger with me.”
Golden head by golden head, we lay in the curtained bed, like two
pigeons in one nest, like two blossoms on one stem, like two flakes
of newly fallen snow, like two wands of ivory, tipped with gold for
awful kings, and heard nothing more from the night but the sound
of our own hearts beating, and fell asleep without having reconciled.
Early in the morning, when the first cock crowed, we rose together
and, sweet like bees, began our work for the day, neat and busy. We
fetched in honey from the combs, milked the cows, flung open the
shutters to air the house, and set to rights all that had fallen out of place the day before. With Lizzie’s mother, we kneaded cakes of
whitest wheat, churned butter, whipped up cream, and then went on
our way to feed the chickens before, in the late afternoon, we broke from our duties to sit and sew together for a while, and talk a little about nothing of importance, as we used to do, as modest maidens
should, which I could see from the placid smile on Lizzie’s face, bent over her needlework, gladdened her. But no matter what we did that
day, my thoughts were with the night to come, with the fruits my
teeth would meet in, with the music and the dancing, and the goblin
men and women who would spin me within their embrace.
When at length the evening reached us, Lizzie and I took up our
pitchers to fetch water from the reedy brook, and did not speak of
goblins or of fruit, but went along peacefully, as we did at the end of each day. Kneeling by the brook, we dipped our pitchers into the
water to fill them with the brook’s rippling purple and rich golden
flags, and when we stood again, the crags of a nearby mountain were
flushed red with the setting sun.
“Come, Laura,” Lizzie said. “The day is ending. Not another
maiden lags. The beasts and birds are all fast asleep, and soon too
shall we be.”
I loitered by the reeds, listening for the sound of their voices,
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waiting to hear a bow eke a tune from the strings of a violin, or a first rush of breath fill the pipes and bring the glen alive with music. “It’s early still,” I said. “The dew is not yet on the grass, no chill has settled into the wind.”
Lizzie, though, was not having any of my excuses. “It’s them you’re
waiting for,” she said, “isn’t it?”
I turned to face her, and said, “Yes,” and said, “If you but tasted
their fruit, you would understand me as you once did.”
“Then why do you wait?” Lizzie said. “Go to them. They are there,
after all, calling for us to join them.
Come buy, come buy!
It is an ugly sort of commerce, Laura. I don’t know what you are thinking.”
“Wait?” I said. “I wait to hear those voices. You hear them?”
“Yes,” Lizzie said, and lifted her chin to gesture toward the glen
across the flowing water. “They are there already, waiting for you to return to them.”
I nearly spun on my feet like a top to look where Lizzie gestured,
but when I faced the glen, I saw nothing but the empty pasture where I had danced and eaten the night before. I heard nothing but the
sound of the brook flowing by me. “Where, Lizzie?” I asked. “I see
nothing, I hear nothing.”
“Good, then!” Lizzie said with a glee that angered me. “Come home
with me. The stars rise, the moon bends her arc, each glowworm
winks her spark. Let us get home before the night grows dark, for
clouds may gather though this is summer weather, put out the lights
and drench us.”
I stood still as stone, and felt cold as stone through and through.
“Really, sister?” I said, my eyes wide with fear. “Do you hear them
truly, or are you trying to hurt me?”
“
Come buy, come buy!
” Lizzie said again, mocking their voices, making them sound like terrible creatures. “It is good that you cannot hear them,” she said. “It means your heart is still your own.”
She held her hand out then, and curled her fingers inward. “Come,
Laura,” she said. “Let us be home again.”
I did not want to take her hand—I wanted to take the hand of the
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goblins whose voices I could no longer hear, whose masked faces I
could no longer see—but in the end it was the hand offered me, and
it was the hand I took.
We went to bed that night and curled around each other as
we used to, and for a while I thought that I was better off for not
hearing the voices of goblins. But before our twistings and turnings could reach a satisfactory moment, I felt all passion leave me, like a cork released from its bottle, and lay in the dark, wondering about
the strange people who had shown me a glimpse of a life I would
now never know. Lizzie patted her kisses upon my cheek, upon my
shoulders, and stroked my side and waist with her nimble fingers,
but the fingers I had longed for in the past few weeks when she had
kept them from me, those fingers and their touch no longer held me
in the spell they once cast over me.
When Lizzie finally fell asleep, I sat up and looked out the window
at the moon hanging low, caught up in the branches of a tree. I cried, silently, and gnashed my teeth like a starved animal, and held the
howls of yearning inside my body so Lizzie would not wake and ask
me what was the matter.
She should have known. She’d been the matter. Now it was
something else taken from me.
For days, weeks, months afterward, I waited in the sullen silence
that accompanies exceeding pain, hungering for another glimpse,
wanting the sound of their music to find me, eager for the taste of
their fruit upon my lips, desiring only to dance within their circle once more. But I never spied the goblin merchants again. Instead,
I began to wither, the way Lizzie had warned me poor Jeannie had
after returning from the woods without her young man. And as I
withered, Lizzie seemed to grow brighter, as if she held a warm fire within her.