Copyright
Copyright © Nikita Gill 2018
Illustrations © Nikita Gill 2018
Cover design and illustration by Tomás Almeida
Cover copyright © 2018 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.
Author photograph © Peace Ofure
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First published in Great Britain in 2018 by Trapeze, an imprint of The Orion Publishing Group Ltd.
First U.S. Edition: September 2018
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2018948935
ISBN: 978-0-316-42074-7 (trade paperback); 978-0-316-42073-0 (ebook)
E3-20180817-JV-PC
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
A Universal Truth
Once Upon a Time
Once Upon a Time II
For the Cynic
Somewhere Across the Universe, This Intergalactic Fairytale Is Being Told
A Tale of Two Sisters
The Fable in Thermodynamics
The Woods Reincarnated
Whispers from the Wicked Woods
The Miller’s Daughter
Half of Rumpelstiltskin Seeks Redemption
Why Tinkerbell Quit Anger Management
Boy Lost
Wendy
Child’s Play
The Red Wolf
Cinderella’s Mother Sends Her a Message from Heaven
The Stepmother’s Tale
Lessons in Surviving Long-term Abuse
Fairy Godmother
Two Misunderstood Stepsisters
Trapped
Badroulbadour
The Shoemaker’s Son
Scheherazade the Clever
Wonderland Villain
The Hatter
How a Hero Becomes a Villain
Beauty and Bravery
Cry Wolf
Jack’s Fable Unfalsified
Goldilocks
The Three Times You Rebuilt Your House-shaped Heart
Take Back Your Fairytale
The Dragon Witch’s Daughter
Waking Beauty
Seven
The Evil Queen
Gretel After Hansel
Hansel’s Letter to His Son
Belladonna
The Little Mermaid’s Mother Speaks to Her Unborn Baby
The Sea Witch’s Lament
An Older and Wiser Little Mermaid Speaks
Lessons from the Not-So-Wicked Witch for Dorothy
Rapunzel, Rapunzel
Rapunzel’s Note Left for Mother Gothel
Baba Yaga
Why the Sun Rises and Sets
Why the Leaves Change Colour
Why It Rains
The Moon Dragon
The Tale Weaver
The Modern-day Fairytale
Ode to the Catcaller Down the Street
The Girl Goes After the Wicked King Who Trapped Her in the Tower
Pandora’s Mind
The Trolls (After Shane Koyczan)
Difficult Damsels
Hunger: The Darkest Fairytale
Vengeance Born
The Art of Emptiness
The Moral of Your Story
The Looking Glass
The Giant’s Daughter
Charming
Metamorphosis
Princess Plain
Phoenix Blood
Man Up, Hercules
Devour Your Monsters
In Absentia: A Common Curse
Of Kings and Queens
Svengali Girl (After Simon Says)
The Ogre
Mothers and Daughters
In the Old Days
In the Old Days II
How You Save Yourself
Nothing Soft About It
Motherly Advice
Skeletons in the Garden
The Shapeshifter
What’s in a Name
For All Our Hidden Witches
Question the Fairytale
Kiss the Dread
Four Spells to Keep Inside Your Mouth
Forest Person
The Healing
Happily Ever After
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by Nikita Gill
Newsletters
For you,
who has never forgotten
the magic.
It wants you to know
it remembers you too.
A Universal Truth
We all have storms and stories
inside our starmade bodies
that even the night sky cannot hold.
This is why we are on this earth;
to learn how to love and each other,
to learn how to love and hold ourselves.
Once Upon a Time
Once upon a time,
Matter dreamed up an idea.
It was a small hopeful dream
a thought with the wings of the fairy.
But as with all things full of hope
it would be terribly difficult to birth.
Several events needed to come together
in the millisecond of the time it took to build Earth.
It depended on a 1 in 102,685,000 chance of existing.
A 1 in 20,000 chance meeting between two beings.
An ancestral heritage that goes back 4 billion years
all the way to single-celled organisms.
And only then can this idea be so finely crafted
into a gift with actual presence.
Imagine how much the universe must have loved
this thing to make it happen.
Imagine how many stars gave up their hearts
to bring this into fluid motion.
Does it make you curious?
Make you wonder what could be so marvellous?
That idea … it was you.
You are the universe’s fairytale come true.
Once Upon a Time II
But the universe never promised
you this would be easy,
after all, you are the hero here.
And heroes are meant
to be forged golden
from the blaze.
It is up to you to rise again
from the fragmented shards
your foes left of you.
You must lift a sword
with reborn strength and take on
the demons in your ribcage.
You must devastate the chains
every violent person
has brutally placed on you.
And you must show them all
how they were simply
characters in your story.
But you, you are the author
of this spellbinding tale
built of hope and bravery.
Out there may be monsters, my dear.
But in you still lives the dragon
you should always believe in.
For the Cynic
Our current cosmic address
is a small flying piece of rubble
travelling through an endless black void,
surrounded inexplicably
by seven other pieces of flying rubble.
All of these pieces harmoniously
rotate around the same giant fireball
without ever crashing into each other,
or hurtling themselves
into said fireball.
And if that isn’t random enough,
out of all those pieces of rubble
ours is the only one that sustains
an environment that gives life
to billions of different life forms,
including a multitude
of flowering plants
and oxygen-giving trees,
a plethora of wildlife,
and eight billion human beings.
And somehow,
you still
genuinely think
that magic does not exist,
that fairytales aren’t real,
that the way people
find each other
at just the right time
at just the right moment
isn’t the most powerful sorcery.
