Fairy Tale Review: The Grey Issue #8

FAIRY TALE REVIEW

The Grey Issue

FOUNDER & EDITOR

Kate Bernheimer

GUEST EDITOR, THE GREY ISSUE

Alissa Nutting, John Carroll University

ADVISORY BOARD

Donald Haase, Wayne State University

Maria Tatar, Harvard University

Marina Warner, University of Essex, UK

Jack Zipes, University of Minnesota

ASSISTANT & CONTRIBUTING EDITOR

Timothy Schaffert, University of Nebraska–Lincoln

ASSISTANT EDITORS

Tara Goedjen, University of Wollongong

Drew Krewer, University of Arizona

ORIGINAL PRINT DESIGN

J. Johnson, Design Farm

COVER ART (INSIDE FRAME)

Kiki Smith, Born

COURTESY OF THE ARTIST

LAYOUT

Ameliah Tawlks, Tara Reeser

English Department’s Publications Unit, Illinois State University

A publication of Fairy Tale Review Press

FAIRY TALE REVIEW

www.fairytalereview.com

Electronic edition © 2015 by Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan 48201. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without formal permission. Manufactured in the United States of America. Originally © 2012 by Fairy Tale Review Press.

The Grey Issue (2012) 978-0-8143-4177-3

FAIRY TALE REVIEW is devoted to contemporary literary fairy tales and hopes to provide an elegant and innovative venue for writers working with the aesthetics and motifs of fairy tales. How can fairy tales help us to go where it is we are going, like Jean Cocteau’s magical horse? We hope to discover. Please know that Fairy Tale Review is not devoted to any particular school of writing, but rather to original work that in its very own way is imbued with fairy tales.

You see, I don’t know any stories. None of the lost boys knows any stories.

—Peter Pan by J. M. Barrie

FAIRY TALE REVIEW

The Grey Issue

ANNOTATED TABLE OF CONTENTS

ALISSA NUTTING

Guest Editor’s Note

Getting lost is the price of admission for discoveries good and bad, and some lessons cost far more than others.

SETH ABRAMSON

Three Poems

I smell in the deep of a sack

an unfortunate boy but for the eyelashes

MATT BELL

The Fingerling (an excerpt)

Not an arm, but an arm bud. Not a leg, but a leg bud, a proto-knee.

MOLLY BENDALL

Two Poems

Leaves evaporate kindly and don’t trouble our alphabet game.

WYATT BONIKOWSKI

Little Man

I could not find myself among the voices around me.

BRITTANY CAVALLARO

Girl-King (iv)

The last fire took your tiny house

and your ermine mother and the tassels

MAILE CHAPMAN

Sanctuary

I hear her laughing at the heart of the maze, and though I walk every path of every year, I can never find the center.

MIMI CHUBB

Tears

In the corners of Tom’s eyes, where before there had only ever been dark strands of slime and dark bits of sand, there were two perfectly shaped teardrops of the purest gold.

TARA GOEDJEN

(Because Children Are Still Brave)

I protest and they kick my cage.

SARA GONG

The Mask

The children liked to speculate upon whether or not the blood was real.

CAROL GUESS & DANIELA OLSZEWSKA

How to Be and Look Like a Mean Girl While in Girl Scouts or How to Make a Bullet Belt

Mash burnt marshmallows into bullet pellets; paste to your waist. Wait. Finger pricks = blood sisters or saints.

AIREANNE HJELLE

girl you won’t remember

You bared your teeth in joy and slept while spinning.

DESIREE HOLMAN

Three Images

ASHLEY ELIZABETH HUDSON

Elegy for a Child Trapped Underground

didn’t they always say to stay put, shocked pale, in one place?

SHANE JONES

Remy and the Crystals

Remy once believed each pet on the dog’s head produced one crystal inside.

