Fairy Tales 🧚 Alberta

The Ties That Bind

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Güsfreude knew that she was dead. The wolf had killed the grandmother and would wait in her bed for her innocent granddaughter to return from the woods. 

She knew she was dead, and yet she was aware of herself floating in darkness, her mind drifting in the obscurity of memories she couldn’t forget.

How could it all end this way, in tragedy? How could the Light be extinguished by the Dark? Where was the woodsman with his ax, come to rescue her sweet little girl?

Perhaps the problem was that she had read to Beatrice the Grimm — and not the Perrault — version of “Little Red Riding Hood.” In Perrault’s version, Little Red Riding Hood is never saved, but is instead murdered and eaten. Perhaps Beatrice, lying in bed next to the Wolf, assumed that the woodsman would arrive momentarily, and that it would all work out in the end.

Stupidly, Güsfreude never mentioned the Perrault version. Nor had she mentioned the clear warning of Perrault himself:

From this story one learns that children, especially young lasses, pretty, courteous and well-bred, do very wrong to listen to strangers. And it is not an unheard thing if the Wolf is thereby provided with his dinner. I say Wolf, for all wolves are not of the same sort; there is one kind with an amenable disposition – neither noisy, nor hateful, nor angry, but tame, obliging and gentle, following the young maids in the streets, even into their homes. Alas! Who does not know that these gentle wolves are of all such creatures the most dangerous!

Having turned the Brothers Grimm into apostles, and having sanctified their wisdom in her Holy Grimmble, Güsfreude stressed how Little Red Riding Hood and her granny were saved by the woodsman. She also told her granddaughter about how they later outwitted another wolf by luring it down the chimney into a trough full of cooked sausages (into which he then drowned). Why had Güsfreude read only that version of the tale? And why, if she insisted on reading only that version, had she not made it clear to the young girl, who was indeed “pretty, courteous and well-bred,” that she must buy and cook her own sausages?

Still, fairy tales were one thing and reality was another — or so she hoped. In the real world it just didn’t seem possible to Güsfreude that evil could win out so easily. Or that she could end up stuck in the middle of Nowhere with only her regrets to think about.

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Even in her darkest days on Earth, Güsfreude had hoped for a glorious life after death. She felt that the universe held some innate order, and that the evil, violent people would be stopped somehow, thrown into a purgatorial prison cell, or obliterated from the face of existence. She couldn’t quite whittle her hopes down into any particular religion, so she settled on vague Indian and Chinese concepts, on the resurrectional power of Shelley’s poetry. In “Ode to the West Wind” Shelley all but promised her, in his typical symbolic manner, that when death strikes, rebirth will follow:

Drive my dead thoughts over the universe / Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth! / And, by the incantation of this verse, / Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth / Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind! / Be through my lips to unawakened earth / The trumpet of a prophecy! O Wind, If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?

And in his elegy to Keats, Shelley went further: he showed us that our present lives were mere waiting stations. Soon we would lift up into the air, and fly like a storm-driven boat into the highest heavens…

And yet even if she were to be driven through the inmost veil of Heaven, Güsfreude simply couldn’t accept it. Angels spinning in the clouds were fine. She liked angels. But what good was divine ecstasy when she knew that her Beatrice was in mortal danger?

How could she gaze through Omar Khayyam’s Seventh Gate at the mysteries of the universe, and how could she watch as each morn a thousand roses brings, when the world she cared about was going to seed? How could she float through a Celestial Wonderland when her grand-daughter wept in chains?

Whether at Naishapur or Babylon, whether the Cup with sweet or bitter run, / The Wine of Life keeps oozing drop by drop, the Leaves of Life keep falling one by one. / Each Morn a thousand Roses brings, you say; yes, but where leaves the Rose of Yesterday?

