Page 32 of How To Survive This Fairytale

You hate your chuckling.

Silencing yourself, you discard your cloak.Slide off your boots.Unbutton your shirt.

Yes, it’s very sweet, Cyrus’s whole life.But is it the kind of life you could have?What areyougoing to do with a packet full of seeds?Your hands would come to that work as strangers; you’d kill a turnip as easily as you killed?—

Besides, you’d need land to plant them.You don’t have land.You have a room at the inn.

But land can be acquired.Purchased, rented.

Stop it.Stop dreaming.

You exhale loudly.You reach for your vial, but your hand falls short.Your stew smells inviting; the skin on his vegetables is firm and fresh.What if you… just this once…

No.No.It’ll send you right back to the gingerbread house.Cyrus wouldn’t want anything from his garden to hurt you.

You take a drop from the vial to protect yourself, the way you have since you were a child, and eat in peace.

Well, no.Notpeace.

But as close to peace as you can make it.

Fifteen

As you climb into bed,the mattress as uncooperative as a dead body beneath your spine, you keep thinking about his embrace.The sheer joy of it.The way joy lit his face every time he turned his head and saw you, still standing there, still solid and real and beside him.Because he doesn’t know what you are, a hissing voice inside you scolds,Do you think that joy would survive him knowing?

No.No, you don’t think it would.

I can’t assume he wants me to stay.

So what if Gertrude asked the Fair Queen about me?

What did she even say?

It didn’t change anything.

It didn’t save me.

Cyrus was right to say it didn’t matter.

You found him, he’s human, he’s happy.

Gertrude broke the curse.Gertrude’s a queen.

Everyone is happy now, and they were happy without you.

Move on before you ruin them.

Move on move on move on, you tell yourself.Even so, you fall asleep thinking of his feathers.How pristine they were.How pretty, how well-cared for.How they caught the light.And how soft they looked.

You dream of them stained by the blood on your hands.

You wake with a new crack in your already broken heart.All right, you say to yourself, surrendering to the part of you that can discern illusions from dreams,I’ll go.

Sixteen

All you’ve wanted allthis time was to know what happened.Now that you do, you can want something else.Tucking your shirt into your pants and fastening your suspenders, the only thing you want is toget out—out of this town and out of your own skin.If you were anyone else, if you’d lived any other kind of life?—

But I didn’t, so it doesn’t matter, you scold yourself.Stop dreaming.