SIENNA LYCUS ✗ D12 ✗ FIN!

You all know the story, don’t you? You’ve run your fingers along the weathered spines, inclined your noses towards the yellowing pages and breathed deep, deep, deep, trying to inhale the words trapped between sheets of paper, parchment, cardboard, trying to find a way to tie the leather that binds the stories that you grew up on into your very soul. The secret messages, the circled words, the wrinkled and bumped pages where your tears wore at the ink. Everyone has that one tale, that one bedtime myth or schoolyard legend, that makes their heart pitter-patter-stop in their chest. That makes them

forget

to

breathe.

What happens to the little boys and girls without their books, without the luxury of a place to get away? What happens to those poor souls, all alone in the world without the solace of imaginary lands, of talking beasts and wicked witches? What happens to those who have to really open their eyes to the world they’re in themselves, that recognize all the things that go bump in the night for the faces around them instead of the ones that are kept jailed in their imaginations, kicking and screaming and knocking but never getting out? Do they get driven to madness, or do they grow up, turn into high-functioning members of society, future wives and husbands, mothers and fathers, workers and, ultimately, compost for this Earth to feed off of?

She’ll never know, not when she’s filled with the scritch-scratch of feather-nibs on any surface she can find, the lilt of her own voice whispering when the birds have long fallen asleep, when even the moon doesn’t dare rustle in the night so it doesn’t upset the stars. She is made as much of fiction as you and I are made of flesh and blood. Ink runs down her face, down her neck, cascading over her shoulders and ending in little waves weighted down from the deaths of her heroines, the hamartias of her heroes. The sins of her villains and the downfalls of her maidens.

You can be her too, if you’d just crack her spine and step right inside. What do you see through those dewy blue eyes? Does the forest seem any brighter against porcelain skin, the talls any taller when you’re stuck so far to the ground despite your mind being wherever it dares to be? What are the limits to a thing untethered? You can’t pop like a balloon, you can only float. Fly with the wind, carry yourself on the westward breeze, fall with the currents and soar with the birds. It’s okay, there’s no one there to see you fall, no one there to catch you when you go too high. You’re free.

Your father doesn’t care, after all. You killed her. That’s what his eyes say, even when his mouth won’t move. When you catch him staring, gazing, looking upon you with something like that four letter word filled with so much hope, so much promise, so many beautiful, impossible things. It’s a look reserved for someone else, someone who’s not you, someone who’s face you’ve borrowed even though you never knew what it was that he saw. What she looked like. You murdered someone, stabbed them straight through the back. Maybe the stomach, curving your blade long and sure, splitting them right in two and climbing out of the ruins. She wasn’t sick before. He swears it.

So what’s keeping you from the woods? The towering branches will take you on journeys to forgotten paradises, reclaimed by nature’s grasp. Hidden pools filled with fairy wine or unicorn tears, you can never really make up your mind. Maybe someday you’ll come across a desert with a princess sitting on a hill of gems, wanting only a friend in exchange for emeralds, diamonds, more gold than you could ever carry, even when she offers you all of the king’s horses and men. Her name would be Sasha - no, Leila, maybe Jelayna, something long and exotic and full of dreams. The forest is filled with mice and burrows, wolves that growl and bite.

You got bitten once, don’t you remember?

Snuffle, sniff, snuff.

What time is it, Mr. Wolf?

Its muzzle was right by your ear, it’s teeth bared and ready to take a taste, to decide whether you were worth the price of admission and then whether or not to sit down for the whole show. But you stirred, just in time, woke up from sleep and stared right into amber eyes. You were small, but he was smaller. Your bones stuck out from your spine, and his ribs created fracture lines under his fur. You were a good meal, but the cheese you had was better. The basket full of food that you’d taken from the house was enough for the hawks and the eagles and the cats that had run away from home, or enough for one wolf with a broken paw.

You didn’t know that the villain could be the friend, that the story could go from the last page to suddenly spilling out over a desk, pages overflowing onto the floor and fluttering against the ceiling with every second. You were supposed to be dead, Little Red, but he saw you instead. What a cute little rhyme, what a pretty waste of time.

How did you make friends with the big bad wolf, storybook girl?

And who are you to rewrite all the rules?

More importantly, who's to say when's supper?