I had gone through many trials through the winter. I had suffered loneliness and the frigid cold, but nothing and no one was crueler to me than my own kind. It was very difficult for me to forget the old mother duck who said, “Have you ever seen anything quite...
I fell down through the glass mountain, miles into the earth. Why had my father built the glass mountain in the first place? And by what magic did it open up like a trap door and swallow me whole? An old fellow with a long grey beard came to meet me where I landed. He...
He was a sweet boy who had been terribly abused. He wanted to die, and who could blame him? He reached for me, thinking that I contained poison. But I did not. I was full of honey. He ate the honey and said to himself, “Folks say death is bitter, but it tastes...
Who cares what “good Christian people” say? We know what we mean to Karen. Did you know that in the beginning, the poor girl had no shoes at all? That’s right. She went barefoot or wore old wooden clumpers that chafed her instep until her feet bled. The...
I am chained to a rock in the middle of a torrent, waiting for a seven-headed serpent to get hungry. When he does, he’ll eat me. Who could possibly save me? No one from my country. The serpent has already eaten all the men and most of the women in this land. My...
In my human form I am not as vulnerable as I am in my animal form. When I go out in the morning as a lion, I get wounded. The attacks have become more serious, and now this wound is too deep to be healed. I must not forget that my injuries have been tended before, and...
After I left the cloister, I met up with a couple of fellows who had lost their way. We traveled together through the forest and came to an old, abandoned castle. We decided to make it our own kind of home. I agreed to look after the house while the other two went out...
When the wolf came in through the door, all seven of us kids scattered. We hid everywhere we could find. I got into the clock-case, and it was the one place the wolf didn’t look. By the time my mother came home, the wolf had eaten everyone but me. I whimpered...
Now that I have come into the forbidden room, I see what the wizard Fitcher has done with my sisters. They are lying in a basin, cruelly murdered and cut into pieces. I will not to succumb to the horror. I will see them whole, not in pieces. Start somewhere. Anywhere....
I killed my brother! I didn’t mean to. He was sitting at the door, looking quite white, and holding an apple. He wouldn’t give it to me so I went to my mother and I told her that my brother was sitting at the window, looking quite white, and he...
