Fairy Tales I’d Like To See Rewritten With an Actual Fairy
as the Heroine
Sleeping Beauty
A long time ago, a King and a Queen had a child after many
years of futile trying. She was the most beautiful, the most delightful, the
happiest little girl anyone had ever seen. They called her Rose.
The King was so overjoyed and so proud of his beautiful new
daughter that he decided to celebrate with a great feast. So many people were
invited that when it came time to invite the Kingdom’s thirteen wisest crones
only twelve places were left at the table. Whoever was in charge of the
invitations fucked up royally. One wise crone had to be left out. So they
excluded the most amenable, least obnoxious crone of the bunch, figuring she’d
understand.
Well she didn’t. She was sick and tired of her good nature
being taken for granted. She’d had it with being the reasonable, undemanding,
understanding crone. She crashed the party just as her twelve colleagues were
bestowing their magical gifts on the pretty child. Seething with anger, she
said that Rose ought to enjoy her life as a pretty girl while she could,
because at the age of thirteen, bang, the girl was going to prick her finger on
a thorn and find herself changing against her will. No more sugar and spice and
everything nice. She was going to change into a boy!
Of course, this upset everyone. They were aghast not only at
the violence of the curse but that it had come from the heretofore sweetest old
grandmotherly crone in the kingdom. But there was still one crone left who
hadn’t given her magical blessing and she saw an opportunity to advance her
cause with the King. She couldn’t undo the curse already cast by her crone
colleague, but she could soften it. She confirmed that, yes, unfortunately,
Rose would now have to live some of her life as a boy but it wouldn’t have to
be forever. The boy part of her life would be like a great waking dream from
which she might awaken once again as a pretty girl. If only she could get a
handsome Prince to fall in love with her and kiss her while she was still a
boy…
Well, that hardly seemed like much of a consolation! What
were the odds of that ever happening?! It seemed in spite of the good crone’s
blessing, Rose would be destined to live her life miserably as a boy, no matter
what, unhappily ever after.
Well the King did what any King, or for that matter, good
father does. He tried to take every possible precaution to insure that Rose
never pricked her finger on a thorn. He employed a massive army of gardeners to
scour his kingdom and clip from every rosebush every thorn, which was a hell of
a lot of thorns, thorns by the truckload, and all these thorns were buried outside
the palace walls in a great thorn landfill, cordoned off with fences and
scary-worded signs, where Rose was forbidden ever to go.
Of course, even this vigilance was fated to fail in the end.
It always does. One day, during her thirteenth year, while the king and queen
were not at home, Rose went poking around the palace, snooping into places she
had never been before. Wow the
palace was more humongous then she imagined! She eventually came to a wooden door
that was normally secured but this day had a key in its lock. She couldn’t
resist turning the key and behind the door she climbed a narrow staircase that
led up into an old tower. There she came upon a gloriously romantic bedchamber
and an ancient chambermaid arranging the most amazing bouquet of flowers Rose
had ever seen.
“What are those beautiful flowers,” Rose asked.
The old crone said, “Why they are roses, dear.”
“Roses! I’ve never seen roses quite like that!”
The crone smiled and thought to herself, that’s because
you’ve never seen a rose with thorns, you silly little bitch. She chuckled in a
grandmotherly way, with a grandmotherly twinkle in her eye. “Would you like to
have one?”
“Oh yes! More than anything!” Rose exclaimed.
The old witch pulled the largest, reddest, prettiest one
from the vase and Rose, having never encountered a flower with a thorn, took
hold of it without looking carefully along the stem, and, thereby, pricked
herself. She immediately fell into a swoon and by the time the King and Queen
returned, she was found lying in bed, unconscious, a teenaged boy in the first
flush of puberty dressed incongruously in girl’s clothes.
Well the Queen fainted dead away and the King went off his
rocker in a rage. No son of his was going to be a panty-wearing fag, etc. No
one in the kingdom was ever permitted to mention that Rose—who they now called
Rob—had been anything other than a red-blooded American boy. Even if what he
really looked like now was a skinny, prissy, bookish effeminate androgyne
dressed awkwardly in clothing that would have befit any other boy of his age.
And that’s how things remained. Rose felt like she was
living in the Twilight Zone. Everyone insisted on calling her Rob and referring
to her has he or him. They expected her to like the stuff that boys liked, to do
the things that boys do. And no one expected her to “act like a man” more than
her father. Couldn’t he see that she was still Daddy’s little girl? Even worse,
perhaps, was the way her mother now acted. She seemed to be so proud to have a
son, but her pride was a great burden to Rose because she knew it wasn’t based
on the truth! How could no one see that she was really a girl!? It was as if
she and everyone around her had fallen asleep and were living in a bad dream.
Meanwhile around the entire kingdom a hedge of thorns
grew—all the thorns that had been cut off all the roses by the King’s gardeners
all those years—had sprung up to form an impermeable barrier, like barbed wire.
Anyone who tried to climb it was inextricably impaled there and died a slow, miserable
death. What’s more, the king had posted ferocious guards with dogs outside the
kingdom to keep out anyone who might try to sneak inside. It was rumored that
there were handsome princes out there who actually liked girly boys like his
son. And the King would have none of that! He wanted to keep that knowledge
away from Robert at any cost!
Most of these girly-boy loving princes were understandably
deterred. But as it happened, one did rise to the challenge. He was a
rough-around-the-edges sort of Prince from a kingdom called Brooklyn. He’d seen
an ad on Craigslist that the boy had surreptitiously posted online like a cry
for help from within the barricaded castle. The prince decided to come to the
rescue. For all the doom and gloom predictions, this latest Prince didn’t find
it any trouble at all to reach Robert. He began to think all the horrendous
tales he’d heard were nothing but a lot of old wives tales. Suburban baloney.
In Brooklyn, he had guys like the King and his henchmen for lunch. Thorns, guards,
dogs…fuhgettaboutit!
There was no barbed wire. No armed guards. He met with no
resistance as he climbed up the stairs to the tower-bedroom. Everything was
surprisingly easy. Maybe almost too easy? For the first time, he was on his
guard. He knocked on the door and when it opened he didn’t see an awkward
unhappy boy but a beautiful princess just waiting to be awakened by the kiss of
a real man. And he was just the real man for the job.
With one deep smooch, the girly boy began to open up, like
the tightly furled bud of a rose that had been waiting all winter for the first
touch of spring sunlight to blossom. The Prince took the boy in his arms and
kissed her again and then again for good measure. And just like that she was
once again the girl she had been from the start. She was once again the
beautiful feminine Rose.
“Go put on something pretty,” the Prince said, “and let’s
split this depressing hell-hole.”
They came down from the tower hand in hand, Prince and
Princess. The King and Queen weren’t too happy about it, but what could they
say? What was done was done. The curse they were living under had been broken
as well. Slowly, but surely, the fog over their memories was lifting and they
both began to remember back to an earlier time when their son had indeed been
their daughter. Or at least, they thought they remembered such a time. She sure
as hell never seemed to be much of a boy, that’s what the King kept telling
himself over and over. It was as if everyone were waking up from the same weird
dream together.
Still, the Prince and Princess thought it best to put the
memory of this unhappy time and place as far behind them as possible. Families
sucked and they had a way of dragging you back into the past so that you never
changed. So the Prince took the Princess back to Brooklyn where they were
married and then he took her even further away to a magical emerald kingdom called
Seattle and they lived happily ever after.
