FF (June 2012) Elora Bishop - Sappho's Fables, Volume 1 - Three Lesbian Fairy Tale Novellas

The Sappho's Fables series takes well-known, beloved fairy tales and retells them from a lesbian perspective. Volume One contains the first three novellas in the series: SEVEN (Snow White), BRAIDED (Rapunzel) and CRUMBS (Hansel and Gretel), compiled together in an enchanting omnibus edition.

SEVEN: A Lesbian Snow White The strange witch girl Neve has skin as white as snow, lips as red as blood, and a dark secret. Her father Lexander, an alchemist, harbors an evil obsession, and Catalina, his newest bride, made the grave mistake of becoming his wife. When Catalina finds herself falling in love with his daughter, Neve, instead, the deepening bond between the women sets in motion the final chapter of a story that began long ago, with a desperate longing and a handful of apple seeds. Together, Neve and Catalina must venture into the Huntsman's haunted forest to undo what has been done and set themselves free.

BRAIDED: A Lesbian Rapunzel Zelda is cursed to spend her days on a platform in an ancient, holy tree, growing her hair long enough to touch the ground. But it wasn’t her curse to bear: Gray, the witch’s daughter, was meant for that lonely fate. Gray visits Zelda each day, mourning their switched fates, and falling deeper in love with the cursed girl, until one night, at the Not-There Fair, an extraordinary creature outlines a magical plan that could set both of them free. Will Gray’s love for Zelda be strong enough to survive the strange dream world of Chimera, or will Zelda remain a prisoner of the curse forever?

CRUMBS: A Lesbian Hansel and Gretel Greta's never ventured beyond the refuge of the Heap. Outside, the Ragers lurk, ever hungry and hunting. But Greta and her brother, half-starved and now alone, must risk death for the dream of safety they hope to find within the metal forest. Once there, nothing is as it seems: in the confines of a crumbling old candy factory, the woman who rescues them with sweet words and sweeter treats harbors a dangerous secret.

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Sample

SEVEN

I slipped off my robe, sat down on the edge of the bed, and opened my mouth. Without a word, he slid the fruit from his knife onto my tongue; then he sliced a piece of the apple for himself.

We chewed slowly, avoiding one another's gaze. It was a communion of sorts, and our most intimate act, but I did not know why, every night, we enacted this ritual. I'd stopped wondering months ago, had stopped asking him questions long before that.

And it was only a bite of apple, I reasoned with myself. In truth, this nocturnal habit was the least of my husband's oddities.

The thin apple skin broke again and again between my teeth; the fruit was so sweet that I winced as I swallowed. With a shiver, I fell back upon my pillow and pulled the coverlet over my body. I was careful not to touch Lexander—he disliked being touched—as he eased into the bed beside me. He exhaled heavily before blowing out his candle. Smoke and apples: my life's perfume.

I stared at the darkness, listened to my breaths, his breaths.

Silence wounds. I have learned that, living here. Silence is not peace; it is its opposite, a spiritual unease, an unrepentant stifling.

I curled up small as a nestling and slipped my head beneath the blankets, eyes squeezed shut. I willed my dreams to fly me away.

*

When we married, I was scarcely older than his child, his daughter, Neve.

I knew nothing of the world, having grown up an indoor creature. I spent my infancy with a wet nurse and my school years with indifferent—sometimes cruel—governesses. My parents were grey silhouettes on the walls of rooms I peeked into but was not permitted to enter. I knew them best by their scents, hovering like ghosts in the empty hallways, on the staircase: my father’s cherry pipe tobacco, my mother’s violet toilette water.

They chose Lexander for me, though they knew nothing about him, save for his title and his monetary worth. I had a respectable dowry, but it was nothing to tempt a man of his stature, and my beauty, I knew, could offer little temptation. Not that he had ever glimpsed my face.

Still, his correspondence with my father confirmed that he wished to make a match with me. All of these arrangements were made ethereally, invisibly. It felt make-believe, as if I were marrying a ghost.

Lexander lived in distant Avella, an isolated country to the north. Avella was thick with forests and even thicker with fairy stories. When I was small, my governess Tendrille, an Avellan emigrant, liked to frighten me with tales of the infamous Avellan witches, and of beasts who made bargains with desperate men. After her bedtime storytelling, I was always afraid that a treeman might leap from my wardrobe, moss for his hair and branches for arms, come from Avella to steal my heart away. And yet part of me longed to see such wonders—real magic!—with my own eyes, so I listened rapt to Tendrille's harsh whispers, and sometimes, secretly, I put on my black veil and whispered made-up words to the moon, pretending to be a witch.

