Fairy Tale Review: The Green Issue #2

By Kate Bernheimer

The sheer volume of responses to the first issue of Fairy Tale Review shows that fairy tales continue to be one of the most viable art forms. In fairy tales, all things are interdependent, mysteriously and insanely entwined. They contain a deeply ecological world. The Green Issue is devoted to new fairy tales, with a special consideration for nature.
The unbridled individualism at work in the literary forms most dominant today devalues the natural world in relation to the human. In fairy tales, the human world and the animal world are collapsed. The collapse remains open to wonder and change. In this way, fairy tales provide the possibility for narratives to shine a different sort of terrible light on the natural world. This world is transparent, imperiled, abstract, and new. In this world, clarity and wonder go hand and hand.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wayne State University Press
• Release date: Jun 5, 2015
• ISBN: 9780814341711

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.

Book preview

FAIRY TALE REVIEW

The Green Issue

EDITOR

Kate Bernheimer

ASSISTANT EDITORS

Alissa Nutting

Nick Pincumbe

Jenn Ridgeway

DESIGNER

J. Johnson

COVER ART

Kiki Smith, Born, reproduced by permission of the artist.

ADVISORY BOARD

Maria Tatar, Harvard University

Marina Warner, University of Essex

Jack Zipes, University of Minnesota

The Editor would like acknowledge the kind support of the English Department and the Program in Creative Writing at the University of Alabama for their support of FAIRY TALE REVIEW.

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 © 2006 by Fairy Tale Review Press.

The Green Issue (2006) 978-0-8143-4171-1

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.

I loved dumb paintings, scenes painted in door panels, stage sets, painted canvas backdrops for acrobats, flags and standards, popular colored prints, old novels gone out of fashion, church Latin, erotic books with bad spelling, the novels of our grandmothers, fairy tales, little books from childhood, foolish refrains and naive rhythms.

—Arthur Rimbaud

FAIRY TALE REVIEW

The Green Issue

ANNOTATED TABLE OF CONTENTS

BRIAN BALDI

The Robot Tree and the Loss of Understanding

Three mockingbirds wheeled above the pine-whiskered copse, dipped down, and wove themselves into the trees, where could be heard the slow moan of timber, the folk song of grubs masticating on bark, and the plenum chatting of ground squirrels.

JEANNE MARIE BEAUMONT

Two Poems

Pssst.

I’m the blonde in the shower

water too hot    water too cold

JEDEDIAH BERRY

Inheritance

At first they didn’t talk about it, the beast Greg brought with him to the Saturday night poker game. He tugged it leashed down the basement steps and it sat cross-legged in a corner, muzzled but more sad than mean.

PAULA BOHINCE

Three Poems

Voluptuous with slime, in the forest, like a queen

grown lazy or tired beneath her tiers.

And the mermaids were her girls, nearly human-

sized, though broken. Someone

had chiseled off their tails, and stolen them.

WENDY BRENNER

The Predicament

The bunch of us were in trouble. That was how it started: we had to flee, as escapees or refugees or criminals, it was unclear which—because we were to blame for something. Or, considered to be to blame. We were not good, we were guilty, that much was clear.

AYSE PAPATYA BUCAK

Once There Was, Once There Wasn’t

In a time when camels were beasts and genie were jinn, there was a girl always in love.

RIKKI DUCORNET

Blue Funk

People love my city for its brasseries like hothouses, ardent and perverse, its breezes that smell of coffee and of the sea. But when I am in my blue funk I see nothing of all this. Which is why I did not notice the dress shop sooner, although it is on a street familiar to me.

RIKKI DUCORNET

Paintings: Desirous 1–5

ANN JADERLUND

Translated by Johannes Goransson

Four Poems

Behind a moist spring in a desolate forest lay the red rose. With dried and hair-pipe-fine god veins. In the grave garden beneath the tall trees. The trunks were large as animal limbs and overgrown by tender green stalks.

DANIEL KHALASTCHI

No Longer: (Less to Say)

As trees dress

down. As sleeves

roll out.

STACEY LEVINE

The Tree

Two men met. Living in the blue-hued city, they caught glances, the way adults do. The men grew to know one other quickly; they hurried along the highway exits. A month passed; they knew each other a little. Sometimes they took walks in the forest as if searching together for something.

CATE MARVIN

The Goose-Girl Speaks from inside The Stove: Intimate Address in Contemporary American Women’s Poetry

In The Goose-Girl, a Grimms’ fairy tale, a princess is betrothed at a young age to a prince in a far-off kingdom. When the time comes for her to marry, she journeys the distance on horseback with only her waiting-maid for company. The princess’ horse, Falada, has the power of speech; the waiting-maid rides a nag.

JOYELLE MCSWEENEY

Novella Excerpts from FLET and NYLUND

Flet has a secret. Wearing heavy blue vinyl kitchen gloves, she opens the hall closet, tips forward the hamper, and withdraws from behind it a paper bag. Kneeling, she dumps out the bag on the carpet next to her. The contents include a blue comb, a cheap plastic Easter novelty, and a pale green pamphlet.

