Fractured Fairy Tale (PDF)

Fractured Fairy Tale
Taste of Eden
We were there at your fall. You plucked my brother from the branch against all warning and
we watched as you were punished. We grew, red and succulent, green and tender, and we
died, and we were consumed, by the sons and daughters of those who came before. But we
did not know what was to come.
I hang here, watching, and I saw her. Face full of terror. Young girl, like the one who came
before, but her skin was different. Pale from fright? Maybe. Or another one of your curses.
Her flesh was like that of the blanket which came with the winter I’d never seen. I watched
as she fled into the dark, the terrors which haunted her only in her mind.
Time passed, since the girl with pale skin, and again I waited. In the distance, I could hear a
chorus, of nature and of Man, and I thought, if I can think, that it was the girl, that she had
escaped her terrible fate. But while in thought, if I could think, another game. A woman,
much older, much colder than what had come before. Her skin was just as pale, but her
eyes were much darker, full of ill intent. I watched as she reached upwards and tugged me
from my branch, and I screamed so that all the woods could hear, but not could she, and
she held me in her icy grasp, and whispered, and I changed.
Inside I had been pure, life giving, but her words twisted me. I am toxic. I am poison. And
the woman, in but an instance she grew an age. Her skin, pale yet fair, grew wrinkled and
sagged, and her stature arched and she hung over, still with me in her grasp. And she took
me, deep into the dark wood, far from my branch, my home. Occasionally I would hear her
cackle, and I would shiver, if I could shiver.
We stopped at a small hovel that you, but not you, had built, and there she was. The girl
with winter’s skin. And the old woman took me and offered me to her. But I knew I was
toxic and I knew the curse I carried so I begged, if I could beg.
Do not eat me.
Do not eat me.
I am not the Eden that you crave.
But it did not work. She bit into my flesh and I scream, but not could they hear. Her grasped
loosened and we both fell to the ground. We both began our decay, though I would die
first.