Clarkesworld Anthology 2012 (51 page)

He looks from me to Tamsen then back to me. If he had a nose, it would have twitched with suspicion. Instead, there’s just a ripple in the folds. He’s in shorts and a muscle shirt. “I feel goddamn hot.”

Tamsen says, “Lay off the spores then.”

I can feel his eyes boring into me. “What are you two doing?” He looks worried.

“I never know,” I say. “Whatever we’re supposed to be doing.”

“Hatching a plan on where to bury me next, no doubt.”

“No doubt,” Tamsen says. “Debating how to cook you.”

“What parts to eat for dessert,” I add.

He reaches into his pocket. For a knife, no doubt, or an ice scream scoop. Defending myself is the last thing this tingling body’s ready for. Instead, Vinegar Tom throws something small at me. It hits my shoulder and lands in my lap: the black knight. “Left this in Buggy 2,” he says, “and we’re out of Pepto.”

Tamsen tells him there might be some in Buggy 1. He gives her another eyeful, says without looking at me, “Remember, Murph, if it was cheese out there, this’d be a whole different ball game,” then leaves without shutting the door.

Tamsen stands quickly, saying she ought to help him.

“Wait.”

She does, but the look from before has vanished. Now it’s just
yellowyellowyellow
again. Even the spot on her jaw. “I killed Spitzer, didn’t I.”

“Would I let a killer kiss me?”

“You’d leave one here by himself.”

“You’re right,” she says. “I would.”

The day before the transport’s arrival, I take another ride toward Tycho. By habit I bring the chessboard and the one knight with me. The moldline’s only ten miles from base camp and traveling upward of a mile every twelve hours. More and more I’ve decided that when the transport comes, I’m not going to get on it.

There’ll be the ride back with Tamsen and Tom, them sporing, maybe them trying to fuck one last time in zero-G, the life they’ll probably lead together if the vinegar doesn’t eat his insides, and then my house in Denver, the hole in my basement, no Ralphie. It’s death to stay up here, sure, but no different down there.

At the moldline, before I even climb out of Buggy 2, there’s Tchaikovsky. Something about that yellow makes him look exceedingly jolly, one capable of cartoon physics. “Come, come, let finish vhat ve began.” I expect him to burst into soapbubbles or grow nine feathery tails.

“Can’t. Lost all the pieces.”

“But you have not lost your hands, no?”

On our knees, we mold a new set together.

I lose.

Not because I was wrong about mate in eight moves—that’s entirely true.

I lost because he had me in seven. Because in the penultimate step, I moved my only knight and opened up the diagonal for his queen to slip in: Qf7++. He knew my plan all along.

I flick over my black king. “Checkmate.”

He nods.

“I’m going to stay here.”

“Ah, yis, more game.”

“No,” I say. “When the transport comes, I’m staying.” I feel overwhelmingly important.

Tchaikovsky sighs. He plays with one of his pawns. “You have heard Laika, no?”

A little.

“Laika you know is happy pioneer,
big star.
” He sweeps his hands over his head. Then he points at the earth. “Real Laika?—she vas stray. Real Laika vas picked off streets of Moscow and put cage. No one vanted zis dog back, not after space. She vas flash in pan, already wodka under ze cake. Real Laika vas meant to die.”

“That’s terrible.” The flatness of my own voice unnerves me. I don’t want to talk.

“Is fine. She vas stray, no? Stray is hard life. Space death: very zimple.” He starts setting up the board again; I don’t have it in me for one more loss. “But it is day ’til launch. Real Laika ready. Ze stray is ready! Then scientist take Laika home. He let Laika play with childs. Scientist say, ‘I vanted to do somezing nice for her.’ Childs laugh. Laika love.”

“So she had a good last day; so what?”

“
Only
good day, Afraham Lincoln. Vithout zis day, she is happy pioneer to beyond. But now she knows.” Tchaikovsky twists his finished pieces so they all face forward, face me. “Childs. Toys. Laughs. Laika vants to come back to zis one good day.”

The chessboard’s empty spaces, Mare Nubium and the sea of yellow mold, the earth above the horizon like a cheap sticker on a tinted window—a man stands practically weightless in all these gravities, remembering only how his daughters once asked him if dogs knew human words.

