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    Fairy Tale Review: The Translucent Issue #13
    Fairy Tale Review: The Translucent Issue #13
    Fairy Tale Review: The Translucent Issue #13
    Ebook178 pages1 hour

    Fairy Tale Review: The Translucent Issue #13

    By Kate Bernheimer

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    About this ebook

    The Translucent Issue is a break from tradition. In some ways, colors are an easier, more obvious entry point into the world of fairy tales. It is not transparent, and thus never explicit on the page—the Brothers Grimm rarely editorialized—but then again psychology is rarely explicit. It is a partial view, one that permits shape and light, but not clarity, not exactness; it is a half-truth, one that includes what is as often as it includes what could be; it is the fantasy of wish, and the dubious luxury of pretense. Fairy-tale psychology is not clarified through the use of interiority or analysis, but by situation, circumstance. It is illuminated by what is seen and, just as importantly, what is not.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherWayne State University Press
    Release dateNov 1, 2017
    ISBN9780814343975
    Fairy Tale Review: The Translucent Issue #13
    Author

    Kate Bernheimer

    Kate Bernheimer has been called “one of the living masters of the fairy tale” (Tin House). She is the author of a novel trilogy and the story collections Horse, Flower, Bird and How a Mother Weaned Her Girl from Fairy Tales, and the editor of four anthologies, including the World Fantasy Award winning and bestselling My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales and xo Orpheus: 50 New Myths. She is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Arizona in Tucson, where she teaches fairy tales and creative writing.

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      Fairy Tale Review - Kate Bernheimer

      Editor

      ALICIA BONES

      How to Be a Vigorous and Hearty Individual Who Is Full of Life

      1.

      Sam received instructions from his father on his 18th birthday. His father passed on advice he himself had received from scholars and theologians, advice sure to shape his son’s direction for decades to come. His father said, A man should know how to catch a fish the size of his thigh, brand the forest with his family name (huzzah!), and force a woman, no matter how beautiful, to enjoy breakfast with him. Only then can he become vigorous, hearty, full of life—a real man.

      Sam took his father’s instruction to heart, so he, naked with only a flint and a fishing lure, ventured deep into the Alaska wild. But the fish he caught were too small to please his father, only guppies with blank eyes, and since Sam walked 15 miles to school in heavy blizzards every day, his thigh was as thick as a barracuda, maybe even a small shark. Fires burned his eyes. He asked a wild Alaskan girl mushing across a frozen lake with her hearts-of-gold Huskies if she’d like to join him at IHOP for a short stack. I’ll be paying, he smarmy-faced her, but she said, Sorry, but I’m following a map to my family’s lost gold in the Heart of the Mountain. Sam cried as he watched her mush into the sunset, but only for a second before he wiped his tears with a manly fist, and then curled up underneath a mama bear in her den, hoping he’d shrink down and grow fur, do it all over as animal without father.

      2.

      Molly received instructions from her mother on her 30th birthday. Her mother passed on advice she herself had received from the instructions included with her hypoallergenic eye makeup. Her mother said, A good woman knows how to harvest Russian caviar and serve it on the right piece of pastry, torture other women with specific eye rolling and particular glances, and entice men in top hats and tails to tickle her. Only then can she seem like a bearcat, somebody who knows her way around a bedroom but still is the kind of lady they can take into other rooms of the house, and, indeed, out of the house entirely.

      Molly took her mother’s advice to heart so she sailed in a stomach-roiling yacht captained by a man with a penchant for smoking cigars and wearing a top hat and tails. She pulled a mama sturgeon out of the Caspian Sea and massaged its belly until it purred and laid its eggs, panting and sweating like a real female should. Blintzes were the only thing to serve with caviar. At night, Molly glared with eyes like bazookas at the moon—all at once the maiden, the mother, the crone—to let her know that none of these forms would be entirely adequate. Close to the Port of Seattle, Molly pulled up the hem of her skirt to reveal an ankle, white enough to bite, too white not to bite, for the man in top hat and tails, and he reached out with a trembling finger for a tickle. I never realized you had an ankle as white as this, the man purred. But Molly didn’t like the feel of his finger, moist, hot, salted with caviar, so she squirmed away, wishing that she didn’t have to be a lady but instead could be a mermaid, or, better, an orca, who had to worry about wearing the right jewelry only when a human bitch sailed around these parts.

      3.

      Reggie received instructions from his great uncle on his 80th birthday. His great uncle had lived a mighty long time, and over that lifetime of backbreaking labor and hard-won lessons, he’d come to know a thing or two. His great uncle said, As you know, I’m already dead, Reggie, but when you die, I want you to let your corpse rot next to mine to proclaim our proud blood lineage. I only lived to be a 13th generation Westerner, but I’m going to come back to Montana one of these days, maybe as a curious chickadee or a Chinese noodle, a teenaged elm crying like a twerp with growing pains. Remember, a good dead man knows how to hire a mortician who doesn’t use too much rouge but instead preserves a man’s farm-working tan, reserves a burial plot under a pine for Sunday family picnics, and books a woman with a clear voice and a modestly covered décolletage to sing his funeral song (The Old Rugged Cross, obviously). Only then can a dead man be thought of fondly, with a tear, a prayer, and a genuflection as a real dead man.