JESSICA JOSLIN

Three Sculptures

KRYSTAL LANGUELL

Your Blood Like an Animal

your seizure ghost your jaw clamp and tongue blood pouring from mouth ghost

STACEY LEVINE

Illustration by David Lasky

The Castaways (excerpt)

Each day had a sameness, a soothing constancy parallel to the disinterest of the earth.

OKSANA MARAFIOTI

Krivoye Lake

What can a fisherman’s son do, Ivan thought, if not try and better his station?

ADAM MCOMBER

History of a Saint

Still and white, she looked much like the landscape seen through the icy window set high on the museum wall.

CHRISTOPHER MERKNER

Tomtens

His mother had died; his father was plainly alone and poor.

BENJAMIN NADLER

The Upper Harz

The underground people—that tiny race

who dwell in the caves, who stuff beehives

with manure that is really gold

ANDI OLSEN, LANCE OLSEN & DAVIS SCHNEIDERMAN

Three Pieces

The teeth’s faith itself may become a vacuole of tiny screams.

DAVID JAMES POISSANT

Fox King

The girls knew then that they must run.

GRETCHEN STEELE PRATT

Vertigo

The man on the pillar has bare feet the color of a bruise.

IMAD RAHMAN

Petty

Children who look like you, he said, this time softly and like someone on TV, need all the luck they can get.

MATTHEW SALESSES

A Korean Fairy Tale

During the time when people were still being born from eggs, but after the time when animals could turn into people, there were born twins.

KEVIN SAMPSELL

Telephone Girl

Sometimes she winced at the things I said.

J. A. TYLER

[the second house]

An opposite side where flowers are glaciers, where foxes are bears.

LEE UPTON

Escape from the Dark Forest

The cat uttered a cry—mechanical sounding, like a tiny door opening, a tiny door on the other side of the earth.

LAURA VAN DEN BERG

Cannibals

My brother and I never asked the cannibals where their meals came from.

ROB WALSH

The Dog

They hadn’t ever killed a dog as a favor before.

JILLIAN WEISE

Elegy for Zahra Baker

It is weird that I have all these legs in the attic but they would not let me keep the real leg.

KELLIE WELLS

Ever After

When the child is father of the man, there are, if you ask me, two people too many in the room.

ELIZABETH CLARK WESSEL

Three Poems

Ants have made a home

in my chest.

DEBORAH WOODARD

Two Poems

I will buy your eyes and give you a fine pair of glass ones for free.

JOHN DERMOT WOODS

Whistleblower

Contributor Notes

GUEST EDITOR’S NOTE

When we speak of grey as a location, placing a thing into a grey area, the color represents territory where the definite becomes lost. Grey lets us know that the truth is not always clear; even the most well-known paths can turn strange when a low grey cloud of fog rolls in. Grey is an act of subtraction, the loss of sun, joy, and color. Regrets are the natural property of grey hairs, said Dickens. Since grey is a symbol for the loss of youth, it seems a fitting issue for a theme about youth who are lost.

Getting lost is one of the most widely used narrative vehicles of all time. Once characters become lost, they can stumble upon anything—it’s a light-speed bullet train between credibility and suspension of disbelief. Falling down a rabbit hole or stepping off the trail in a labyrinthine wood can transport a character to another world entirely in a manner of seconds. When I’m reading and the protagonist starts to get lost, my fingers press against the pages a little more tightly; I know that, positive or negative, something exciting is about to happen.

Lost has always been a central element in my life. I am a misplacer and a forgetter. A wrong-turner. A daydreamer. In school, teachers always marveled at how I could get lost without even leaving my desk. Earth-to-Alissa, they’d say. Please come back and join us in reality.

I did not frequently accept their invitations. I preferred being lost in my head. I liked what I found in there. Not much has changed; if I’ve fallen deep into thought while looking at a building as I’m waiting to cross the street, it’s not uncommon for well-meaning people to tap me on the shoulder. You look lost, they’ll smile. Do you need directions?