The hardest thing to accept was that there was no going backward. Time’s wingéd chariot was on a one-way journey. She knew she could never go back and make things right in Eden Valley — that wooded paradise where she went to escape from all the wolves in sheep’s clothing. And where, with her grand-daughter on her way through the dark forest, she’d been swallowed in her bed.

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Güsfreude had done nothing to prepare Beatrice for the real world. She knew how suicidally bored her granddaughter was. And she thought she was creating an escape for her by reading her fairy tales and fantasy stories, by encouraging her imagination. In fact, she had merely invited the Wolf and the Walrus to dinner, without explaining to Beatrice in plain English that they were hungry psychopaths.

She had been a great friend to Beatrice, but she had also enabled her to live in her own private fairy tale. She grew up believing that boys could fly if they really wanted to, and that a Knight would always be true to his Lady. She believed that a princess would spring wide awake if she was kissed in the right place at the right time, and that all men who dressed in black leather jackets and wore Gucci shoes were fairies from the Neo-Platonic Realm.

Even after she got married, Beatrice still believed in these tales, although the Cheshire Cat was nipping at Alice’s petticoat, Peter Pan was lying to Wendy, and the Carpenter was getting out his saw.

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On their wedding night, Antonio pushed Beatrice into their bedchamber and tied her to the bedpost in what Beatrice thought was a playful game of love-making. Antonio brought out a book called The Temptation of Saint Anthony, ripped the pages from its spine, and taped a page to each part of her body that needed to be cleansed of its unspeakable sin.

Knightly deeds became nightly fears, and Beatrice could see that Camelot had been stormed by a legion of blood-thirsty mutants. Orcs and trolls were massing on the horizon.

The Red Cross Knight, who Beatrice assumed was a paramedic, poked holes in her underwear. After splitting the Round Table in two, Sir Lancelot schemed with a band of Norman thugs in the Anglo suburbs of Montreal.

In defence of Beatrice’s naïveté, one should remember that there are reincarnated Buddhist monks in lonely monasteries, who, after 40 lifetimes, still can’t tell the difference between Unity and Division or between Platonic Beauty and the Beast.

How then was Beatrice to see Antonio for what he was? With her grandmother dead and gone, how was she to know that “all wolves are not of the same sort” and that some will indeed follow “the young maids in the streets, even into their homes”?

How was one so gentle to defend herself against this Age’s most recent reincarnation of Sin — a professor of Literature and Legal History, a fiend who could bend both the laws of language and the language of laws? 

From the moment of his fall, this most reptilian of litigators overturned legal codes and commandments, transforming the world into his own private kangaroo court. Legions were at his service: from Los Angeles to Kolkata, the jury chambers of the world were haunted by his angry ministers, his false affidavits, his extradition loopholes, and his switchblade-thin technicalities that liberated the most vicious of brutal psychopaths.

Beatrice asked her tormenter: “Why did you bring me to this dungeon, anyway?”

Antonio responded, “If, deep down, you didn’t believe you’d sinned and needed to be tied even tighter to this rack, you would struggle to free yourself.”

Beatrice was in fact struggling to free herself, yet the ropes were so tight that you couldn’t even see her wrist move.

Beatrice tried in vain to wrangle her way free of her marriage contract. Yet Antonio had, with the help of the County Courthouse and the Catholic Church, tightened the clauses with Indian rubber, and bound up the stray exemptions with leather straps. She pleaded with him to untie her and instead monitor her movements with an ankle bracelet. “Otherwise, how can I make you breakfast?”

The thought of sausages cooking in the pan made Antonio relent. He took off her straps and replaced them with an electronic monitor, which Beatrice decorated with a fluffy pink band and called her ankle wing. Finally, she was free to go to her bedroom without pleading to her jail-keeper to unlock the door. She could also to into their back yard and roam around town — although on its outskirts she got a jolt of electricity that made her grit her teeth in agony.

