Frogs fall out of my mouth when I talk. Toads, too.
It used to be a problem.
There was an incident when I was young and cross and fed up parental expectations. My sister, who is the Good One, has gold fall from her lips, and since I could not be her, I had to go a different way.
So I got frogs. It happens.
“You’ll grow into it,” the fairy godmother said. “Some curses have cloth-of-gold linings.” She considered this, and her finger drifted to her lower lip, the way it did when she was forgetting things. “Mind you, some curses just grind you down and leave you broken. Some blessings do that too, though. Hmm. What was I saying?”
I spent a lot of time not talking. I got a slate and wrote things down. It was hard at first, but I hated to drop the frogs in the middle of the road. They got hit by cars, or dried out, miles away from their damp little homes.
Toads were easier. Toads are tough. After awhile, I learned to feel when a word was a toad and not a frog. I could roll the word around on my tongue and get the flavor before I spoke it. Toad words were drier. Desiccated is a toad word. So is crisp and crisis and obligation. So are elegant and matchstick.
Frog words were a bit more varied. Murky. Purple. Swinging. Jazz.
I practiced in the field behind the house, speaking words over and over, sending small creatures hopping into the evening. I learned to speak some words as either toads or frogs. It’s all in the delivery.
Love is a frog word, if spoken earnestly, and a toad word if spoken sarcastically. Frogs are not good at sarcasm.
Toads are masters of it.
I learned one day that the amphibians are going extinct all over the world, that some of them are vanishing. You go to ponds that should be full of frogs and find them silent. There are a hundred things responsible—fungus and pesticides and acid rain.
When I heard this, I cried “What!?” so loudly that an adult African bullfrog fell from my lips and I had to catch it. It weighed as much as a small cat. I took it to the pet store and spun them a lie in writing about my cousin going off to college and leaving the frog behind.
I brooded about frogs for weeks after that, and then eventually, I decided to do something about it.
I cannot fix the things that kill them. It would take an army of fairy godmothers, and mine retired long ago. Now she goes on long cruises and spreads her wings out across the deck chairs.
But I can make more.
I had to get a field guide at first. It was a long process. Say a word and catch it, check the field marks. Most words turn to bronze frogs if I am not paying attention.
Poison arrow frogs make my lips go numb. I can only do a few of those a day. I go through a lot of chapstick.
It is a holding action I am fighting, nothing more. I go to vernal pools and whisper sonnets that turn into wood frogs. I say the words squeak and squill and spring peepers skitter away into the trees. They begin singing almost the moment they emerge.
I read long legal documents to a growing audience of Fowler’s toads, who blink their goggling eyes up at me. (I wish I could do salamanders. I would read Clive Barker novels aloud and seed the streams with efts and hellbenders. I would fly to Mexico and read love poems in another language to restore the axolotl. Alas, it’s frogs and toads and nothing more. We make do.)
The woods behind my house are full of singing. The neighbors either learn to love it or move away.
My sister—the one who speaks gold and diamonds—funds my travels. She speaks less than I do, but for me and my amphibian friends, she will vomit rubies and sapphires. I am grateful.
I am practicing reading modernist revolutionary poetry aloud. My accent is atrocious. Still, a day will come when the Panamanian golden frog will tumble from my lips, and I will catch it and hold it, and whatever word I spoke, I’ll say again and again, until I stand at the center of a sea of yellow skins, and make from my curse at last a cloth of gold.
Terri Windling posted recently about the old fairy tale of frogs falling from a girl’s lips, and I started thinking about what I’d do if that happened to me, and…well…
Here’s my full story from the Valor Anthology! Thank you all for supporting the Kickstarter in 2014 and the book last summer, as well as sharing stuff on tumblr. I learned so much from this project and had such a great experience working with all the great people in the book that I’m looking forward to sharing more comics this year :)
Aaaaand crying before my morning coffee. Happy International Women’s Day, everyone <3
Man, I want queer fairytales too, but what I really want is for them to follow traditional fairytale tropes and structures while they do it. I want rules of threes and true names and quest stories and impossible tasks and disguises and riddles, I want blood and death and happy endings. I want more stories in the shape of oral folk tales, but with queer people in. Modern reimaginings where ‘and the prince was really a princess’ is a solution to the problem of the narrative are great, but I’d like to see more where it’s an uncommented-upon fact that there are queer people in this fairy tale, but the tale has other, very traditional problems (the princess won’t laugh, the cow has gone dry, the bridegroom intends to murder and eat the bride) that they need to solve by being kind and clever and brave and a little bit rebellious, as well as whatever their identity may be.
A King and Queen ruled in a time of peace and abundance; the only mar upon their happiness was that they had no children, through their youth and even into their middle age, despite many fervent hopes and prayers. One day the Queen went walking on a forest path without her attendants. There, in the dark quiet of her despair, an old woman found her.
“My dear,” asked the woman, “why are you so sad?”
“It doesn’t matter,” answered the Queen, gently. “It wouldn’t make a difference if you knew.”
“You may be surprised.”
“The King and I have no children. He lacks an heir, and I have always wanted a child of my own to care for. But you see, that’s not something you can help.”
“Of course it is,” nodded the woman, for naturally she was a witch. “Listen and do as I say; take a drinking cup and place it upside-down in your garden tonight. In the morning, you will find two roses beneath it - one red, one white. If you eat the red rose you shall give birth to a son, and the white rose shall give you a girl. But remember that you must not eat both.”
“Not both?”
“No,” the woman said.
Astonished, and not a little suspicious, the Queen agreed. That night she did as the old woman had instructed, and in the morning she discovered two small roses under the cup’s brim.
“But which one should I choose?” thought the Queen. “If I have a son, he may grow into a man who marches off to war and dies. If I have a daughter, she may stay longer with me, but I will have to see her given away in marriage. In the end, I may have no child after all.”
At last she decided on the white rose, but it was so sweet to the taste - and the thought of losing a daughter to marriage was so bitter - that she ate the red rose as well, hardly remembering the old woman’s warning.
Shortly afterwards, as happens in such stories, the Queen was found to be with child. Her husband was traveling when the time came for her to give birth, and so he did not bear witness to what happened, which was this: The Queen’s first child was no child at all, but instead there tumbled forth from her body the long, scaly one of a lindworm, a hideous dragon with a venomous bite. It scrabbled out the window on its two legs, even before the terrified midwives could move to do anything, and amidst the chaos the Queen delivered a second child as well. This one was a fine, handsome boy, healthy and perfectly formed, and the Queen made her midwives swear that they would tell no one what they had seen. And when the King arrived home, joyous at the news of his son’s birth, not a word was said.
Years passed, so that the Queen wondered if it had not been a terrible dream. Soon enough it came time for the prince to find a wife, and he set out with his guard to a neighboring kingdom to ask for its princess’s hand in marriage. But suddenly a great lindworm appeared, and laid itself before the prince’s horse, and from its jagged-tooth mouth came a voice:
“A bride for me before a bride for you!”
The prince and his company turned about to flee. The Lindworm blocked their passage and spoke again.
“A bride for me before a bride for you!”
The prince journeyed home to tell his parents. Distraught, the Queen confessed that it was true. The Lindworm was indeed the elder brother of the prince, and so by rights should marry first. The King wrote to the ruler of a distant land, asking that they send their princess to marry his son: but he did not say which one.
A lovely princess journeyed to the kingdom, and did not see her bridegroom until he appeared beside her in the Great Hall, and by then (naturally) it was too late. The next morning they found the Lindworm asleep alone in the bridal bedchamber, and it was quite clear he had devoured his new wife.
A second princess was sent, and a third. Both met the same fate, but each time the prince dared to embark on a journey, the Lindworm would appear again and speak:
“A bride for me before a bride for you!”
“Father,” the prince said, ” we must find a wife for my elder brother.”
“And where am I to find her?” asked the King. “We have already made enemies of the men who sent their daughters to us. Stories are spreading fast, and I am sure no princess would dare to come now.”
So instead the King went to the royal gardener’s cottage, where he knew the old man lived with his only daughter.
“Will you give me your daughter to marry my son, the Lindworm?” asked the King.
“No!” cried the gardener. “Please, she is everything I have in this world. Your monstrous son has eaten his way through three princesses, and he’ll gobble her up just the same. She’s too good for such a fate.”
“You must,” the King said, “You must.”
Distraught, the gardener told his daughter everything. She agreed to the King’s request and went into the forest so that her father would not see her weeping. And there, in the dark quiet of her despair, an old woman found her.
“My dear,” asked the woman, “why are you so sad?”
“I’m sorry,” answered the girl, kindly. “It wouldn’t make a difference if I told you.”
“You may be surprised.”
“How can that be? I’m to be married to the King’s son, the Lindworm. He’s eaten his first three brides, and I don’t know what will stop me from meeting the same end. That’s not something you can help me with.”
“Of course it is,” nodded the woman again. “Listen and do as I say. Before the marriage ceremony, dress yourself in ten snow-white shifts beneath your gown. Ask that a tub of lye, a tub of milk, and as many birch rods as a man can carry be brought to your bridal chamber. After you are wed, and your husband orders you to disrobe, bid him to shed a skin first. He will ask you this nine times, and when you are left wearing one shift you must whip him with the rods, wash him in the lye, bath him in the milk, wrap him in the discarded shifts, and hold him in your arms.”
