--Zel by Donna Jo Napoli
“I had raised Zel wrong. I had raised a creative, curious child. I had let the child develop her own inclinations. I had clapped with pleasure at every new discovery, new talent. I had raised a child who could love easily and whom anyone could love back. Oh, what a terrible twist. I had raised a child in the best way I knew how, and it was that mistake that kept her from me now. I hold that child in a tower. The only one I love, the one I love more than life itself; for two years I have held that one in a stone room. And I live alone. I live the life I would have lived if I had never had Zel in the first place. Only it is far worse—for I know what I have lost.”
--Zel by Donna Jo Napoli
0 Comments
“I still have no use for either; it seems to me that the combination of great beauty and great wealth is a monstrous cruel handicap for a girl who simply wants to tend to her own affairs and her own Geese. In the future I shall know precisely what to do if another old beggar woman comes pestering me for a bite to eat while I’m herding my Geese in the high meadow. Will I give her my last crust of bread, like the softhearted, simpleminded dunderpate that I am? No I will not; I’ll send her away with a flea in her ear, that’s what I’ll do. ‘Tis said that no good deed ever goes unpunished, and so I am learning to my sorrow.”
--Goose Girl by Patrice Kindl “I have been considering my fate, and the way it appears to me is this: if I agree to marry the Prince, who is young and handsome and somewhat less intelligent than a clod of dirt, he may perchance let me out of this tower before the wedding takes place. ‘Twould not occur to him that I might run away when once I had given my word. Which I would do, I assure you, in the winking of an eye. On the other hand, if I do agree to marry the Prince, the King will simply have the Prince quietly assassinated, and I will end up marrying the King anyway. He would never risk losing anything he wanted through foolish trust in a woman’s word. No indeed; I shall be treated like the wife of Peter, Peter Pumpkin Eater, who kept his poor lady in a pumpkin shell, and most uncomfortable that must have been. I daresay I’ll be walled up in some tower or another until the day I die, which could turn out to be a great deal sooner than I might otherwise have expected. If I agree to marry the King from the first, why then, the Prince is less likely to find a knife between his ribs, which I recognize is a much happier outcome for the Prince. Yet look at what I am left with: the old sinner with the concealed weapons and a smile that makes you wonder how, precisely, his first two wives died.”
--Goose Girl by Patrice Kindl “The King killed my canary today. Now, I know full well that the customary way to begin such a tale as mine is: ‘Once upon a time, when wishes still came true, there lived a poor orphan Goose Girl,’ or some such fiddle-faddle. But what do I care for custom? ‘Tis my own story I am telling and I will tell it as I please. And as I find myself plunged into it right up to the neck, I see no reason why you should not be also. I resume. The King killed my canary today.”
--Goose Girl by Patrice Kindl “I’d be lying if I said that given a choice, I wouldn’t rather know than not know. But there are some things you can just know for no good reason other than that you do, and then there are other things that no matter how badly you want to know them, you just can’t. The truth is, whether you know something or not doesn’t change what was.”
--So B. It by Sarah Weeks “Hung myself. Sister found me. Alive.”
—Anna-Lise M. --I Can't Keep My Own Secrets by the editors of Smith Magazine “Laughed at all the wrong moments.”
—Kierra B. --I Can't Keep My Own Secrets by the editors of Smith Magazine “Being scared has saved my life.”
–Stephanie D. --I Can't Keep My Own Secrets by the editors of Smith Magazine “You can’t go on like you’re going to start really living one day, like all this is some preamble to some great life that’s magically going to appear. I’m a firm believer that you have to create your own miracles, don’t hold out that there’s something better waiting on the other side. It doesn’t work that way. When you’re gone, you’re gone. There’s no pearly white gates with an open bar and all the Midori you can drink. You can only get one go-round and you gotta make it count. I know that sounds harsh, but it’s true. Don’t wait.”
--Hero by Perry Moore “But everything had changed, and I was becoming more and more of who I really was, and less of this person I had thought I wanted to be.”
--Hero by Perry Moore |