Page 30 of How To Survive This Fairytale
There’s a lightness in your chest.A sense of closure.It feels like anything could happen, but only in the good ways.It feels like something has ended for you.One last thread of story stitched into place.The picture is done, which means you’re free.Which means, from now on, whatever happens next is up to you.
Ten
In the morning,Red ambushes you at the bottom of the stairs.
“Teach me how to hunt,” she says.“If I’d had a knife like yours, and if I knew how to use it, I could have cutmyselfout of the wolf.”
“Probably true,” you say.
“So is that a yes, then?”Red grins widely for a girl who, just yesterday, was eaten by a wolf.Maybe you’d feel cocky, too, if anyone had ever saved you in the nick of time.
“I’m acknowledging you’re correct,” you say.“I’m not offering anything.”
“Come on,” she protests.“I go through these woods all the time.I can’t be afraid of them.Do youwantme to get eaten by a wolf again?”
Granny appears in the doorway, wiping her hands on her apron.“Let it lie, Red.”
“What ifyouget eaten by a wolf again?Someone’sgoing to need to save you.”
“Yes, andI’dprefer a strapping young lad.”Granny waggles her brows.“Join us for breakfast, huntsman?”
You don’t have your vial with you—you never imagined being out overnight—so the answer is going to have to be no.
“Sorry,” you say.“I’ve got to be on my way to find the prince.”
With the wolf pelt over your shoulder, you head out of the house.Out of the house, and into the woods.
Eleven
Half a mile westof Granny’s, you come upon a brick house with an untamed vegetable garden.Several scarecrows stand vigil, holding signs that say “NO RABBITS ALLOWED >:(” and “CROWS R FOES” and—this one’s good—an illustration of a man asking a slug, “DO U RLY WANT TO MAKE ME CRY?”
Netting that should be upright on fenceposts instead lays like a blanket over raised beds of… cabbages?Maybe?And the tomatoes—well, you’ve never seen a sorrier sprawl of tomatoes in your life.
The woman you met yesterday was right.You couldn’t have missed this if you tried.You also couldn’t have imagined him living like this.Warmth rises in your chest.So this is Favorite as a human.Messy and silly.A bad gardener trying nonetheless.The swan eating mussels from your hand became a man who gave his scarecrows signs to hold.The fondness you feel is immeasurable.It might just break open your chest.
A commotion around the side of the house steals your attention from the front garden.Something metal—a bucket?—crashes against a stone, and a man’s battle cry follows.
“We’ve talked about this, Petunia!”he says.You walk around the side of the house in time to spot a gopher loping through the grass.“You haveyouralfalfa, and I havemine—you can’t eatboth!Petunia, get back here!”
The gopher—Petunia, presumably—does not get back here.Instead, she scurries away, until you lose sight of her between the trees and underbrush.And the man is left standing there, sighing so heavily his shoulders droop, wiping sweat with one gloved hand while his singular wing rests at his side.
He glances your way.Then he gestures loosely at your feet.
“Pass me the pruning shears, will you?Petunia’swreckedmy alfalfa.I can’t bear to look at it.I have to work on something else.”
The pruning shears lay abandoned in the grass just beside your boots.You pick them up, then cross the back garden with care.
“Here,” you say, which isn’t what you imagined your first words to him would be.Although you’d tried to rehearse a speech, none of the words were right.In the end, you’d hoped for a spark of brilliance in the moment.Not pruning shears.
“Thanks,” he says.He takes them from you, kneels, and starts aggressively pruning a rose bush.“I thought I lost these shears, actually.Scoured the whole house fordays.Went to the market yesterday to buy a new pair, and then got distracted, as I usually do.Funny thing, isn’t it, that you came along and found them?”
He turns and looks at you for the first time, smiling and squinting into the sunlight.What a face he has—angular where yours is broad, with flushed cheeks and golden hair like ruffled feathers, dampened by sweat at the hairline.
Pretty, you realize.He’spretty.With all the elegance of a swan, a dainty neck, narrow, pointy shoulders—he could be a dancer, really—you can’t believe hereminds you of a swan.The prince turned swan turned prince again, with so much of the bird still in him.
“You’re carrying a wolf,” he says.
“Oh.Yes.Just the skin.”