Somewhere Across the Universe, This Intergalactic Fairytale Is Being Told
In the far corner of the Virgo supercluster, a small galaxy called the Milky Way exists, and in one of the further spirals of that galaxy there is said to be a tiny planet called Earth. At a cursory glance, there is nothing seemingly unique about this planet, even though it is simply beautiful, cloaked in calypso blue with an oscillating belt of green. It is, in fact, one of millions like it that live in just this universe.
The extraordinary thing about this planet though, are the beings that exist on it. They have been through war after war. Empires that promised to burn brighter than their resident star, the sun, and disappeared in the blink of an eye. Savage rulers, dictators have destroyed entire portions of it, and yet … they simply refuse to stop existing, it is like they have this treasured thing within them to keep them surviving, and to keep knowing.
Look closer now, oh passer-by, look closer at these beings. They are survivors with a sense of awe and curiosity at everything around them. Sometimes they have lost their way, but this is a thing they never seem to lose, because they are so full of potential.
Promise. This planet may be called Earth, but it should have been called Promise.
If you do not believe this little story, and dismiss it as a silly old wives’ tale, a thing which cannot possibly exist, then I hope you come upon their legendary message. You see, 40 years ago, these beings sent out a message on a space probe that has travelled 20.5 billion kilometres, hoping to meet one of us in space. In it lies a message, the definition of this entire species, and it reads simply:
‘This is a present from a small distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts, and our feelings. We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours.’
The Voyager is still out there, waiting for someone to come upon it. Maybe that someone is you. Maybe you will remind that species of the greatness that lies in their potential, their promise. Maybe you will be the being that turns that fairytale planet of promise into an intergalactic legend of green and blue.
A Tale of Two Sisters
In the beginning, there was oblivion.
A vastness, and an abyss comprised
of darkness and nothingness
… until there were two sisters.
One was made from the interconnectedness
of all things, a precipice of stories,
a treasury of things gone and things to come.
Her name was Cosmos.
The other was made from the tricorn
of darkness, black magic waiting to be born,
inkwells of feral power and rebel thoughts.
Her name was Chaos.
Before they had floated into the abyss,
as all celestial beings were left to do in the end,
their father told them to be a binary system,
to never ever let go of each other.
He warned them that together they could
build everything, but apart, nothing could exist.
So the two came together and imagined a tapestry
of moving, living stars that inhaled around each other.
They pictured impossible things like planets
that help thousands of different beings
and balls of fire to keep them warm
and whole atmospheres to help them breathe.
And this was how the love of two sisters
wrote the first ever eternal poem into magical
loving existence. A single poem
they christened, ‘The Uni-verse’.
The Fable in Thermodynamics
The first law of thermodynamics states this:
‘energy can neither be created nor destroyed.’
Which is that everything around us is recycled energy:
you, me, your dog, those we love and those we avoid.
is as ancient as the beginning of time itself.
Which is to say that our bones could have been
fragmented together from the ashes of the library of Alexandria.
Which is to say our sinews and spine were crafted from the
end of a hundred-year-old oak tree and our smiles a comet.
Which is to say our hearts could be Achilles’ spirit
when he battled at Troy, bringing his enemies down with it.
Which is to say, when we feel like life is overwhelming,
we must remember that we’re just sparks of energy borrowing skin.
That no matter how much this pain feels everlasting,
this is just the temporary fabric we are in.
The Woods Reincarnated
We traded the woods for high-rises,
the wolf became the boy next door,
soft brown eyes and close-lipped smiles
to hide the flash of fangs instead of teeth.
The huntsman became the ‘nice’ man
that happened to live down the street
whose laugh never quite reached his eyes,
and the beaten track gets hazy
between grandmother and beast.
I wonder where the wildest things go
when the devilled copse is no longer there.
When the forest paths
become the backstreets of a city,
where predators learn a sweeter language
accented with false niceties.
The stories where little girls
need to be street-smart to survive
and sometimes they don’t win,
sometimes it’s the wolf that thrives.
What happens to the fairytale
when the woods have been replaced by cities;
and a concrete jungle that comes to life?
Whispers from the Wicked Woods
Where are the stories for the wicked girls,
the ones where they are told perfection is a lie?
Where are the legends fashioned from nuance,
the ones that cause the hero and the villain to blur lines?
Where are the myths for darker things,
the ones of us who were never snow-white pure?
Where are the lessons for naughty children,
the ones who want to be lost in the forest and folklore?
If you’re looking for secrets you will find them here,
these words have been resurrected from old fairytales’ rui
ns.
This is the place where those stories come to be reborn
and from the wreckage emerge things
more human than humans.
The Miller’s Daughter
The queen addresses her firstborn
after the fall of Rumpelstiltskin:
Maybe magic ends with me
and it will never cross your path
but I want you to remember
that survival is an art.
The world is falsehood
so you rely on your smarts.
Princes fail all the time.
Passion sometimes goes cold.
And princesses on days of fortune
can turn straw into gold.
Kind kings become greedy
and dragons can have soft souls.
Fairies cast the wrong spells,
mermaids can be drowned,
goblins and trolls can be heroes
and giants can fall without a sound,
and even the darkest things can be defeated
once their names are spoken out loud.
Half of Rumpelstiltskin Seeks Redemption
Half of Rumpelstiltskin
speaks to the Miller’s Daughter:
Since tearing myself in two,
the half of me that remains
has been learning how to grow
and craft an apology worthy of you.
I offer no tricks, only regret
for not understanding in my childhood
that guilt is sometimes necessary,
a way to remember good and never forget.
I have heard that excuses make
for bad apologies, so I’ll stop there.