3. 3
Ugly Sister Lonely Heart
Lia Sanders
Ugly sister WLTM handsome prince who still believes in the magic
of romance. Must be willing to engage in dancing and general gallantry.
If you like Pumpkin Pies and staying out after midnight get in touch.
No shoe fetishists.
4. 4
A Letter from the Editors
Hallo there.
Welcome. Step inside. Draw up a chair – and put the kettle on while
you’re at it.
We’re delighted to present the very first issue of Far Off Places, a
precocious child who likes to clamber into nooks and crannies and tell
herself stories. It’s been a winding but exhilarating ride. With editorial
staff spread over three countries and two continents, we have developed
intimate relationships with our skype headsets and are now adept at
calculating time differences. Our laptops have witnessed debates about
page size, launch dates and the suitability of innuendo (approved).
We were astounded by the variety and quality of work submitted
– selecting pieces for the magazine was a joyful but difficult task. We
settled for a recipe of whimsy, fantasy and startling voices – although it
must be confessed that Issue 1 has turned out a shade darker than we
expected. We’re putting this down to the deep fathoms of the fairy tale,
although we may have simply left it too long in the oven.
Milk please. No sugar.
Biscuits?
Interested in submitting to Far Off Places? We’d love to hear from
you. Take a look-see at our submission guidelines at http://faroffplaces.
org/submissions.
5. 5
Bone Tree
Kristina Wojtaszek
The flicker taps out a rhythm to the thump of her unsteady tread,
a foot dragged through spilled leaves. She stops, white hand wringing
the throat of a white birch, her memories rising up like bitter tannins.
She slides her twisted foot up the bulge and knuckle of root, then kicks,
hard, waiting for the pain, for reckoning.
She wears the cape of her youth, thin as a whisper and red. She
testifies with the sugar maples in fall, loosing a shock of crimson tears
to the early winds. She weaves her basket with new willow, gathered
when the world rolls its green, apathetic eye. She lines it with clubfoot
and sphagnum, a cradle for the unborn, the fragile hopes she dashes
against her griddle, nodding as they weep for her, a brilliant yellow
breakfast.
Her hope was never a silken curl, a pliant cheek, a fat little hand
to kiss… but a blackened pool of hurt that poured out over her knees
and mine. It was the woodcutter, leaving scars along her path to see, her
name entwined with his, a watching eye that wept sap in early spring,
a leaping buck, mad with joy at the sight of her, but always, always too
shy for words.
When she asked about the dark man who felled her Great Ma’s
trees (though never me), that young fellow who laid bundles of herbs
upon their threshold, Great Ma said he was just another shade of love.
When she asked about her Ma, Great Ma said bad births ran in the
family like pitch in the pines, and that her Ma’s bones were gifted to
me, the old oak. I was, indeed, the only husband her Ma ever claimed,
the one she pressed against as she heaved the child into the world and
soaked my patch of earth with her blood. There was so much of it,
so much raw iron that flooded my filaments, my every fiber, with her
cast off life. I remember, and taste her still, caressing her bones deep
beneath my worried feet.
When a grackle lost the stars in its eyes, or a fox kit curled up and
stiffened in the corner, Great Ma sent the child to me. I was the faceless
6. 6
father, the tonnage of rough shoulder, and only I could outlast her grief.
She left the still pets in the crook of my split neck, and I held them until
I wore a patchwork quilt of rotting hides. She lined up their tiny bones,
played with them like dolls, and strung them into my fingers, chimes for
the wind. And when she stopped visiting them, and me, I left amber
tears in her absence, my only words, a silent love.
But Great Ma’s half-wild hound refused to die, and never was shy
about his distrust, slinking around the corner of the cottage where he’d
been nursed but not healed, the flash of raw, white bone erupting from
the scar like a warning, like a savage grin, a nod to death. He was jealous,
Great Ma explained, hating the surefooted child for no other reason. I
quivered and darkened the day their quiet friend lodged his axe in the
temple of the beast, freeing her from a frenzy of fur. I’d heard her ankle
snap like dry wood in a mouth of flames and I wept as his thick, brown
limbs wrapped around my broken child, cradling her, his tears in her hair.
Great Ma tended, wrapped and mended, rubbing crushed herbs
into the raw wound, but it grew back twisted, gnarled like angry, infected
wood. Her heart twisted, too; a swelling gall around the memory of the
woodcutter’s callused hands. She flushed at the sight of him, and hid
herself away in the sky between my branches.