“It’s not a place I want to go back to.”

“But it is place,” Tchaikovsky says, pushing his king’s pawn to e4. “And ze moon—ze moon is not.”

I sit down in front of the board. I pick up my black knight. Its slope and eye-notch, this craftsmanship, all are meticulously fine, each one better than the last carving’s. Instead of pushing the bishop’s pawn forward—c6—in the Sicilian Defense, I swing my knight out first.

Rubbing his hands together like big paws, Tchaikovsky looks pleased with my decision. “You are getting better.”

About the Author

Alexander Lumans graduated from the M.F.A. Fiction Program at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. His short fiction has been published in or is forthcoming from
Brain Harvest, Story Quarterly, Blackbird, The Normal School, Cincinnati Review, American Short Fiction, Surreal South ’11,
and
The Book of Villains,
among other magazines and anthologies. He was a Tennessee Williams Scholar at the 2010 Sewanee Writers’ Conference and he won the 2011 Barry Hannah Fiction Prize from The Yalobusha Review. He also recently completed a fellowship at the MacDowell Colony. He now lives and teaches in Boulder, CO. His very first short fiction publication was in
Clarkesworld
over five years ago.

The Fairy Tale in the TV Age

Alethea Kontis

Call them folk tales, wonder tales, or fairy stories: Fairy tales have a history of adaptation that was born long before some Italian wrote one down on paper in the 1500s. They have celebrated renaissance, preached religious values, and outlined basic moral behavior, with a little adventure, magic, and witchery thrown in for entertainment value. Perhaps they were once teaching fables or urban legends—they have been shaped and molded by and for so many societies that the world will never know for sure. (The Brothers Grimm, not the first and certainly not the last to celebrate the fairy story, modified their own works quite heavily over the course of forty years in no fewer than seven editions.) Though we will never discover their true origins, two opinions about fairy tales seem universal among academics: Fairy tales were not originally meant for children, and fairy tales are a guaranteed source of revenue.

Whether or not you believe that fairy tales
should
be adapted for public consumption (Bruno Bettelheim was against adaptation in all forms; J. R. R. Tolkien hadn’t seen anything that impressed him and called it a lost cause; Jack Zipes appreciates it but draws the line at Disney), fairy tales have been popping up on our television screens for over fifty years. Based on a recent surge in popularity, they appear to be here to stay. Of course, adapting tales for media automatically calls for alteration. Ratings and awards add a whole new level of hurdles that serve to change the stories even further. The key is not losing the essence of the tales and the character archetypes when all is said and done and the end credits roll.

I’d love to know Zipes’s opinion of the portrayal of fairy stories in the “Fractured Fairy Tales” shorts from the animated classic
Rocky & Bullwinkle
(1959-1964). There was definitely a 1960’s, progressive-woman message behind most of these tales, yet the prince was always a short, mustachioed, smarmy used car salesman type, and the female lead was often a lazy, self-centered, and materialistic girl with a thick Jersey Shore accent. Beneath this trampy, proto-hippie tribute, the overarching theme of the Grimm tales was not compromised: Sometimes the devious main character got away with his or her schemes, and sometimes he or she did not. Only in “Fractured Fairy Tales,” it was a lot funnier.

More recently on the animated front (and much more out of left field) is
The Fairly OddParents
(1998-2001). While these short cartoons only touch on one recurring character archetype appearing in fairy tales, they do deal with possibly the most common theme: Be Careful What You Wish For. Though I’m sure Timmy Turner’s adventures with Cosmo and Wanda would have had Bruno Bettelheim rolling over in his grave… if only to turn down the volume.

I would wager that Bettelheim, given the chance (and life after death), would have had no problem plopping his kids in front of the far more subdued Shelley Duvall’s
Faerie Tale Theatre
on a Saturday morning. Inspired by her many talented friends, her love of fairy tales, and a show from the late ’50s called
Shirley Temple’s Storybook,
Shelley Duvall’s
Faerie Tale Theatre
ran from 1982 to 1987 and was specifically geared toward children. Duvall herself introduced every episode (
à la
Masterpiece Theatre
), telling a little bit about the tale, the theme, and sometimes why it was personally special to her.

