Sunday, November 16, 2008

A strange little story... God know what I was thinking...

I am only a storyteller and these are my stories.

Peter Pan taught us that when we say we don’t believe in fairies one dies. Name her as an untruth and she wilts away, like a hothouse flower left out in the rain. So it is with us. When nobody believes in us we shrivel away, we start to doubt the truth of our own experience and no amount of clapping can bring us back to what we once were.

I am only the storyteller and these are only my stories.

Once upon a time there was a little mermaid. She lived at the bottom of the ocean, safe, but she longed for something else from her life, she wanted to stand in the sunshine. She went to the sea witch and pleaded for her legs but the witch kept her prisoner and hurt her and broke her spirit. Eventually, when the witch knew that all traces of the mermaid child had been erased, she gave the girl her legs and sent her to the land. The mermaid saw a prince and thought that she could love him, thought that she could marry him and have his family and start a new life away from what the sea witch had done to her, but when she tried to speak to him she realised that her voice had disappeared. She was trapped inside herself forever.

I am only the storyteller and these are only my stories.

Snow White runs away from her crazy mother, her uninterested father. She runs to the forest where she believes that she might be safe but she does not realise a hunter is following her, she cannot hide because he can smell her fear on the wind. She tries to escape him but he is staggering behind her, she hides but he can always find her because he can hear her crying, he knows all her hiding places. Then he is beside her, on top of her, puffing whiskey breath onto her cheek and into her ear. He leaves her heart, not cutting it out like the evil queen said, but he takes everything else. When he finally leaves her she crawls on, bloody and bruised and broken, to the safety of a fantasy. Seven tiny men who never touch her. She stays with them, heals her bruises and hides her scars and convinces herself she is happy until her crazy mother finds her and marries her off to a prince in a golden mask. On their wedding night she takes off her dress and he takes off his mask, (he leaves his boots on). He is the hunter and she is trapped beneath him forever.

I am only the storyteller and these are only my stories.

Beauty has been living with her prince for so long that she has forgotten that he is really a beast. She has created a fantasy where he is kind and gentle and will always take care of her. A fantasy where her kisses have saved him. She will never escape him, he has her too closely guarded and so she teaches herself to love him because that is the only way that she can keep any of herself, but he is still a beast and sometimes, when she looks at him she cannot see anything else and she is afraid and she wishes that he would allow her to die. She is a prisoner and so she smiles and kisses and pretends he is a prince and allows herself to waste away into nothing.

I am only a storyteller and these are only my stories.

Once upon a time there was a little girl whose grandma had been sent to live in the woods. Nobody wanted the tired old woman and so they left her to rot away lying in her bed. The little girl was the only one who would go to visit her but one day she was stopped on her way by a wolf. He warned her that that there was danger awaiting her in the woods. The wolf was afraid of the hunter. The little girl was not afraid.
He crept up behind her, ripping off her red riding cloak. His hands were everywhere. When she reached the grandmothers house she was crying. Grandmas big nose smelled him on her and her weak old eyes were all the better to see the damage. She cleaned the little girl’s cuts, with a stinking ointment that stung and burnt, and wiped away her tears, all the time scolding her for being so bad. Then she stitched her red riding cloak together skilfully so that the tares were well hidden, dressed her and sent her home. She warned her that nobody would ever believe her. The hunter captured the wolf and mounted his head on Grandmas wall, she gave him a basket of fruit.

I am only the storyteller and these are only my stories.

Peter Pan taught us that when we say we don’t believe in fairies one dies. Name her as an untruth and she wilts away, like a hothouse flower left out in the rain. So it is with us. When nobody believes in us we shrivel away, we start to doubt the truth of our own experience and no amount of clapping can bring us back to what we once were.

I am only a storyteller. I am only one voice that is trying to pull many voices together. My stories are truths and untruths bred from the fictions we build for ourselves. My stories are horror stories of the big bad wolf and fairy stories with happy endings and they are only stories. These are the clumsy collection of fairytales fed to us when we were children as a criptic message of where the dangers might be, but they are only stories. They are words on a page and can be easily ignored or forgotten and we can go back to being queens and princesses, if we still want to.

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