A Fairy-Tale Ending by Jack Heckel

Author:Jack Heckel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2015-08-02T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 1

Once Upon, Once Again

“ONCE UPON A TIME,” everyone can agree, is a fairly inaccurate way of marking time. “Once upon a time when?” one might well ask. Of course, most fairy tales live in their own blurry and disconnected time, neither now nor exactly then, and so the relative “when” of the story doesn’t matter. But in Charming’s tale, where you inconveniently have more than one “Once Upon a Time,” it can be important to know whether any particular “Once Upon a Time” came before or after any other “Once Upon a Time” that had been or is to come.

And so . . .

Once upon a time, at about the same time that the recently disowned Charming wandered lost in his own melancholy, Elizabeth Pickett awoke from a muddled dream about the Prince, little men, and fairies as a badly metered ­couplet was running through her head. She lay in bed staring at a short man perched atop a tall stool. His back was to her, and all she could see of him, apart from a waistcoat of garish purple, was a thin head of wild white hair. He had his arm cocked back and seemed on the verge of throwing a small leather book he was holding through the open window where a rainbow flock of songbirds chirruped loudly.

She had no idea where she was.

Liz sat up. As she did, the birds fell silent and stared at her. For his part, the strange little man spun about quickly, nearly unseating himself. As he struggled to regain his balance, she studied him. Putting aside his size, he was most singular. He had a white beard that matched the disorder of the hair on his head, and he wore a tiny pair of wire-­frame glasses that perched unsteadily on his long thin nose.

Finally reseated, he smiling and said, “The poet speaks, the lady stirs . . .”

She started to say that poetry could be deadly in the wrong hands when another pair of eyes, sitting just above a short fat nose and topped by a head of curly black hair, appeared above the foot of the bed. The eyes of this second little man narrowed, and then a deep voice boomed, “HEY, EVERYONE! . . . THE BROAD’S AWAKE!”

This announcement provoked an alarming racket from the room beyond. There was an explosive sneeze, something heavy crashed to the floor, then crockery shattered and someone with a high, wheezy voice let loose a remarkably colorful curse, all followed by the sound of booted feet thundering unseen through the door. Then, like gophers in a field, four more heads popped up over the edge of the bed’s footboard. Red hair and yellow, hatted and bare, thin nosed and broad, and each with the same sharp beetle-­black eyes. Liz mouthed silently as she counted out the number: . . . four . . . five . . . six. Six little men. No! Not little men . . . dwarves!

Her head felt strangely foggy, so when she spoke, it was without thought.

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