A couple of the episodes were directed by Tim Burton and Francis Ford Coppola, and some of the scenery was inspired by famous fantasy artists like Maxfield Parrish and Arthur Rackham. While there was a healthy dose of camp administered with each episode, the fairy tales did stay pretty true to the storyline and sometimes even took it a bit further. (How
does
a princess explain to her father that she went to bed with a frog and woke up next to a naked prince?) This series was made with a lot of love and some seriously high quality for the time. It was also cited by Zipes as a prime example of a big time money-making venture.

Beauty and the Beast
—the show from the late ’80s with a cast (Ron Pearlman! Linda Hamilton! Delroy Lindo!) and writing crew (George R. R. Martin!) that most producers would give their right arm to have today—is the quintessential fairy tale that springs to mind when discussing such fantasy television. Zipes called
Beauty
“a good example of the fairy tale as representation (and legitimation) of elite bourgeois.” The show brought the original tale into a contemporary setting but took the “beast” element quite literally, further stressing the similarities and differences between the upper and lower classes of society. Above and beyond this deeper meaning, just seeing the premillennial New York City skyline in the romantic opening credits is the epitome of “once upon a time” in its own right.

The original fairy tale was taken more literally (and indeed, pushed over the top) by the 1997 made-for-television film
Snow White: A Tale of Terror.
Ah, the Evil Queen: suddenly one of the most highly sought-after roles in Hollywood. But long before Charlize Theron (
Snow White and the Huntsman
) and Julia Roberts (
Mirror, Mirror
), there was Sigourney Weaver as Lady Claudia. Fairy tales are quite often cited among influences of the horror genre, but this is not so much a horror movie as defined by today’s standards. Set in the fairy-tale world (despite an offhand mention of one of the miners having survived the Crusades), it does stay true to the darkness, if not quite the plot, of the Snow White fairy tale. Of course, once Lady Claudia loses her mind, it becomes more of a watch-Sigourney-Weaver-go-crazy movie and far less of a traditional fairy tale. Which, in true Hollywood fashion, earned Weaver an Emmy nomination.

Realistically, how can one stay true to any source material when one is encouraged to include all the fright and fireworks required to garner award attention? In their shorter forms, fairy tales are often used to invoke happy endings, but these longer, newer incarnations concentrate more on their dark and subversive nature. Twisting the original tales and pushing the limits both visually and emotionally for ratings, reviews, and media attention has become far more of a driving force than staying true to Messrs Grimm and Andersen.

Another show to achieve Emmy award-winning fame is the cult favorite
Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
I admit it’s a bit of a stretch to list Buffy as a whole without commenting on
Supernatural,
Doctor Who,
or all the other paranormal/fantasy TV fare on the small screen, but Buffy Summers truly embodies the archetypal “Jack” of so many fairy tale legends, and in doing so became a unique legend herself. Jack is the überhero, voluntarily or not, who must use his wits and whatever little skill he possesses to best giants and beanstalks and talking animals and fair-weather fairies. Buffy faced off with the original Hansel and Gretel, but she was also forced to conquer the Grimm-inspired child-eater Der Kindestod and the The Gentlemen of the dialogue-absent, Emmy-winning episode “Hush.” So many fairy and folk tales were successfully woven into the genesis and storytelling of Buffy over the years that it’s really impossible to separate the two.

Possibly the most successful weaving of fairy tales into contemporary storytelling is the 2000, ten-hour miniseries
The 10th Kingdom.
Of all the shows on this list (though
Faerie Tale Theatre
was probably truest to the Grimm tales, and the jury is still out on today’s
Once Upon a Time
),
The 10th Kingdom
stands out as the best. The series begins in contemporary New York, but the fairy tales are not modernized: The premise is that there are nine kingdoms in the storytelling land of fairy. The real world as we know it, accessible only through a magical mirror portal, is merely the tenth.

Despite its poor ratings,
The 10th Kingdom
did win great reviews and ultimately an Emmy for (if only for Outstanding Main Title Design). It’s interesting to wonder how the reception might have differed if this miniseries had premiered today, in a world far more ready to welcome fairy tales with open arms. (There are rumors that a sequel called
House of Wolves
was planned; it would have been great to see the cast together again, but it would also have been hard to stand up against the original.)