Drive-By Fairytales
Once upon a time after a rain, a young woman walked
the reeking sidewalk of a college town fueled by soybean industry.
A car driven by a man veered into the oily puddle in the gutter
between him and the girl and drenched her, white shirt
grey and clinging, dark curls dripping, shocked mouth a hole
hands out spread, shaking off drops from eyelashes and finger tips
like tiny prismatic knives. She walked the blocks back to her dorm,
stretching her blouse off her goose pimpled chest, wondering why.
Next week, next year, next life, riding her red bike like a mare
mane flying, another car, this one full of laughing high school boys
veered so close that one could lean out, long arm swinging
and smack her bottom planted on the small hard saddle
of her trusty ten-speed. It was then she stopped wondering.
She woke from a long sleep, as if from a spindle prick
as if from an uninvited kiss, as if from her mother’s future whisper
clawing through the earth of sixty years before the buried words
could reach her daughters’ ears. That ancient tale, gleaned
from nameless wives, scrubbed clean by brothers: her father
the king, was never more than a frog in the back seat of a car
on a first date with a lovely, naïve girl who told him no, no, no
and nine months later, muted by marriage, handed him a son—
and later, three daughters, and later, a decree of infidelity
he denied and flipped, despite his dukes’ discreet testimonies.
Later still, as the youngest daughter lay dying, golden curls
long fallen, their father, who never saw a car he didn’t covet
made a one-way flight to her side to ask if she’d bequeath
her red Ford to his youngest son, the seventh child, the favored one.
“No,” she sweetly seethed. He left before her last breath
to attend his new queen whose hardened brood love to say
none of this is true: a sullen stepchild’s sooty fairy tale.
They ride for the brand, his heirs. She tells this story anyway
her tongue a wheel of wooly thread, her finger black
with ash from a fire long dead they never had to tend.
with thanks to Amy Irish for her workshop,
“Rewriting Fairy Tales, Myths and Legends for Modern Survival”
and Maddie Crum’s “Unhappily Ever After: How Women
