Fairy Tale Review: The Brown Issue #7

FAIRY TALE REVIEW

The Brown Issue

FOUNDER & EDITOR

Kate Bernheimer

GUEST EDITOR, THE BROWN ISSUE

Timothy Schaffert, University of Nebraska–Lincoln

CONTRIBUTING EDITOR

Alissa Nutting, John Carroll University

ASSISTANT EDITORS

Forrest Roth, University of Louisiana–Lafayette

Lucas Southworth, University of Alabama

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

ORIGINAL PRINT DESIGN

J. Johnson, DesignFarm

COVER ART (INSIDE FRAME)

Kiki Smith, Born

COURTESY OF THE ARTIST

LAYOUT

Aida Giurgianu, 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 © 2011 by Fairy Tale Review Press.

The Brown Issue (2011) 978-0-8143-4176-6

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.

The air was heavy with the delightful fragrance of mellowed paper and leather surcharged with a strong bouquet of tobacco.

—The Haunted Bookshop (1919), by Christopher Morley

FAIRY TALE REVIEW

The Brown Issue

ANNOTATED TABLE OF CONTENTS

TIMOTHY SCHAFFERT

Guest Editor’s Note

The pages of this book you hold in your hands—depending on when you’re holding it—may very well be brown with age by now.

L. ANNETTE BINDER

Lay My Head

Babies weren’t frightened of her face. They didn’t yet know sickness.

MAUD CASEY

The Man Who Walked Away

They could just live their lives of gas fitting, meals, the stories of the prince who wanted to see the world, sleep, gas fitting, meals, the stories of the prince who wanted to see the world, sleep.

MELISSA COSS AQUINO

Pelo Bueno/Good Hair

Her hair was so black it looked like India ink running down her bare arms, and so shiny it reflected images like a mirror.

ELIZABETH CRANE

Mr. and Mrs. P Are Married

Worrying everyone terribly, she does not speak until her third birthday, when she says, I have to go.

MELISSA CUNDIEFF-PEXA

Ars Poetica

This man breathes smoke into his hands for heat.

BEN DEBUS

The Sugar the Wind Brings

The birds which should swoop down to peck the panes of sugar hold so far away that Gretel can’t hear their song.

BRANDEL FRANCE DE BRAVO

Four Poems

Together they were bacon

—sinew and glisten—

and called a platter home.

OWEN KING

The Idiot’s Ghost

The impact killed him instantly, and horrifically.

DREW KREWER

Glitterbug

and here’s a semi-precious flea aflutter

PETER KUPER

Alice Through the Wonderland Looking-Glass

As I went along, it became curiouser and curiouser who made a natural fit.

SARAH MESSER

Spirit Medium

Branching, birds, and since you left: everything

I wear is made of glass.

BRIAN OLIU

RBI Baseball

This is the part where we are supposed to keep an eye on things.

LISA PERRIN

Paper Dolls

Do not cut out space between arm and body

JUDITH SLATER

Innocence

The woman put the birds in silver cages and forced them to sing to her until their throats were raw.

DAYANA STETCO

Habitat

And then it happened. His body grew, stretched, and became transparent, wrapped itself around the land.

JIM TOLAN

Devil Born

He knelt down in the hole and managed to wrest from icy earth and stone a wooden box the size of a cow’s heart.

Contributor Notes

GUEST EDITOR’S NOTE

Brown is the color of the wolf, of the harvest-ravaged farm, of thatched roofs, of cinnamon cake, of autumn, of snuff, of wooden boxes (bridal chests, watch cases, humidors, coffins). If ever there was a color more suited to earthly existence, it’s the color of earth itself. And earthly existence is at the very heart of fairy tales, despite all the unearthly circumstances depicted.

The pages of this book you hold in your hands—depending on when you’re holding it—may very well be brown with age by now, or riddled with the dark-backed, woodboring bugs that feed on paper—the deathwatch beetle, for example, named for its ticking noises that disrupt the dead quiet of a room.

As writers now spill their words into the digital ether, doomsayers (and deathwatchers) tick off the minutes of the book’s last throes. The opposite manifesto is that of the bibliophile, who believes a book untethered by binding, glue, and paper is no book worth reading. Somewhere within all this is a recognition that books—even at their most depleted (falling apart at the stitches, pages torn, edges flaking away into a dust that makes us sneeze and our eyes water)—are more than just the stories they contain.

Though much is made of the fairy tale tradition’s powerful and enduring oral history, I can’t imagine the stories without their trappings of leather and paper. So integral to a story’s romance and terror is the very shape of the words and sentences, the flourish of the illuminated letters, the scent of its pages, their weight and scratch. Illustrations inform your understanding of the text: the bend of a swan’s neck and a stepmother’s wrist, the ripples in the flow of falling tresses, the décor of a candy cottage and the hunch of the back of the witch within.

The books we love the most are those that most show the love, books damaged by our reading them over and over, from dog-earing their corners, cracking their bindings, loaning them to friends who leave them in the rain. I wish for your copy of The Brown Issue to grow withered and warped, its ancient technology to fail page by page, all these words collapsing in your hands, right before your eyes.

