fiction
- elichvar
- Apr 11
- 3 min read
Updated: 5 hours ago
by Peg Alford Pursell
Bouquet with Foxglove
There is always the prince. Always the prince who pays so little attention to the girl that he requires a slipper to figure out who she was after she’s gone. Where has she gone, Billy Boy, Billy Boy, oh where has she gone, charming Billy? He must believe she has been chosen by lazy fate to bring something true to fruition. Oh, dear William, follow the scent of the cherry pie as it cools on the cottage windowsill. Through the mist driven across the trees. Listen for the bells she carries in her bouquet: foxgloves, syringa, witch hazel.
There is always the prince trying to prove he is much more than he seems: white steeds, turrets and towers, solid gold buttons. In his chamber, the vials of love potions red with sea moss. On the other side of the forest, in the clearing rich with ancient ashes, sags the ruined chapel where once ladies wore veils, disguised from evil spirits. Cenotaph engraved in a forgotten alphabet. Creatures in the tree hollows sleep on.
There is always a prince who lays the blame on incompetent angels, permitting himself a complicated form of self-pity, a kind of sorrow the lost girl would find absurd. Will she never allow herself to be found?
Broken Oven
A woman who lived life in a register somewhere between the magical and the mundane. She lived in a cottage furnished with ancient rugs that had been woven by candlelight in meticulous patterns of reds, royal blue, and gold: women’s work she treasured. At night in her curious dreams these sightless ancestors came to her dressed in hand-stitched frocks and woolen cloaks. Looms laced with moonlight.
Her little house held an ancient wooden table carved with beatitudes that blessed her kitchen with their simple mysteries. A narrow closet held a sturdy broom. Each day she swept the slate walk to her door as if there might come a day, any time now, when visitors would once again arrive. The world beyond spun in perpetual strife, stripping many of contemplative, imaginative power.
Her bread baking in a broken oven there was no one to repair was a ritual she shared alone together with many across the land. She imagined. At sunset she sometimes took pieces of the thick bread in her pockets to the bank of the tiny lake to feed the swans dying upon the foul water. Trees standing like the heddles of a loom on the other side. Smog had gone from the city, where soon the fires would begin in acts of reclamation.
Gold Coins
Crayons in heaven, her mother said. A long-ago story for the girl who’d memorized the names of each crayon, written in a forgotten alphabet. Story from a long-gone mother. Heaven, maybe. Clouds bank against the darkening sky unseen from within the forest, where the girl used a found stick to make marks in a dusty patch encircled by a ring of fallen trees; no life arisen there since.
The girl had yet to understand the nature of her sleep, to arrive at a time and place where tracking the circadian rhythm would become necessary. Campfires blazed in secret pockets all over the city. Ambient light—what was that to one who lived in a kingdom set inside a cave? No one wanted to remember how capitalism had been exalted once. Sometimes threadbare sacks of gold coins seeped into dreams and alone, afraid, the dreamers chose not to analyze.
The girl had taught them how to fold paper ships, which they’d hidden in the hollows of bare trees, never realizing the starlings would pluck them out. The old science about cavity nesters lost as the disappeared bluebirds. The starlings with their thin whistles and rattles—they could talk better than parrots. Some had once known how.
Breeding season drawing near. When the sun rises, some will see the faded spots on the feathers, those who haven’t yet lost the ability to look, to see. The girl’s picture of the starling documented the spots in Cosmic Black and Ghostly Silver, names of crayons retired ages ago. Her picture become a folded ship. Launched into a river rising.
Peg Alford Pursell is the author of A Girl Goes into the Forest (Dzanc) and Show Her a Flower, a Bird, a Shadow, Foreword INDIES Book of the Year for Literary Fiction 2017. She is the founder, director, and editor in chief of WTAW Press and Betty. https://www.pegalfordpursell.com/