KAT MEADS

On The Palace Steps, She Pauses

Caught in a crisis of confidence. A cinder wench/wretch not an hour before, en route to dazzle and besot the wealthiest, most handsome of men, the man with a castle, a title, a bloodline with expectations.

LYDIA MILLET

Walking Bird

One of the birds was lame, struggling gamely along the perimeter of the fence. The bird was large, a soft color of blue, and rotund like a pheasant or a hen.

ANDREW MORGAN

Fairly Taleish

And we all wait in the crescent to see

and identify the double-decap—

what it means, where it sheds its opinion

and becomes something blue, something

moving or at least in need of retelling.

AIMEE NEZHUKUMATATHIL

The Woman Who Eats Soil

What can the unfortunate insect do

if it is found wanting in weight?

STACEY RICHTER

Chapter One from FAIRYLAND, A Novel

Tina curled under her Dukes of Hazard comforter, picturing the various ways that Gordon could die. He could jam a fork into the wall socket, or hide in an abandoned refrigerator, or chase a puppy into the street—she’d been warned about these dangers herself.

ARTHUR RIMBAUD

Translated by Donna Tartt

Four Poems from Les Illuminations

An Ideal of Beauty, standing tall before snow. Whistles of death, circles of deafened music make this adored body rise, swell, shudder like a ghost; scarlet wounds and black burst out in the superb flesh.

CARMEN GIMINEZ SMITH

Finding the Lark

Once there was a milkman

who wore a lark on her shoulder.

Good God Gave her a Lark.

Good God broke His Shoulder

on the Slippery Walk.

KATE BERNHEIMER

Editor’s Note

Contributor Notes

BRIAN BALDI

The Robot Tree and the Loss of Understanding

I. Prelude to Hundertwasser

Three mockingbirds wheeled above the pine-whiskered copse, dipped down, and wove themselves into the trees, where could be heard the slow moan of timber, the folk song of grubs masticating on bark, and the plenum chatting of ground squirrels. One of the mockingbirds held a small seed in its beak, but when the canopy above released a sheaf of dead leaves into the bird’s path, he loosed his grip. The seed dropped through a tight kink of brush, caromed off a felled branch, rolled over the dark topsoil, and came to rest against a surface that looked like gouged metal. From the core came a feeble mechanical whir, like a soda machine. It was a tree.

II. Waiting for Sustenance, the Taproot

The hamburger order had been placed, and we were sitting in the car, in line. The radio was broken and there was dirt all over the floorboards from our shoes and snow. Lara and I had not been keeping body and soul together much lately. In fact, it was only because we came home at the same time that night, both hungry, and with nothing much to eat in the fridge, that we found ourselves in the car together. If it weren’t so unseemly and overt, we both probably would have preferred to have gotten into our own cars and gone out separately. But when our hunger became unavoidable we took my Toyota and went down to the drive-thru, maybe because it was only a few blocks away and we both knew that would mean having to spend less time together. I knuckled the shifter and looked to see how the transactions were going up ahead at the service window. Lara had one leg bent under the other, and she also kept an eye on the hamburger business. After we placed our order, I don’t think that line moved at all for twenty minutes.

Finally, Lara said: Right now I’m primarily thinking about a robot tree named Hundertwasser.

Why are you doing that? I asked.

Well, he’s mostly made from silver, but he does have some bronze filigree around his trunk and low-hanging branches.

Oh, I said.

A car in front of me increased its idle, but the line still didn’t move.

She continued: The rest of the forest is made from soil, plant matter, animals, and animal waste—a regular forest. Hundertwasser pretty much can’t move because he is a tree, even if he’s a robot one.

Does he play harmonica? I asked.

I touched at the tip of the parking brake.

"His soil is red," she said, and he is built according to plan.

I remember wondering why we hadn’t had some sort of relationship discussion in a long while. It was because Lara worked at the hospital late, and I worked there early. Of course we hadn’t.

Lara unfolded her leg, and folded the other one under. Her nose was lovely, and there was something about reflected light that improved upon just sitting in my subcompact doing nothing so late at night in an inert hamburger line. She kept talking: Hundertwasser deeply wishes for a relationship between his tap root and the variation of soil granules at its disposal. He has no meetings to go to. He does not even know the meaning of molten chocolate cake. He has green foil leaves that attract a modest amount of bird activity, though to be perfectly honest he gets the feeling more birds could be a possibility. He computes nightly and for long algorithmic stretches that maybe it is because he does not produce robot apples that they forsake him. Hundertwasser has been, since his inaugural launch, almost entirely shunned by the resident vegetation in his part of the copse. And the rain, the rain is untoward. Lara turned to me. He is happy, however, with his comity with the peat moss. Ahead, a hand reached out of the service window with a bag.

III. The Cola Knows

The incident—if you can call it an incident in the policing sense—took place on the 2300 block of King Street at approximately two in the morning on January sixth. At that time, Ms. Evelyn Peppas, an employee at a quick service restaurant, witnessed what she called a curious break-up in her drive-thru order lane. I responded to the scene at approximately three in the morning.

Why did you call us? I asked.

A couple broke up because of a robot tree named Hundertwasser, she said.

"How do you know this, and what is a robot tree