Neither of my parents had ever traveled so far as Avella, and neither ever would. When I bid them farewell, I knew I would not see them again. My mother gave me a gold-framed mirror to remember her by. A wedding present, she said. It was the loveliest gift I had ever received; I wrapped it in a silk cloth to protect the delicate roses that encircled its surface, and I refused to let the footman take it from me when I stepped into Lexander's carriage.

I was such an eager, hopeful thing. For the journey to Avella, I wore my most flattering dress, the white one with blue lace at the cuffs and hem, and my brown curls were decorated with sprigs of holly—for domestic happiness—and a trailing vine of ivy, to promote affection. I was a rosy-cheeked, self-absorbed bride; I watched the countryside glide by through the carriage window and imagined that it had beautified itself for my sake alone, riotous with yellow and pink and purple flowers.

I’m ashamed to admit I accepted the marriage proposal eagerly. Here was my chance at an adventure. Perhaps love. Companionship. I had never had a friend, or a kiss. Loneliness and I, however, were intimate.

*

Lexander was older than they told me, much older. We were married hurriedly, privately, by a nervous clergyman in a small, dark room. I had no time to change my dress or wash up after my carriage ride. There was no formal introduction. There were no witnesses. Lexander kissed me just once, to seal our contract. I had dreamt of the marriage kiss—my first kiss—since the arrival of his letter confirming our betrothal. But my husband's mouth was closed and hard. His rheumy eyes drifted, lofty, never meeting my gaze.

Not one week into my marriage—if such a circumstance may be called a marriage—I found myself longing for the life I had so readily sacrificed. After a full month had passed, I began to ponder escape. We lived far outside the village, removed from sight of any other inhabitants. Still, there were horses, servants I might bribe. I had no belongings to offer them, though, besides some dresses and my mother's mirror. Lexander had never given me a ring.

I confronted him, in the beginning, asked him why he had chosen me, since it did not seem as if he wanted me at all.

"It is not a matter of want but of necessity."

"I am your wife, but you treat me terribly. What have I done to deserve this?"

"You mustn't mistake detachment for dislike, Catalina. I provide food for you, and shelter. What more do you need?"

I could not answer, did not know the answer—not precisely. I had hoped for freedom, but instead I found myself caught in another cage.

Still, I did not despise him, not at first. Some part of me held on to the fancy that perhaps, given time and care, our affection would grow. He was old enough to be my grandfather, but it was not so uncommon for a wealthy man to take a young bride, and though I knew I could never love him in the way that a wife loves a husband, was it naïve to imagine that we might be friends?

But Lexander ignored my attempts at kindness, spoke to me only when it was unavoidable, or when he wanted something from me. He was an alchemist, an odd hobby for a man of his wealth, and on frequent occasions, he asked me—and, eventually, threatened me—to submit to innumerable, nonsensical tests.

It was my duty as his wife, he said. He asked nothing else of me, he said. He took care of me; I was free to live a life of leisure, without worries or responsibilities. All he asked, he said, was that I be compliant in this "one small matter."

When I refused—and I did refuse, many times—he raged and punished me in a hundred different ways: ordering the cook to ban me from the kitchen and prepare me no meals; locking me up in our chamber for hours, sometimes a day, sometimes longer; sprinkling my half of the nightly apples with peppers and powders that made me wretchedly ill.

So, more often than not, I swallowed my urge to protest and did as he bade me. It seemed easier, somehow.

His tests were tests of pain, of endurance. He took me to his laboratory below the castle and strapped me to long-armed mechanisms that pulled and pinched. He drew my blood with thick, dull needles. He measured my bruises and, in cold, clinical words, instructed me to describe how I felt afterward, to describe the depth of the pain.

In truth, it did not take long for my hopes to sour, and I could never seem to remove their bitterness from my mouth.

*

Since I hated him, I hated his daughter, too. My stepdaughter, Neve. She did not resemble him in any way, with her dark hair, her fair—almost white—skin, her unnerving green-eyed gaze. I supposed she took after her mother, but there were no portraits hanging in the drafty halls of any of my husband’s former wives. The paintings he commissioned were abstract scenes thick with red and green and black oil paint, suggestive of broken trees, of earthy carnage.

I felt Neve’s stare physically, like a bite. Sometimes, when I wandered the grounds, a sensation overcame me, a prickling alarm, and I turned back to the house to find her watching me from her chamber window. But when we met indoors, we rarely exchanged a word. I had acquired a habit of keeping my chin down to discourage conversation. Some of the servants were chatty, and I had no inclination to socialize. Even mundane topics like the dreary weather and the proliferation of mice in the hallways were too involved for me.

