Quiet Magick
For S.J. Tucker & Catherynne M. Valente "Fairy tales hardly ever come true for quiet girls." So they think. The tourists. The lookee-loos who peek at our lives like zoo exhibits, museum displays, they love to declaim their theories without ever actually asking us. After all, what do we know? There's not enough money to keep the children fed, much less acquire a proper Aarne-Thompson Index. You haven't read the Index, you're not a folklorist. Even if you've lived folklore since before you were conceived (with some help from a witch), or since that snafu at your christening, you are not an authoritative source on your own life. They don't know whether we're quiet or loud: that would mean letting us speak for ourselves, Us fairy tale girls don't shout to be heard over their monologues. We have to save our voices, not risk raspy vocal chords when it's time to scream or to tell the hidden truth clearly, a life and death matter. The tourists are drawn to it, but don't want to touch: it gets too real when there's wolfs blood on the snow, when the smell of cooking sister-feet rises from the glittering dance floor, when the dark figure comes to the door for the promised infant, or your new wife suggests how much easier it'd be if that seventh son, that golden-ball daughter just never came back home expecting a share of the crumbs from your table. That doesn't glitter like paste-jewel tiaras and mouse-sewn ballgowns. Tourists are the same all over, they want what's simple and shiny, not the stark, the stygian, definitely not struggle, suicide, stepparents who create nightmares, just familiar enough to send the visitors running for the happy endings. But time doesn't end. Time's a river flowing to a sea of stones. One triumphant peasant princess is a bloody revolution, later, not fit for their preferred flavor of stories. And anyway, who's quieter than a girl in a magic sleep, a glass coffin, a servant's rags? But platitudes, boiled down like the scum on a witch's cauldron, those pretty fictions are what make careers. Since they determine who gets a platform, it's easy to erase the quiet girls even from the stories everyone knows already. After all, one should listen to the experts, like we do severed horse-heads, mysterious travelers on out of the way roads— except our authorities have a better success rate. But what would I know about fairy tales coming true, when I never put my daughter in a red hood, gambled her for lettuce, sent her off to get lost, or favored her sisters? Never mind the chest, banded in iron, buried, sealed with sigils, their specifics lost to time— after all, a selkie must hide her skin or be enslaved to it. I prefer the sea to be an choice, my love not bound up in ownership, my legs only an option, my leaving to come at my pace, not the pull of a narrative desire. A secret never indexed: sometimes knowing the magic of quietude is the only way to make your fairy tale come true.
March 25th, 2015