In church they made me hold still in my fluffy dress.  The priest worked his slow, small-stepped way along the line, feeding wafers and wine into the mouths of the willing.  I didn’t get any.  I folded my little hands into my lap and fiddled with my patent leather purse until my mother smacked my knuckles and I put it down.

Then, when I was older, they told me to kneel on the padded bench with the grown-ups – my mouth agape like a baby bird.  The priest would mumble and I would eat, or so they told me.  The kneeling bench was hard on my shins. I shifted my weight back and forth between my knees.

This is the body of Christ, they said, and it smelled to me like a Saltine.  This is the blood of Christ, they said; and I thought it smelled like wine until they held the cup up to my lips and told me to drink. 

Then, when they brought the cup close it smelled like pennies and salt and I couldn’t touch it.  I twisted my neck away, and I started to scream. 

I later said that I must’ve seen a spider.

Her father all but sold her to me; he offered her as a sacrifice, as penance for pricking his hands on the roses by the gate.  But she swears she’s come to me freely and of her own volition.  She might believe this lie, or maybe her father never told her of the bargain we struck between us.

I’ve given her the room in the tower, where she lives alone because she will not speak to me yet.  In time, perhaps a week or two, she will grow accustomed to the darkness.  In time, perhaps a month or two, she will worry less when the dogs outside sing songs of the hunt.

In time, perhaps within the next one hundred years, she will agree to join me as a wife and partner; and in a thousand years more she may not fear me.  I am older than any tree she’s ever climbed.

Yesterday she spoke for the first time since she’s been here.  She asked me why there were no mirrors.  I told her that it was a selfish thing.  Only one of us has to know what I look like.  

I can lie too, when need be.

Gretel

My big brother is hopeless, his mind is a circular room with windows tinted on both sides. “He doesn’t mean to shut us out,” mother has always insisted, but she does not know how wrong she is. He’s never had a means to let us in.

He communicates with us in little ways -- accessing the world outside his head through habit and preference, through immediate wants and half-remembered needs. We lead him through the house with M&Ms, little trails to the bathroom, to the kitchen, to bed.

One day our father snapped. It’s easy to be impatient but hard to understand, and parental guilt is the tie he wears to work. While I was gone at school he threw my brother out -- tossing the bag of candy into the front yard. When I came home I found the shells. They were cracked apart like brightly-colored birdseeds, with the chocolate nibbled out of the center.

The next-door neighbor lady is an elderly widow with very sharp eyes and a warm oven. She lured my brother into her home with the smell of cinnamon rolls. I sat in her dining room and hugged my knees while she quietly phoned our mother.

Gold

It’s not enough to only love him, though of course I do. This Kevlar coat of media coverage has made for him an ivory tower; it has set him apart from me, and so I hate it.

His cold, redheaded agent hovers like a mother bear, and his publicist stands beside her – a great grizzled man with a hot cup of coffee that will scald me if I get too close. Last time they called the cops.

But I made it into his house again, all the same. I checked my reflection in the hall mirror and ruffled my hands through my yellow hair. I tweaked the curls (oh so fetching, I know he thinks). I listened for the sound of him sleeping, and when he rose to stand in the bedroom doorway after I spoke his name, I swear to God my heart stopped. “I could be your puzzle piece,” I told him, “a last small corner of sky that makes your picture whole. You don’t have to live alone in this glass cave. Let me stay and warm your bed.”

I hid the gun behind my back and waited for his answer.

Beauty Awakens

This long-legged girl with bleached teeth, she last washed her face in a bus stop bathroom. I think she’d wanted a proper rescue, complete with a kiss and a horse and a guy with money. “I shouldn’t have done it,” she admits, sneaking a stare at my badge and watching me tap my pen against the clipboard.

“Where’d you get the pills?” I don't really care, but I need to file the paperwork.

Her hands shake while she sips from a blue and white Dixie cup. Some nurse gave it to her. I guess it's water, or something else to flush her out and wake her up. “My mom keeps them in her sewing machine case. I shouldn’t have taken them, but …” She lets the sentence hang. Maybe she wants me to ask for the rest, to draw the answers out of her like so much poison. Her jaw quivers, and maybe it's a little cute.