Timothy Schaffert

University of Nebraska–Lincoln

L. ANNETTE BINDER

Lay My Head

Babies weren’t frightened of her face. They didn’t yet know sickness. They saw only her eyes, how big they were. There was a baby girl before her in the aisle. A little round-faced girl, no older than two. Her ponytail went straight up like a paint brush, and her mother had tied a pink ribbon around it. The girl stood up on the seat while her mother read magazines. Angela smiled at her. She set aside her book and covered her eyes with her fingers and uncovered them again. The little girl giggled at that. She grabbed the fabric of the headrest and squealed. She reached for Angela and for the stewardess who was pushing the drinks cart up the aisle. Her mother patted her on the bottom. Felicia Marie, she said. You better hush. People are trying to sleep. The girl squealed again, and her cheeks were dimpled and shiny like apples. The mother looked between the seats then. Her face went dark when she saw Angela. Get down here, young lady, the mother said. Get down here right now, and she moved quickly. She pulled her little girl away from the headrest. She held her baby against her. She held her there and didn’t let her squirm.

.   .   .

The roundness in Angela’s cheeks went first. Her skin went from olive to yellow. She’d spent all those mornings on her deck, but the sun didn’t warm her, not even in September when L.A. was hottest. She’d shivered and watched the neighbor kids splash around in the pool. They worked their squirt guns and wrestled in the water, and they were happy even when their parents fought. How little children need to be happy. How little it takes, and still things go wrong. She watched them all summer and into fall, and the roundness was gone and from one day to the next the veins popped out on her forearms. Her hands were spotted like her grandma’s had been. Liver spots grandma called them, and Angela had wondered why.

Her belly grew round like a pregnant lady’s. Like Mr. Hogan from the old neighborhood who drank beer every morning and tossed the cans onto his wife’s compost heap. In the last few weeks the bones in her throat had started to show. There was a hollow between them, and her mother would notice this right away. She’d see it and know. Thirty years married to a U.S. soldier, and her mother still thought like a German farm girl. She’d been right about Angela’s father. She knew he was sick from the smell of his breath. He’s got the mark, she’d said. She knew it months before the doctors did, and she’d see the mark on Angela now, too. Her girl who’d been pretty once. She should be a model, that’s what all the people said. And what did it matter. Every day brought another loss, and her prettiness was the least of them. It fell away like the burden it was.

.   .   .

Her mother was waiting at the luggage carousel. She carried the same winter coat, the extra one she kept for guests because it was cold even in November. Angela didn’t remember that old plaid coat until she saw her mother standing there in her winter boots. She’d brought it along every Christmas when Angela came home from college. Look how you’re dressed, she’d say back then. You’re always in short sleeves. You need to cover up. Angela would pretend she didn’t feel the wind when they went through the sliding glass doors. She’d say she was warm in her sandals or those loafers she wore without socks. Anything was better than letting her mother be right.

The coat smelled like mothballs. It was years between visits now. Years when it used to be months. Her mother walked too quickly at first. Angela couldn’t keep up, and the air outside was sharp in her throat. It squeezed her chest. She’d forgotten how thin the air could be up here. This was probably how fish felt when they were pulled from the water. She slowed and stopped and set her hand against the retaining wall where the juniper bushes grew. Her mother stopped, too. She came close and fixed the collar on the old plaid coat. She took her scarf off and wrapped it around Angela’s neck, and her eyes were black when she spoke. You need to cover your mouth, she said. The wind’s picking up. All those years in California and you’ve forgotten how it blows. They walked slowly to the car. Her mother always parked in one of the farthest spots, out by the long-term lot. There were patches of ice in places. Angela slipped and caught herself, and the mountains were dark already against the sky.

.   .   .

Her bed was the same and the feather quilt, but her books were gone and most of her posters and ribbons. Her mother had packed these things in plastic boxes and set them in the closet. The bookshelves were full with her mother’s art books now and porcelain figurines, and up at the top there was the yellow book of fairy tales her mother had brought from Germany. She’d read it to Angela when she was little. She read to her in German, and Angela understood. Strubelpeter with his wild hair and Hans im Glück who was happiest when all his gold was lost. She knew the stories and her mother’s voice, and that was the last thing she heard that night and the first thing in the morning.

.   .   .

Her body was healthy in every way but one. She wasn’t even forty and her heart was healthy and her lungs were clear and everything was perfect except for the thing that wasn’t.

.   .   .

She held a cup of tea in her lap. Whitethorn and lemon balm because they were good for the circulation, that’s what her mother told her. Her mother had set the redwood chaise in the middle of the yard. She’d brought out blankets, too, and wrapped them around Angela’s knees. It was almost forty degrees out, and it felt even warmer. The sun was shining on her head. It was bright as California outside, mountain bright, and she should have worn her sunglasses. Two little girls played in the front yard at the old Meyer house. They tunneled into the melting snow. One of them was wearing a skirt without any tights, and even from across the street Angela could see the pink of