Page 57 of How To Survive This Fairytale

Gertrude does not sob.The corner of her mouth twitches.Her eyes grow misty.Her gloved fingers lace tightly together, as tightly wound as a shirt sewn out of thorns.

“Leave me,” she says.

“It is a good ending,” you mutter.

“For who?”

“It is a good ending.Achosenending.”Your eyes burn through her until she looks at you, and even then, it’s only a glance to acknowledge her shame.“You and I figured out we had choices and we made them.Cyrus gets to make his choices, too.”

Forty-Eight

The thingabout gardens is they need someone to tend them.

Coming down the path, you decide to visit his cottage first.His cottage had a garden; yours never got that far.Maybe yours never will, now.Maybe that’s okay.

You expect his will be an overgrown catastrophe.His tomatoes were in astatewhen you met, and that was when he was there to tend them; how unruly they must be now, and how bare the alfalfa patch must be, with no one to stop Petunia’s pilfering.And the house—both houses have been abandoned for a year.Who knows what waits for you now?

Except the garden is well-kept.

“Someonehad to make sure this place didn’t fall apart,” says Red.“Does Cyrus know he’s got a gopher problem?Wait, Hans, why are you crying?”

Forty-Nine

Sometimes you goto the nearest lake to watch the swans.

They’re always in pairs.

Their togetherness makes you wish you’d taken the potion, too.

The apothecary didn’t give Cyrus two bottles solely for him, did she.No.No, that second bottle was supposed to be for you.And you never even thought about it until this moment.

Will he still be where you left him?Or has he flown far away by now?

You have to try.You have to be with him.

Except—

You don’t want to be a swan.

You wanthim.

I love him enough to change my shape, your heart cries.I love him enough to be whatever would make him happy.I love him enough to be a swan.I love him enough to be the water he swims through.I love him enough to be the sky.Make me whatever shape he needs me to be.

Except you’ll never be happy.And he’ll feel it.He’ll feel your resentment build.And he’ll know that you’d give up swanhood in a heartbeat, and he’ll live with bated breath, waiting for the moment you leave.

He was your fate.His fate was the sky.

You spend a long time sitting with those two truths, reaching no conclusion.

Fifty

You don’t know it,but Cyrus thinks of you.

In the spring, he descends from the sky and alights on sun-streaked water, he closes his eyes and thinks,I am coming home.But when he thinks ofhome, he thinks of your body—how, like the water, you would have caught him readily; how, unlike the water, you would be warm, and you would hold him.

On some summer mornings, when the potion wears off, he goes into the woods and picks fruit from the same trees that fed you as children.He sinks his teeth into a ripe peach and thinksI will never need anything but this.But when he thinks ofneed, he thinks of dark winter nights on the road with you, the wolf pelt covering your bodies and the little magic pot cooking tea.By the time he finishes the peach, it isyouhe needs with his whole body, which is a body you have loved regardless of its shape.

And in the autumn night, when he relives his childhood by swallowing the stars, he thinks,I am back where I belong.But when he thinks ofbelonging, what he thinks of is howyoubelong in this scene with him: asleep in the hovel, or waiting on the shore for his return.Without you, the scene is not complete.You were a part of the best moments of his life and you are not here to recreate them.Without you, this life he has chosen is the life he led after the Fair Queen took you, and it is filled with the same anxieties, the same sense of dread.