“Do I truly have to hold him?” the girl asked, in disgust.
“You must. It may mean your life.”
The girl was suspicious, but she agreed to the woman’s plan however absurd it seemed. When the day came for the marriage, she dressed herself in ten white shifts before donning the heavy gown they offered her. When she looked upon her husband for the first time, waiting for her in the Great Hall, her steps did not falter. And when she asked for the rods, the lye, and the milk, she said it with such ease that the servant could do nothing but obey.
Finally, the girl and the Lindworm were left alone in the darkened bedchamber. For a moment she listened to the rasp and click of his scales on stone, and heard his soughing breath.
“Maiden,” said the Lindworm, “shed your shift for me.”
“Prince Lindworm,” answered the girl, “shed your skin first!”
“No one has ever asked me that before,” the answer came.
“I am asking it of you now.”
So the Lindworm shed a skin, and the girl shed a shift, but she revealed the second shift underneath.
“Maiden,” said the Lindworm, a second time, “shed your shift for me.”
“Prince Lindworm,” answered the girl, again, “shed your skin first!”
They repeated this, nine times in all, and each time the Lindworm shed a skin the girl removed another white shift, until she was left wearing one.
The Lindworm, shivering and weak and bloodied, spoke his request a last time.
“Wife,” asked the Lindworm, “will you shed your shift for me?”
“Husband,”answered the girl, “will you shed your skin first?”
And the Lindworm did as she asked of him, tearing himself free of scales and armor even to the bare flesh beneath, and the girl whipped the writhing creature with her birch rods until they snapped; she carried the whole massive length of him to the tubs, lye and milk, washed him clean and bathed him and swathed him in the shifts like a great, terrible child, collapsed to the floor with her husband in her arms, and there she stayed until, exhausted, she fell asleep.
When she woke, it was to the timid knocking of a servant on the door.
“Princess?” asked the servant. “Princess? Are you alive?”
The girl looked about the bedchamber: there in the morning light were the dried skins, and the tubs, and the broken rods, and the blood, and in her arms slept a pale, weary, but very handsome man.
“Yes,” she answered. “Yes, I am.”
The King and Queen were astounded and thrilled to hear how the girl had saved their son from his curse, and she ruled together with her husband for many long years, and thus closes our tale of the most intense game of strip poker that you shall ever hear.
A prince with a love of the sea undergoes a terrible shipwreck and wakes, briefly, while being rescued by a mermaid. Obsessed now, he requests the help of a land witch and gives up his “charm” - looks and speech - for a tail. Silent, disfigured, and lost beneath the waves, he discovers that though he can breathe, every breath he takes feels like fire in his chest. Still, he hopes to find the mermaid who saved him and someday earn her heart…
A young, beautiful wolf with a coat as red as blood is off to visit her grandmother - now living in another pack. She’s warned by her mother not to approach the path, for humans lurk there. However, the pup ignores her mother’s advice, lured away by a girl’s tempting treats, and later at dusk, when she finally arrives at grandmother’s, a whole group of hunters sets upon the pack…
A young man is selected to keep a fearful ‘beast’ company, living in a castle far out in the woods. Yet when he arrives, he finds not a beast, but the most gorgeous woman the land has ever seen… one who claims to be under a spell. She is not human and utterly despises this form, but the spell will not be broken until someone loves her for reasons beyond her appearance. This man, gentle and well-read, may one day look past her beauty and if he does, he may still love the ‘beast’ that then springs forth…
A princess is told by her father that she must marry and a ball is planned to find her a husband. Angry and panicking, she flees to the edge of her kingdom where she finds a young man, living with two brothers and an abusive stepfather. These fast friends hatch a scheme: the princess will take one of the man’s shoes, claim it belong to her one true love, and send her father on a fool’s errand to find the ‘prince’ to which it belongs. In return she will help the man escape his family, if he wishes, at least for one night - at the ball. But when they dance together, more than friendship might form…
If Goldilocks tried three beds, then Momma Bear and Daddy Bear slept separately. Baby Bear is probably the only thing keeping the family together.
You ain’t have to put those people business out like that.
Y’know, the story straight-up tells us why Mama Bear and Papa Bear sleep in separate beds: they have very different needs in terms of mattress firmness, and those fancy responsive mattresses that can be soft on one half and firm on the other hadn’t been invented yet. There’s no shame in valuing your spinal health.
The fact that they’re secure enough to admit that they’re better off in separate beds probably indicates that they have a very healthy relationship built on a foundation of mutual love and respect.
