Once

Forty Five

It was about four in the morning when Elle woke up with a start. Everything was dark and quiet, the house deathly silent. She was still dressed, and she hadn't brushed her teeth, but she had no energy at all to even lift her head. Her face had the puffy raw feeling you always get after you've been crying. Her eyes stung. She wondered how long she'd cried for before she eventually got too exhausted and fell asleep.

She realised her phone was still in her bag, somewhere on the other side of the room. There might be fifty missed calls on there. There might be none. She wouldn't be surprised either way, and she didn't bother going to look. If none of them had called her she wouldn't blame them, but to find out that was true would just break her heart. If they had all tried to call her it was too late to do anything about it now. People always said things like 'call me any time if you need anything.' She assumed they didn't mean four o'clock in the morning. And not when the last thing you said to them was that they were basically awful people who'd let you down.

She rolled over onto her back, staring up at the ceiling. The curtains were open and she didn't move to close them. Her eyes were beginning to get used to the gloom now, and outside she could see the sky speckled with the tiny pinpricks of a hundred stars. No clouds in the sky tonight.

She found herself thinking about fairy tales. That was only natural, she thought to herself. You might say she had an excuse for having them on her mind after the week she'd had.

As a little girl she'd loved fairy tales. She remembered so vividly poring over them again and again. She'd had dozens and dozens of books of them: big floppy picture books, hard-backed collections by the Grimm brothers and Hans Christian Andersen. She supposed she'd liked them then because they were mostly stories about little kids, just like her. Little girls in red cloaks. Little boys who climbed beanstalks. Children who broke into the homes of talking bears and found gingerbread houses while they were lost in the woods.

As she'd gotten older she'd started to think they were stupid. Everyone did, of course. It was a part of growing up. Who'd said that thing about growing up and putting away childish things? She'd read it in English once. That's what it felt like. Like she'd put away those stories, locked them in a chest, buried them under a sign saying 'Kids' Stuff - Do Not Open.' There had been other stories to read, stories about proper, grown-up stuff. Stories about adventures. About love. About families and heartbreaks and the difficulties of growing up.

But what made those stories any different to fairy stories? Weren't all fairy tales about families and love and adventure, and all the things that great literature was supposed to be about? She felt like it was a kind of snobbery. An inherent feeling everyone had, an unspoken rule saying that since these stories had been written for kids then they must somehow be 'bad.' Because they had things like witches and fairies in them they weren't worth bothering about.

But there was something amazing about fairy tales, she was now beginning to realise. The fact that they'd survived for hundreds of years, passed on from generation to generation, through every culture in the entire world. That, in itself, was amazing enough. And what it created was this huge shared consciousness, this series of interconnected stories that everyone knew, that everyone would recognise from just an image or a few words. Just like Mr Luzlic had said: the magic of the stories was rooted in their domestic normality, the fact that everyone could somehow relate to them. That's why you talk to almost anyone in the English-speaking world about glass slippers or poisoned apples and they would instantly know what you were talking about. They would have this insane shared idea of what those things meant, where they came from. They would have heard those stories themselves as kids. They might even vaguely remember their own mothers reading them to them. They might have this obscure memory of her frightening them by putting on the voice of a wicked witch.

It was incredible, really. There couldn't be more than twenty stories that the majority of people in the world could have a crack at retelling themselves without first looking up a few details of the story. And how many of those must be fairy tales? Practically all of them, surely?

That was the thing. Fairy tales weren't about fairies. They weren't about kings and queens and magic spells and enchanted forests, or about wicked witches and big, bad wolves. They weren't even really about love or hardship, they weren't about the patriarchal assumed ideal that all young girls were yearning to someday marry a handsome prince, and they weren't just thinly-veiled morality tales about fathers marrying deranged second wives or the dangers to young children of wandering off into the woods on their own.

Fairy tales were about magic. Not the magic of a spell. The magic of having something you could share with your parents, with your friends, with countless generations going back centuries. They were about the magic of knowing when you opened a book and read a story like Cinderella or Sleeping Beauty, some other child a hundred years before you had opened a book and read the exact same story, almost word for word, and loved it every bit as much as you did.

Of course, after this week fairy tales wouldn't quite feel the same way to Elle. She'd see a darkness in them: she wouldn't be blinded to their macabre undercurrents by the twee sugar-coating of too many simpering animated movies. She'd see the fantastical beasts for the monsters they truly were.

But maybe it was almost a good thing. Because it had reminded her, in a way, of something that she'd lost. A memory of her mother. Something she hadn't even really thought about for more than ten years, until a witch with a rotting face had screamed into her ear.

Her mum. When she'd died all they'd really shared with each other were fairy tales. One of the few tangible things they'd actually had that was theirs. Maybe that's why she'd read so much after her mum died, why she was so into stories now. Elle and her stories.

Obscurely, even though she still felt as if she could cry for the rest of her life, a very faint smile lifted the corners of Elle's mouth.

It stayed there as she drifted quietly back to sleep.