When I was very young, I was convinced that I didn’t forget where I’d put things—instead, if a possession went missing, it was because the world had taken it from me. I was okay with this thievery only because it seemed to be a barter system: if a small feather I’d picked up on a walk later disappeared from my pocket, when I went to search for it I’d come across a new treasure, like the dried carcass of a wasp.

In the fairy tales I picked up as soon as I could read, I saw this trade-off echoed on a much deeper level. The lost children of fairy tales broach life’s most painful truths with great honesty—an honesty that felt respectful to me as a child reader, and attracted me to return to the tales again and again as I grew, and grew to understand. Alone, disoriented, vulnerable, we will encounter wonder and horror. Getting lost is the price of admission for discoveries good and bad, and some lessons cost far more than others.

Thank you so much for finding this lost issue in your hands right now. It’s time for me to go. Please turn the page and lose me, lose yourself, lose track of time. You have important things to go find.

—A.N.

Note to Readers: all visual art in The Grey Issue appears in greyscale, to honor the theme.

SETH ABRAMSON

Three Poems

Paracosmics

They come from the woods three by three

and I pass the time a world or two

watching.

The great brown foxes’ bulb-dark noses bob

as they pass by

on two legs in black masks, burlap sacks

over their shoulders. Inside

the children. I smell in the deep of a sack

an unfortunate boy but for the eyelashes

who’s dreaming he’s in his mother’s womb

as she’s raped

by her work in the laundries.

Is this enough for you

he calls

and I see he means me. You just keep on,

boy, three by three as before.

With a clever little knife another one makes

a hole

and his eyes starpoke

from the black. Stars are just endless knots

says his fox

and sews his sack up. But we were speaking

of heaven and hard-ons,

that’s clear. An unfortunate boy but for all

those lashes, and yes I suppose

that does it for me. I forget to get a name

but I do shake the hand

of every passing burglar

but one. Him I roll because he’s took a girl

and we don’t. We won’t. She worms pinkly

onto the grass beside the track

and asks me to stay with her and she means

always. She’s asleep before I can answer her

with the one word

that makes this end and be like it never was.

The Better Kids

They cloudbank

in the windows, single-armedly brought up

from tiny hearts of meat

to tiny raised fists, out of snowed-up ways

where wolves in fantasies of histories

are nursing boys,

and where boys are pounding uphill

with a killing speed. Up into themselves

they launch themselves, up into monasteries

black behind the capes

of nightwatchmen, up into cymballic orgies

of women and men, half-women half-men

behind a seventh-story façade

the boys will not be joining them behind.

Growing lakes

beneath their feet. Growing agonies into

men, and meetings men will join like circled

cinder-blocks—

and unlike hunting parties, but like hunters’

foaming calico horses

some men are the men who don’t survive it.

And the girls are even worse at it than this—

the sad sex of sad boys.

Naughty Boys Well and Truly Punished

Beneath the trunk of limbs he keeps

a photograph of Adam and her

in which the two stand jowl to jowl

and they are naked

but confused. Nothing fits.

There is a second frame in an inset

in the first

in which he and she are bleeding

in an interesting way. There’s a limb

in the locked trunk

that attaches to similar effect. I am

at the beginning of things

and my blood

is well and truly concealed,

he thinks. He would snap each limb,

one by one,

but it’s not Friday

yet. Every boy’s blood is every boy’s,

so I cannot hide long

he thinks. But I also cannot bear her

seeing me. That makes it hard.

And so he turns away

and every boy on the block turns away

and Adam in his colorless garden

turns away

and every Friday up and down streets

and streets off streets

they bend their small willing bodies

in interesting ways

when she comes to the door and says

it’s happening.

