The Anchoress
Wherein Tracey reads her niece a bedtime story… and traumatizes herself.
The basic setup for Donkeyskin is this: Handsome king and beautiful queen have a beautiful daughter and a magic donkey that poos gold. The beautiful queen falls deathly ill, and in a final beautifully bitchy act, makes the handsome king promise never to marry again unless he finds a woman as beautiful and virtuous as she. Beautiful queen dies happy — haha! — because she knows he will never ever find a woman like her. All manipulative and perfect and such.
So I’m reading along and ….. oh.
Hm.
Guess what?
Seems the handsome king searches far and wide for a replacement wife who matches the dead wife’s criteria. He comes up with bupkis.
So… as the story goes …. the lonely king decides … and I’d forgotten this through the yellow haze of age ….
“The only princess fairer and better than his late wife was his own daughter.”Yep. You heard it. Fairy-tale incest. Awesome, Tee Tee.
But do I, Tee Tee, stop reading at this hint of possible fairy-tale incest?
No.
No, I do not.
“He told his daughter that he would marry her, since she alone met with the conditions of his promise.”
Piper stares up at me from the balloon bed, blue eyes huge and shocked and I don’t like this look. Make it go away. That’s the look for later, when she finds out about Santa; that’s not the look for here and now, for me, Tee Tee. She opens her mouth and starts to whisper, ” But, Tee Tee ….” I interrupt her, laugh gamely, and talk fast. “Oh, haha. Isn’t that silly? He can’t marry his daughter, can he? Haha.” Yes. Haha. Silly incest.
And in the corner of my mind where my common sense naps contentedly, I hear a faint alarm, a bell of warning, a dim gong gonging to rouse that sleeping part of me, but it snoozes on, dreaming of Christmas bells and pie. “Ask not for whom the bell tolls, Tee Tee.”
Read on…. You haven’t even gotten to the fashion meltdown and the pervy keyhole-peeping Prince who chokes on a Delicate Ring. I picture the writer of this fantasy as an unshaved fellow in stained yellow tee-shirt, who neighbors said, “always kept to himself” and who wrote his fairy tales in the dank, mildewy basement where he kept his shovel, his taxidermy supplies, the carcass of his beloved dog and his half-solid bags of quick-mixing concrete.
To contribute to Tracey and Piper’s Inevitable Post-Traumatic Stress Therapy Fund, send checks to:
Donkeyskin Rehab
P.O. Box Oh-no
Nightmaresville-at-Auntie’s, Cerebellum USA
Meanwhile, THIS is a GREAT one:
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