      Reggie wanted to take his great uncle’s instructions to heart, but before he could, he died. The mortician rouged him up like a real doll, his greedy sonofabitch son buried too close to an interstate, and Mrs. Bellows wore a low-cut top only appropriate for lounge jazz to sing. But before any of it, Reggie was reborn as a pebble and now spends his time with a gurgling stream that expects nothing from him but constancy.

      BRADLY SERGIO BRANDT

      Glaze & Morph

      Glaze

      I got my sugar cube.

      My archangel forms

      In a circlet of weather.

      My archangel gathers

      Plastic bottle caps left

      In the desert, blue snow.

      He throws me a blanket,

      Then slips from his skin

      Like a steady flight of silk.

      He splits me open

      To a neighborhood of lights

      Beaming from the crown of my head.

      He’s got a voice of warm milk

      And I got a nighttime body

      Even God can’t resist.

      Morph

      The day I studied pavement

      That day gives into me

      Daddy’s office friend

      In the alley

      Roaches creep the steam pipes

      Beside the red windows

      His jeans lead to the part of men

      Some women

      Don’t return from

      The afterlife

      Is dick-hot

      And steamy…

      An anthem of horns grows in my skull

      I’d kill anyone

      I know

      ROWAN HISAYO BUCHANAN

      Juniper

      The dream collectors’ truck stopped at each house on our street. There was a system: Mondays recycling, Tuesdays dreams, Wednesdays general trash. Lying on the front lawn, I could see the double-wide tires. Dreams clanked as they were thrown into the back. Dream collectors, like trash collectors, travel early.

      Grandma and I had shared our small house, and after she died, I couldn’t sleep. Even when she’d been alive our dreambag was thin. Grandma’s dreams were slender as yarn and juniperberry dusky. She disliked tossing them out. She kept them inside old shoeboxes. Juniper blue reminded her of the tree that grew in the garden that was hers before she flew to this empty-lawned nation. She said that she saw this tree when she slept. It grew wide-branched and ample-berried. She’d fill her cheeks with the fruit. But when she awoke, she could never remember the taste.

      Dreams are many sizes, but they’re all blue. When I stopped sleeping, the dreams collected under my eyes and stained my skin. After my third night awake, the color spread. My knees were the blue of the veins that grow under tongues. After six days of unsleep, the palms that I held up against the light were deepest Prussian blue.

      The two collectors stopped, looking left and right for our household’s dreambag, but no dreamers lived there anymore. One yawned into his fist and turned away, but the other pointed to my dream-dyed body.

      It’s over there.

      Looks heavy.

      One picked me up by the feet and the other by the hands. My hips and shoulder brackets strained. I opened my mouth to protest, but the noise that came out was no louder than paper crumpling.

      One, two, three, heave, ho.

      They threw me into their truck. My knees smacked against my face. My hip hit the steel wall.

      The truck was dark. A bag crashed against my ribs and another bounced off my stomach. The vehicle was rancid with stale dreams. I knocked my pinky against the side, but the men were laughing and their voices creaked like the truck’s steel jaws. The drive was long.

      There was a time when people let their dreams drift out the window. They didn’t give a thought to how their dreams would pollute the sea and sky. They didn’t consider the growing population of dreamers. But now we have the dumps, where the suburbs meet the scrubland. Nobody wants to see the nightmares flicking their indigo tails.

      When you are sleepless, time passes in strange ways and I don’t know how many bags were dropped on my body. They hummed, buzzed, and rumbled. Near my left ear, something was weeping. There were moments I thought I’d die and moments I thought I was dead.

      Then the truck stopped with a great beeping like an almighty alarm clock going off. One by one, the weights were removed. A face bent down towards me, the nose was crooked. Stubble greyed his face. He hefted me over his shoulder.

      Need help with that?

      I’ve got it.

      You know if you put out your back, the insurance won’t cover it.

      His phone lumped his pocket and I wondered who he called on it and what they spoke about. Behind the barbed wire fences, dreams were piled into hills. Cranes swung, ultramarine drooling from their rusted jaws. Grandma used to say she hated that the citizens of this country ironed everything flat. She meant that the houses were lined up straight as the teeth of the children who live here.

      Is it just me or are the leavings getting uglier?

      I wondered if I should be insulted. He dropped me on something spongy. I couldn’t see my house from there. I couldn’t see any house at all. My brain was blue. The sky was blue-blue. Everything was blue-blue-blue.

      Hey, at least this one didn’t scratch.

      Their voices crumbled on the wind as they walked away, and finally, bruised by night terrors, wet dreams, dry dreams, night joys, and all the rest, I slept.

      When I woke, my hands had faded to the hue of the fluff that builds up in the back of the tumble dryer. My feet were the same. My limbs were light. I wiggled my fingers in front of my face. I stood.

      The morning sun cut through the dreambag hills and the dump glowed. It was difficult to make out specific forms. But as I looked up, I saw, on the nearest hill, a tree was growing. I waded out to taste its fruit.

      STEPHANIE CAWLEY

      Mary Shelley

      Did you ever hear a bird, an animal, dismiss its kind?

      Embroidered gold, the sky, a coast with a heartbeat

      in it. I am this crushed vowel, this sand on the ground. A girl

      like weeds, like wet bridges adrift from moorings. Suppose

      a book jellyfished out of this darkness. A pearl

      on the horizon. A turning away from lighthouses.

      Are we only allowed, now, the

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