The first thing she did when she got out of the house was visit the town lawyer, Bartleby. The visit was a disaster, however: Bartleby told her of the hopelessness of all such legal suits. The paperwork always ended up in Edmontonium, in a government archive presided over by a clerk named Edgar, who had a pet raven. Edgar had taught the bird to say, “dead souls, dead souls,” over and over till Beatrice concluded that it would be easier to put up with the darkest slavery than seek any form of justice in this world. It was better to escape, or take the advice of Voltaire’s dervish: find a garden on the outskirts of town and plant tulips.

Having exhausted her legal options, Beatrice tried to bury herself in the fantasies of her youth. Yet in what fairy tale could she find the spell that would make her life return to what it was? How could she retrace her steps to that first Immaculate Conception, that first golden apple of her innocence? It seemed impossible to bring back those moments when clouds danced across a ballroom sky of blue. Ever since her Granny died, the ballroom was looking more and more like a Hell’s Angels bar.

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The Necrometer

Beatrice only dimly recalled the time in her life when the hills were alive with the sound of music, and when the air around her wasn’t a dark glass plane crisscrossed by purple waves of electrostatic energy that Antonio sucked from the sky.

Antonio called his machine The Necrometer. It was capable of drawing in currents of energy hidden among what appeared to be low-level energy signatures of various spectra. The Necrometer stored the energy, which circled in currents, in a chamber beneath a titanium arm.

As a girl, Beatrice would sit at the breakfast table with her mom and dad, staring out the window and over the roses at the fields of wheat. Oh, how she would love to sit with her parents again! To feel the wind blowing and dancing in the sky. She would do anything to once more dangle her fingers over the circular bank of roses that surrounded their home.

Instead, she watched her husband pace the kitchen floor, occasionally picking up a knife and using the walls for target practice. Above their breakfast table was a gigantic slanting aquarium glutted with eels and suspended from the rafters. Antonio used these eels as a biological feedback mechanism to test the way low-level energy signatures affected neurons embedded in flesh. From there, he tried to measure the degree to which energy patterns could be detected in the water after Antonio electrocuted the body. On occasion, he would shout out, “Where in the heavens is that damned star?”

Beatrice’s dreams that once floated freely in the sky had been submerged, polluted, and defiled. The electrostatic discharge that Antonio sucked down from the heavens and measured in his nefarious machine sent piercing pulses into her broken heart.

To bring back her simple prairie life was an impossible dream. It was like a promise made by politicians and priests, and she despised both. The Courthouse and Church had sanctioned the band of marriage that dug into her left finger like a miniature handcuff. Her marriage bed resembled a pillory.

Beatrice thought of her lost innocence, of that golden delicious gleam and wither it had fled. Desperate, she cried out, “Who has swallowed it? Who has hid it from my sight?” 

Antonio heard this and laughed out loud at her stupidity. Such an idiot he’d never seen! While she understood the abstract delicacies of the great fairy tales, she was incurably naïve when it came to the actual deeds of goblins, wolves, gremlins and efreets. She’d read Snow White a thousand times, yet still she didn’t suspect that the apple he offered her wasn’t from the Okanagan Valley in nearby British Columbia. It was in fact the crimson, four-cylindered machine that lay five centimetres behind her sternum.

Dressed in a shiny black cloak, Antonio had stepped out from the black forest of Academia and offered a ripe, fleshy, 50 kilogram apple to the waylaid beauty of the plains. She thanked the well-dressed gentleman and took the gift back to her mother’s kitchen. She layered it into the soft dough of her feelings, sprinkled it with sugar and spice (in this case cinnamon), and popped it in the oven. She then offered Antonio a large slice, which she placed next to a thick piece of cheddar cheese and a cup of Earl Grey tea.

Antonio would swallow her whole!  And he would keep on swallowing her and eating at her for the duration of their married lives. For if she couldn’t grasp the blatant Freudianism of the simplest fairy tale, how was she to defend herself against the Nietzschean undercurrents of his Brothers Grimm?

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Next: 🧚 The Bind That Flies

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