Chanterelle could not believe that what was being done to her was any kinder than what had been done to Luscignole. She opened her mouth and tried to scream, but no scream came out. Instead, a spoon went in, bearing a full load of the impossibly delicious soup.
Chanterelle would have swallowed the soup if she had not gagged and choked, but the reflex saved her, and sprayed the contents of the spoon all over the bosom of Amanita’s white dress, flecking it with gray and brown. So astonished was Amanita that she dropped the bowl and howled with anguish as the hot liquid flooded the thin fabric of her skirt.
Chanterelle, fearful for her very life, threw back the crimson coverlet that had kept her warm for two nights and a day and made her bid for freedom. She flew across the room to the open window, beating her wings with all the force and skill of long-frustrated instinct, and soared into the welcoming sky.
Some months later, on the first Monday after New Year’s Day, Handsel and Amanita were walking in the wild forest by the light of the full moon. Their two ghostly hunting-dogs were beside them, neither needing a leash.
Amanita wore her favorite cape of bloodred fur, flecked with silver sequins. Handsel wore a fur cloak cut from the hide of a brown bear, trimmed along the edges with the silkier fur of a gray she-wolf. The body of the fur was a trifle mangy in places but the cape was warm in spite of the spoiled patches.
“How beautiful the sylphs are as they dance on the moonbeams,” Handsel said, “freshening the air with their agility.”
“Indeed they are, my love,” said Amanita.
“I like the dryads even more,” said Handsel. ‘“They know the very best of elfin music, and they love to play their pipes when the wind blows. I was a piper myself once, and a plucker too, but I was never very good. One should leave the exercise of such arts to those who know them best.”
“Indeed one should, my darling,” said Amanita.
“There is another song in the air tonight, is there not?” said Handsel, pausing suddenly and cocking his ear. “There is another voice, even more distant and more plaintive than the dryad pipes. I have heard it before, but never by day and always very faint. What is it?”
“It is the song of a nightingale,” said Amanita. “There is a way to make one sing by day, if you remember — but you would have to snare it first, and hold it very still. Would you like me to do that, Handsel? I think I can sing a song which will tempt it from the tree, if you wish. Birds are silly creatures, easily lured by artifice.”
Handsel remained where he was for a moment longer, considering this proposition. He frowned as he listened to the plaintive voice, redolent with loss. It seemed, somehow, to be trying to lure him away from Amanita — but he was not the kind of creature who could be tempted by a song.
“What would be the point?” he said. “The poor thing cannot hold a melody at all.”
Brian Stableford started with the story structure of “Hansel and Gretel,” incorporating significant embellishments borrowed from two modern “art fairy tales”: the novella “Luscignole” by Catulle Mendes, and the play “The Sunken Bell” by Gerhardt Hauptmann. The link between fairies and magic mushrooms was appropriated from Maureen Duffy’s book on The Erotic World of Faery.
Bear It Away
MICHAEL CADNUM
Miсhael Cadnum lives in northern California and is a poet and novelist. He is the author of St. Peter’s Wolf, Ghostwright, Calling Home, Skyscape, The Judas Glass, Zero at the Bone, Edge, The Lost and Found House, and other novels. He has also published an illustrated book based on Cinderella called Ella and the Canary Prince, and a novel about Robin Hood and the Sheriff of Nottingham. His most recent collection of poetry is The Cities We Will Never See.
I never liked the woodland, even in my youth, but the forest here has never been one of your lowly hoar-wilds, all crag and moss. It was really very pleasant, a happy mix of pinecones and little red ants, dock and nettles. You wouldn’t want to muss your skirt, going on a picnic in the cockleburs. But it was nice wood, little yellow flowers when the snow melted, and mushrooms shaped like willies. Some of our more prominent watercolorists traveled here to set up their easels, and botanists collected herbs along the streams.
A maiden could go berry picking with the silversmith’s son, or slip off to meet the young professor from down-valley, and if she ran across a bear, it would be one of the old traditional bears, little eyes, big rumps, snuffling the air, trying to see if you were trouble or something to eat. If a bear said anything at all it was in antique bear-tongue, not much to it, really, just good-bye or go away, all a bear needed to know.
From time to time a typical bear fracas broke out. A sow bear killed a miller down by the well, for example, when he stepped on a cub, it being night and the miller having lost his spectacles in the inn. The she-bear threw him over her shoulder and left him by the quarrymen’s privy quite a boneless puddle. But what did we expect? It was reassuring, in a way, having bears to worry about. Kids afraid of the dark were easier to quiet down. A sudden gust or a scuttling acorn on the roof and Mom and Dad would roll their eyes and whisper, “A bear looking for children who won’t eat their cabbage!”
Gentlemen of rude humor would disguise a burp by muttering, “Must’ve been a bear, growling in the glade,” and if things got boring on a long summer’s day, the villagers would unpen the hounds, run down a granddad bruin, and pen the bear in a sand pit. It was sport, all fair-play, joy under a summer’s eve. Bets would flow hand to hand on the question which would expire first, bear or dog. Life was simple. Mosquitoes and holidays, ale and bear skins.
But it changed.
Some people say it was better nutrition, trout multiplying as the rivers ran clear. The weather changed, the magnetic poles shifted — we all had our theories. I don’t know how, but it happened. One day we had dumb bears rolling logs to gobble worms, and the next we had bears in the vicarage library. They were wood-bears, still, and kept off to themselves, when they weren’t stocking up on rhyming dictionaries. But a revolution was underway.
It could be overlooked for a while. Bears still slept half the year and they still had trouble seeing. But when a boar-bear lumbered into the fletcher’s wife one afternoon and offered effusive apologies for treading on her toe, we all knew something profound had happened to bear nature. The bears rushed her to the surgeon, stood around waiting for news of her recovery. Mrs. Fletcher regained her health and sanity, until she stepped out a week later to take some medicinal-sun. A bear made way from the midden, dainty-like, a she-bear, and said, “I hope I see you well.”
Which killed the fletcher’s dame. She died of the shock. Many of us understood exactly. I didn’t mind a bit of sass from a bluejay or the tinsmith’s mutt, but I did think that this was more than mortal humans need endure, a curtsy from a bear wearing a bonnet.
Myself, I was blond, and if the glazier liked the look of me as well as the joiner, why, let them all have an eyeful, was how I always felt. I was charitable with my smiles, but when a bear asked how I was on this finest of mornings, and held the post office door open for me, I hurried right past and never said a word.
A long era of tranquillity was underway: bears writing essays, offering opinions on the likelihood of rain, bears making excellent neighbors. And most humans liked this, an age of peace. But I never got used to bears reading haiku, bears laughing at our human jokes. Months went by, entire seasons, and a bear never ate a single human. Not one. There was bear laughter and bear song, noon and night.