One-Line Fairy Tales

Photo by Amalia Sieber

♥ It’s a strange tale how I met her, her with her perpetual grace and strange charms and voodoo dreams and silver screen glow and her tendency to ramble on about the strangest things, like Frida Kahlo or 1950’s soda shops during car rides or lovemaking, and us with our battered looks tossed back and forth over cups of coffee and slices of pizza and our awkward windowless serenades and our collective feelings on certain unspoken things, like training your pets or taking the train at night, alone we were just strange souls in an even stranger city, but together, after she twirled herself into my world one sparkling night, we made quite a handsome pair.

♥ On dimly sleepy nights we wandered out, with red silk ribbons and ornaments in our hair, and we shook the world and shattered plates and carried our lanterns high above our heads so that the light made our hair look like icy sidewalks and grass that wept with dew, and we followed the others as they too carried their lanterns high and sung travelers songs and spoke in blistering poetry about the tiny sorrows of their lives and we sung too, humming playground songs as we marched towards the ocean which was already ablaze with tea-lit lanterns and buttercream moonlight, and when we were knee-deep in salt water thick with the tears of a thousand souls just like us we took off our masks and set our lanterns free until the pool of tears before us was sprinkled with red crepe paper and black ink, and the sea became our journal in which we wrote out our happiness and our sorrow until the ever-creeping waves swallowed up our stories, but we made our mark and stained the ocean with billowing clouds of black ink that became us, naked except for our masks of animals and heroes and ancient queens, because our faces didn’t matter, because we still had our stories.

♥ And a chill soaked through us as we drowned ourselves in the kinetic night air, neither of us by choice, and I followed him in as far as we could go until he stopped running, exhausted, and threw himself down upon the brush and shook and shuddered and howled and shifted from one being into another, and I stared with open eyes and an open mind and tied back my hair because it was all I could do to keep from shouting, “This is a tragedy, a story unlike any other, and I can never imagine the pain shaking deep within your body and seeping into your bones!” and I stared as he pulled himself up and ripped off his clothes in resentment and paced towards me with his eyes reflecting the perfectly rounded moon all the while, and he pulled me close and looked straight through flesh and blood, howling out in the highest of lows, “It is your tragedy, madam. For you are cursed with being nothing more than human.”

Always,
Penelope ♥