When the first snow fell, loosed by Great Ma’s last, lonely sigh,
the woodcutter buried his axe in my old heart and I held Great Ma at
last. I kept aloft the mourners that gathered, the appropriately dressed
chickadees in their black and gray garb, the bowing titmice, and the
chatty, disrespectful squirrels that came only for the food. I sang a song
of heaviness, of creaking weight and the burden of time.
That winter the pain shot wicked bursts of lightening through my
daughter’s leg and her green eyes hardened into stiff hazel as she lived on
in the cottage alone. The woodcutter brought food for her fire, and she
cooked for him, making the cottage smoke and sigh. One night he stayed
and the wolves howled long and low, interrupting their tangled dreams.
I shook my few, brittle leaves in warning as he left in a morning fog to
find a preacher and a ring. I understood; I had so many of my own rings
stacked within my bulk, so many renewed vows to the sun. But the fog
was dense, not to be trusted. I watched with my knotted eye as the mists
7. 7
choked the whole of the wood. He never did return.
One bloodless moon passed, and then another, and she knew at last
that he’d left her with that one night growing inside her until she burst
with grief and bled. So little was the offering left on a bed of moss,
cradled at my gnarled feet, the blade of a lost father still lodged high
above, like a handle to heaven.
So that was how she came to be alone in the wood and blaming a
wolf. She wore the colour of grief, that vibrant red of loss, of the last
of daylight ebbing away. I’d begun dozing in my old age, and I slept
away the winter, that temporary death, and woke to find her gone. The
window to the cottage was left open and cackling in the wind. The cap,
the cloak, the lore so worn and half forgotten, still hangs upon my
brittle fingers, a fading, tattered burst of restless words, just another
shade of loss, of love.
8. 8
Blood, Snow, Ebony
Katy Ewing
Once she had been rosy, dark-haired, fresh and unstained.
Had skipped through life, noticing butterflies,
intricate lichens, infinite skies.
Now when she asks for beauty,
the mirror can show hints of step-mother,
even glimpses of the witch.
She is pale from staying indoors, lined by life
and her hair would be silver if she let it,
only henna stains it dark.
Her mask can turn harsh without her even knowing.
Sometimes she thinks she’d like to slip out in the night
and dance her slippers to pieces,
but she never learned to dance
and doesn’t like to leave her tower.
9. 9
Rapunzel
Simon Jackson
Once upon a time she heard
a voice calling her true name
in a way no-one had called before,
it resonated in her breast
as an aching echo.
The cathedral of her rib cage
sang to his voice as a glass
to the caress of a licked finger.
His closeness lit a slow heat
there, between her thighs, a pressure
like wood turning on wood, threatening
to leap into improbable flame.
So she let down her hair and he clambered up,
hand over hand, clutching, grasping,
grunting at her. The pain was terrible
but finally he was in
and it all seemed worth it for a time.
And now here he is, in her small chamber,
bigger and harder to hide each day.
Christ, she never meant him to stay!
It was far too late to ask him politely
to pack his things and leave.
In the end she cut him out with a knife.
The next time she heard that call
to let her hair hang down
she leaned out of the tower block,
shook her head into the wind’s caresses
letting everybody see her newly cut tresses.
10. 10
Red Riding
Chelsea Cargill
It is dark in the wolf,
warm and filled with stones.
I come out wearing
a disguise
treading softly
so I don’t wake
the animals.
My shadow grows
large and crooked
and there are signs
all around, a bird telling
me never to go home.
It was as if I had
been in a story,
walking down a lane
to a house and a door,
with cut-out birds
and cut-out stairs.
I try to find the way back
and make all wrong-turns,
climbing weeds, pulling at briars.
I step over a low wall
but then there is the wide open
and a room full
of hoof-prints and arrows.
I go down to dried-up
11. 11
wound river and the surge
unfurls my lips.
Did you have to come
dressed as a fox?
a boy says.
In the forest
no-one can see
you smiling.
12. 12
The Editors’ Post Script
We hope you enjoyed this sampling of Far Off Places, Volume
I Issue I, Fairy Tales Retold. These are only a few of the stories and
poems that we were privileged to receive and publish in our first edition.
To enjoy the complete magazine, please purchase online!
