The King’s Tower

by Cheryl Pappas

Dark but for the dim light streaming from the window above this room he’s put me in. There may be stars, there may, but I see clumps of dirt is all, dirt sky.

I feel for the loom, trace my fingers along the waterfalls of straw. It makes a ssss sound. He wants gold? My life is as good as over, gold as far from me as stars. The rat I hear nibbling in the corner agrees.

I feel the old ache again—my friend, the hunger—and as I touch my belly, I remember I’m still wearing the blood red dress he had made for me. I stand up and take it off, strip down to nothing, to what I truly am. A body in a castle, ready for death at the hands of yet another man.

My hair is as dry as the straw, and as I begin to work the loom, no dream inside me, strands get caught but I can’t stop, I push through just to see, just to see, and my hair turns wet from my grief so generous, and not just wet but glistening and the luminous moon, there it is, it moves over the window, and I think I see gold. I think I see. I am gold. I see. I am.

That Old Fairy Tale

by Cheryl Pappas

In the candied house deep in the woods, the old witch is stirring into a big, black pot a brew of eardrums, finger bones, and disfigured doll heads for the children who will be stopping by later, because, of course, they will be lost and drawn in by the skittles on the roof, as plentiful as raindrops.

But the witch doesn’t know that the children don’t even like candy, not since their parents forced it on them until their teeth fell out, and all they eat now is cheap applesauce and pudding instead of rich meat and brittle sweets.

So by the time these two sleepless boys peek into the window of the witch’s shack, they are long past hunger and are eyeing instead the two beds up against the wall. The mattresses look plush and soft like big pillows and the bedspread is lavender. They are beds made for princes. Made for who they want to be.

The witch welcomes them with her own toothless grin and shows the boys her repulsive, magic stew that smells of roast beef, the blaze of the oven behind her. The boys slouch by and say “Wow, wonderful” before climbing into the beds, but instead of soft, princely sheets they lie on hundreds of black spiders who crawl all over their tired, thin bodies.

They scream with their mouths sewn shut. The witch laughs so deeply it can be heard through the centuries, her there leaning on the broomstick.

The boys clamber out, grab her stick, and gather all the spiders and throw them into the witch’s pot. The witch howls that that they’ll burn for this—her maw wide open—and the boys laugh, their lips unstitched, as they toss a few extra spiders in her mouth for good measure.

Before they leave her writhing on the floor, they open the pantry and grab some jars of applesauce for the walk home, for before long their hunger will return as sure as that witch will always be stirring a big, black pot.

Cheryl Pappas is an American writer living outside Boston. Her work has appeared in Wigleaf, Hayden's Ferry Review, Juked, The Chattahoochee Review, and elsewhere. She is the author of the flash fiction collection The Clarity of Hunger, published by word west press (2021). She is a 2023 MacDowell Fellow and the recipient of a 2022 grant in fiction from the Massachusetts Cultural Council. She is currently writing a novel.