Size / / /

When she was born

her parents both rejoiced

and sent the invitations

winging out to all but one,

and then they waited,

breathless, for her

tale to start.

She was a child then,

too young to care about

the crystal slippers,

or the potions that

they smeared into her

golden hair to make it

grow to tower length.

But some years later,

when she caught

her mother slipping peas

beneath her satin sheets,

and found her father

thrusting glowing blades

into a granite slab,

she swapped her fine

embroidered clothing

for the tatters of

a downstairs maid,

begged a tired nag from

a too-trusting stable hand

and slipped away.

Her life too short to waste

on other people's fantasies,

she went to find her own,

instead of waiting for

some random hero to

come riding through a

strictly scripted fairy tale.




Marcie Lynn Tentchoff is an Aurora Award-winning poet and writer who lives on the west coast of Canada with her family and various animals, both domesticated and not. Her work has appeared in such publications as Weird Tales, On Spec, Mythic Delirium, and Aeon. To contact the author, send her email at mtentchoff@dccnet.com.
Current Issue
25 Mar 2024

Looking back, I see that my initial hope for this episode was that the mud would have a heartbeat and a heart that has teeth and crippling anxiety. Some of that hope has become a reality, but at what cost?
to work under the / moon is to build a formidable tomorrow
Significantly, neither the humans nor the tigers are shown to possess an original or authoritative version of the narrative, and it is only in such collaborative and dialogic encounters that human-animal relations and entanglements can be dis-entangled.
By: Sammy Lê
Art by: Kim Hu
the train ascends a bridge over endless rows of houses made of beams from decommissioned factories, stripped hulls, salvaged engines—
Issue 18 Mar 2024
Strange Horizons
Issue 11 Mar 2024
Issue 4 Mar 2024
Issue 26 Feb 2024
Issue 19 Feb 2024
Issue 12 Feb 2024
Issue 5 Feb 2024
Issue 29 Jan 2024
Issue 15 Jan 2024
Issue 8 Jan 2024
Load More
%d bloggers like this: