for real, the emperor has no clothes
me and some fairy tales
olá people,
far and away the fairy tale i most cite in my daily life is the emperor's new clothes. the boy who cried wolf and the princess and the pea are distant runner-ups but nothing is as pertinent or contemporary as the bullshitting corrupt tailors (elon musk perhaps?), fawning townsfolk (congressional republicans maybe?) and the vain naked king (we know who).
i'm no academic when it comes to fairy tales but that one really holds up. it also inspired me to give a go at writing my own sort of fairy tale.
at the end of 2024, my flash fiction piece, If Fairy Tales Were Real, was published in Rathalla Review (Fall 2024). it's in a pdf e-book format which isn't super conducive to reading so i'm reposting it here, in its entirety here. i hope you enjoy and i wish real life ended like this fairy tale does…
cw: (lite) misogyny, (brief yet unpleasant) religious zealotry, and domestic abuse.
Once Upon A Time…
There was a kingdom with cutting edge technology and so many girls that mothers told daughters that there were twenty-five of them for every eligible boy in the kingdom. The girls grew up with sharp elbows and suspicious eyes and the boys had expectations of great abundance.
Among the many girls was Sheila. She had a sad tale: her mother, not much older than a girl herself, became pregnant again when Sheila was five months old and attempted to escape the burden of another baby by the only means available—illegally. That solution killed her. The fierce baby protectors of the kingdom, who hovered through the sky on poison ivy leaves watching always with infrared binoculars, cheered! Better a mother and fertilized egg both dead then a woman alive making undesirable decisions.
From that woeful beginning our heroine grew up as best she could. She flew kites and skipped rocks. Her stepmother was mean and her father a bum and the urge to be loved felt like an ever-tightening noose around her neck, but she imagined that she was happy because happy was an easy word to say.
When she was seventeen, she met the Rat King. He was thirty six. Beady red eyes, wispy white eyebrows and skin so pale it was almost translucent, she couldn't look away. He had wives and children and an unstable income provided by poorly managed drug dealing, but kings didn't need receipts. One quick swish of his tail and they were in love, she said, many times over.
No one questioned their pairing. Most girls of the kingdom had been given magic wands that, with a dainty flick of the wrist, could transform girls into women and abuse into love and cast predators as victims. The wand contained an alchemical mix of estrogen and patriarchy, but no scientist ever won a Nobel Prize for identifying exactly how the girls could achieve such amazing feats.
Despite public approval, the Rat King, with a creepy squinty gaze, and Sheila, so fresh and tender and beautiful in all the ways that youth endows the young, were not a love match for the ages. But no one had ever told her she deserved better and so she fell so hard that the scars from her scraped knees would always remain bright and jagged. When he punched her for skipping rocks in the polluted Tiete with the neighborhood boys, she promised never to look up again.
And so Sheila lived her life, day after day, year after year, proud to be the girl who had won the Rat King's heart, if not exactly his fidelity, and convinced that she'd found the love that every little girl dreamt of.
Until one day…the kingdom's annual kite competition lifted her chin. Sheila was walking back from work, and she slowed her steps to watch the colored kites flutter in the wind. Her wrists ached, so she twirled her wand and reminded herself how lucky she was to have sharp elbows.
A tabby tom cat from the other side of the kingdom had come to compete. Martín. Orange and flashy in his French made beret, he saw the way Sheila flicked her wrist and knew there was kite flier in her DNA.
“This one can fly,” he said, pointing to her.
She didn't hear him.
“You, I said,” he repeated, with the classic confidence of a tabby cat.
“Oh, me,” she said, wand in waistband as she worried the jagged skin of her scarred knees.
“Fly,” he said.
“I could, once, a long time ago,” she replied.
“You're not that old, kitty cat,” Martín purred. “I think you can make this beast fly.” He pointed to a red kite that made her blush.
“I can't, I don't have money to pay the fee,” she said, for once wishing her wand was more useful and could turn lint into coin instead of self-delusion into reality.
He flicked silver in the air and it shined bright as it twirled in her direction. She grabbed it with a grubby fist and giggled at her greed.
“Why do you want me as competition?” she asked as she bit the coin with hungry teeth.
“No point in winning if no one is good.”
Could it be? She'd never met a boy eager for a level playing field.
After her entry was guaranteed, she let the nylon cording whisper over her hands and pulled it taut when the time was right.
The red pentagon and long slithering tail bucked and jerked, testing her dominance, but she didn't lose her cool. Not even when the others came for her.
She put that kite to work and swerved and dodged and cut them down one after the other, so ruthless that she accidentally knocked over half a dozen baby protectors. It wasn't until the tabby cat did a figure eight through her ankles, with his soft fur sliding against her bare skin, that she realized she stood among a pile of ruined kites.
She had won. Campeão de pipa, número 1!
The Rat King, who'd been at another wife's baby shower, rushed to her side and flicked his grubby tail around her golden trophy. She held firm to the slick metal and used her elbow to poke him in the eye when he refused to let go. He claws slipped loose and she blinked at the pleasure of his failure.
His ears twitched in revolt and he lifted his small arms to push her, revealing a handful of girls shivering below. She blinked again and knocked him out, releasing the girls and freeing herself.
And just as suddenly as she’d returned to flying kites, she realized that the king’s love was cheap and her talent was pure.
Sheila lived happily ever after, skipping rocks and flying kites, her name whispered in awe by young boys the kingdom over, all wishing they could be one of the twenty-five she let clean her kitchen.