But I did my job when I slapped her face, down under the bridge, so she can keep trying. It won't work on me.  It only reminds me of the way her eyes creaked open when she threw up in my lap.

Rapunzel's Aftermath

I saw you in your stroller, brunette and big-eyed as a Halloween cat. You were one of a baker’s dozen; I wanted to ask your parents, “Christ, don’t you know what’s making them?” But Jesus needs more babies to love Him, and your mother and father lived to obey.

You would have too, if I had not taken you. I had no daughter of my own to teach, and their backs were turned. You looked up at me, in the grocery store line. You peered out from under those thick black bangs and you smiled at me -- seeing neither crone nor threat.

I loved you then. And I lifted you up, out of your stroller and into my home, into this tower room. I made a nest for you with a soft bed and gourmet food from the health food store down the street. You grew tall and strong, and your phenomenal mane grew past your knees, past your feet.

The note you left (lying on top of the coiled black cable) says you were lonely. I’ve been lonely before, too. But a woman who cuts her hair for a man deserves whatever she gets.

Snow Angel

You came uninvited, your hands outstretched as you begged for shelter. “I can pay for your silence,” you said, and indeed you did. You paid us as mother, maid and wife. Our love for you was complex and seamless.

Tall and dark, you were Etruscan and strange in your poverty princess thrift store wear. We should have cast you out when we had the chance, before you became caregiver, and lover, and vulnerable small sister yet twice our size. For seven and one is an even number, easily divided. How carelessly you left us. How smoothly you bit the red ripe flesh of your mother’s fruit.

We men though small are strong and skilled, masters of our craft. We made for you a tomb. We cut our hands on the glass to make your shroud. We crushed our fingers, pounding the gold into place. No fair queen or venerated saint ever rested in a bed so fine. But when he came, you lifted your face and took his hand. Until you rose that day and cast us aside, what did we know of grief?

We were children to you, as high as your hip and as easily swayed.

Cinderella When

He picked up my DNA from the cigarette butt I left outside Haliburton, on the last day I worked there as a temp. I stubbed the half-smoked thing into a frayed mash of paper and leaves before I went back inside to quit. The boss’s boy was watching.

Daddy sent the goons around, wanting a bit of blood -- bringing that glass slipper to nick our feet and take a drop or two of sample. Hell of a way to ferret out a princess I say, but what Junior wants, Junior gets.

I would have left, but there’s only so far you can run when the city walls reach the sky and no one was offering day passes to anyplace -- not until they found the smoking blonde.

And the curious shoe made its cutting rounds.

One in a million chance of an error, I heard, but I’ve never had that kind of luck. The tiara fit me, a crown of iron thorns. I wear it always, even here in the bathroom where I have won my small victory. It took two flushes to send his half-formed wolf baby away.

She’ll never know it, this little favor I’ve done for us both.

Cherie Priest was born in Tampa, Florida, beside the ocean and beneath the sign of the sun. At present, she resides in Chattanooga, Tennessee, where she's a writer for a computer company; there, she spends her 9-5 composing and checking advertising copy about electronics equipment, power tools, home appliances and computers.

In 2002 Cherie graduated from the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga with an M.A. in Rhetoric/Professional writing. She also has a B.A. from Southern Adventist University in Collegedale, Tennessee, which she finished in 1998. She uses her college diploma as a mouse pad.

In 2003, Cherie haphazardly joined the illustrious ranks of published writers with her southern gothic novel Four and Twenty Blackbirds. In October of 2005 this novel was re-released in a gloriously revised, expanded edition by Tor; and a second novel, the sequel Wings to the Kingdom, is slated for publication late in 2006. Not Flesh Nor Feathers will complete the trilogy in 2007.

And furthermore, because heaven knows she's not busy enough as it is, Cherie is working on a novella for Subterranean Press. It is tentatively titled "The Wreck of the Mary Byrd," and it promises to feature werewolves, steamboats, and ghosts.