I had one solace, and that was the orchard. Decades ago, before Lexander inherited the estate, someone had planted hundreds of apple trees in neat rows, so that the branch of one tree met the branch of its neighboring tree, creating a sweetly scented bower beneath. It was a fairy place, my hiding place, though I was no more hidden there than anywhere. Still, I liked to lie on the grass, on the hard fallen apples, and imagine myself a simple country girl with my own cottage in the woods.

There was one grove of trees I was not permitted to enter. It was Lexander's alone, and it was, I knew, where the apples we shared every night came from. The servants picked them from the branches, left them in crates in our chamber. A circle of stones separated these trees—so heavy with fruit that their thick, twisted branches grazed the ground—from the ordinary trees. Their revered apples grew half red and half white; I supposed them to be a rare Avellan breed, as I had never seen any apples like them in my country.

One afternoon I was sitting high in the crook of my favorite tree in the greater orchard—a very old tree, gnarled as my husband’s fingers—and I heard footsteps, whispers, excited girlish laughter. I sighed and moved further along the branch, into the shadows.

Many of the servants had sweethearts in the nearest village, and the orchard offered privacy of a sort, so they trysted there from time to time. The sight of their furtive gropings made me feel uneasy. I never watched and tried not to eavesdrop. If they noticed my presence, they did not comment on it, so I had grown accustomed to waiting, silent, eyes closed, until the orchard was empty and all mine again.

My first glance of this couple, though, brought a wobble to my insides that I couldn’t reconcile, and I found myself leaning forward for a better view.

Neve had her back to me, three yards away. She was dressed all in black, black gown and bodice, and from behind I recognized her night-sky hair, her tapered waist and curved hips. Her hand clasped the hand of a girl whose name I couldn’t remember—Maria, Marian? I knew she worked in the lower kitchens, scrubbing dishes, and even from here, I could see how raw her fingers were.

How rough they must have felt against Neve’s smooth skin.

Scarcely had the thought formed than I was blushing, because now Neve had let go the maid’s hand and was touching her—first, gently, the girl's plain, flushed face, framed in limp hair the color of apple flesh. Then Neve’s fingers moved downward to graze parted lips; the maid's neck, arching back; her collarbone. And there she paused, bent her head, pressed her lips to the heaving place between throat and breast.

Maria/Marian moaned, and the sound startled me so much that I forgot my precarious roost, lost my balance and tumbled from the apple tree branch to land with a muffled thump on the damp, fruit-littered grass.

Neve turned to look at me.

I felt hot and dared not meet her stare. My embarrassment coiled with frustration. She should be the shamed one, not me. I was her stepmother, after all…

But I had not watched with the eyes of a parent.

I had never before witnessed any human act so lovely.

“Go, Mariah,” Neve spoke softly, and Mariah ran, red-faced, a fist pressed to her mouth, kicking up browned apples with her little black boots.

Neve stared at me, eyes like burning emeralds, as she leaned upon the same knobby tree she had pressed Mariah against. Her fingers absently re-laced the front of her raven-black bodice, pulled tight and drew a bow.

I wanted to speak, but I found I could not command my tongue.

So she sighed and crossed her arms at her waist. “Will you tell?”

They were the first words she had given me in weeks.

I winced.

“No.”

She raised a black brow, moved near to my jumble of muddied skirts and bruised apples, and offered me her hand.

We’d never touched before. I studied her fingers. She had colored the long, sharp nails black.

She shook them, waiting. “Did you injure yourself in the fall? Are you in pain?”

I opened my mouth, but before I could respond, Neve bent down and grabbed my arm, securely but gently, and hefted my twisted body to its feet.

“Thank you, Neve. I’m fine.” I busied my trembling hands with smoothing out wrinkled fabric and straightening my sleeves, pinning up my loosened hair.

She did not back away. She stood so near that her perfume mingled in my nostrils with the scent of earth and crushed apples: something dark and red, like anger, or grief. Her mouth slanted to one side, as if she were working out a stubborn thought.

I attempted a smile, to weak effect. “I’ll go in now. I think—oh!”

My right ankle had the audacity to give way beneath me. In stumbling, I caught hold of Neve’s hand, and she held me up, steadying my shaking with her free arm.

“You are hurt,” she said, and it sounded like an accusation.

“It’s nothing. It was so stupid of me to climb into that tree, knowing my own clumsiness—“

“No, it’s my fault entirely. I must apologize.”

“Apologize?” I couldn’t hide my surprise. This was the longest conversation Neve and I had ever shared, and my assumptions about her were beginning to dissolve. She was intimidating and prideful like her father, yes, but there was a softness to her manner, her voice, that wrenched at my heart. How had it been for her, all these years, growing up under the roof of that cold, unfeeling man? Perhaps things had been better when her mother was alive.

I dared not ask about her mother, though. We were hardly on such intimate terms. I half-doubted that Nev