MATT BEL

The Fingerling (an excerpt)

I had finished building the house, or nearly so, but we moved in both too fast and too early, before I had completed the furnishings, even before I had right-hinged all the doors, and in response to my worries my wife said there was no trouble, that she would finish what I had mostly made. Always I had loved her singing, had been moved and changed by its sound, but now it became something else, stronger upon the dirt, made more capable where it was the only such voice: With some power never exhibited throughout the days of their courtship, she began to sing into being all that I had not yet fully crafted, and from her voice there came to be a sofa and chair, then a linen closet packed with linen, a cupboard full of clay dishes. Our marital bed was already made, hewn from hard boards I had cut from the woods, but it was my wife that weaved our mattress, not from feather down and cloth but from song, and though the object worked the same as one made still I knew there was some difference, and also that all this aggressed upon the realm of my dominion. Always I had planned to be the maker of things, steward of artifice, and yet here she was, able to call from within what I had to cull from without, and in my anger I tested my wife’s powers, asked her to make various objects which I desired for the house, certain tools and utensils harder to craft, and also something else, something just for me: Some amount of steel, fashioned into traps, with which I might perhaps venture into the woods, intent after the fur and the meat of the small animals I had seen living among the bush and the bramble.

My wife frowned but did not deny me. In those days we refused each other nothing, or nearly so, certainly not the differences in our dreams of house, of home, of family, of husband and wife, father and mother, child and child, and of all the right occupations we would each take to occupy all of those roles, and so in the yard behind our house, she sang into existence the means of my trapping, a complement to my fishing tackle, the tools of my previous employment, which I had last worked when we lived on the other side of the lake, past the mountains beyond. With axe and saw, I built for myself a wagon into which to load my traps, but for a long time after I did not put them to work, because it was fishing I was best built for, and it was fish I wished most to eat, and so from the lake I at first took only such numbers as were necessary for our table, and while I fished my wife planted a garden behind the house, where she thought to grow some few tubers, some sparse assortment of herbs. From this simple existence sprouted the first days of our life together in that house, the first weeks and months, the first year, and at the end of that year we had much of what we needed for each other, for each other’s happiness. And yet still I was impatient, for it was a family I wanted most, that I wanted from her, my wife.

.   .   .

The earliest signs of my wife’s first pregnancy were attended with much joy and celebrating, and after some months had passed I put aside the implements of my fishing and with my hatchet returned to the woods to cut more lumber from its trees, so that I might craft both crib and bassinet, then a table for changing the diapers of our coming child, then all the other furnitures necessary for the rearing of that expected infant. As I completed each piece, my wife trailed after, supporting her belly with one hand as she raised and lowered her diaphragm, bellowed her lungs to sing a song over their recently-finished forms, taking the rude shapes I had made and adding to their function some ornate flourishes, prettifications: Now the bassinet was filigreed with ornate leaves, now the changing table was guarded on each corner not by a simple post but by a wooden bird carved as detailed as any ever born from egg. I marveled over the exactness of her touchless craft, the way that the syllables of her song-speech could produce such fine beauty from what I had already made, but when I was done marveling, I maddened, for who was she to change what I had created for our child?

Everything I made she improved, but it was not improvement I craved, only title, control, mastery, and now there was my wife always there to take from me what was first mine, and as she presented what she had done, there I was sure I saw a smile upon the pale shape of her face, another bright song already held behind her lips’ redness.

.   .   .

The dirt’s wettest season swelled, and then its hottest burst the world to bloom, and with those seasons my wife swelled too, expanded in both belly and breast until the leaves fell, and afterward there was no more growth for my wife either, instead only some stalling of the flesh gathering within her. Even before it was obvious that there would be no baby for us, even then my wife began to cry, to sing sadder songs that dimmed the lights of our already fuel-poor gas-lamps, or else that broke some dishes stored safely in our cupboards. Her frustrations made melodic, they darkened my moods too, and soon there were the first cross words between us, and for many evenings I went out the back of the house and sat in her garden, staring out its dirt to my wagon full of traps, still unused as the day she first sung them. Their sharp secrets gleamed in the starlight, but I did not move to touch their shapes, not yet. I was not then a trapper, despite the availability of necessary tools, nor was I to be a father, despite the earlier hopes of my wife’s first tumid months. How I angered