The Rose and the Beast Read online

  The Rose and The Beast

  Fairy Tales Retold

  By Francesca Lia Block

  This book is for

  my husband, Chris Schuette

  With all my love

  Contents

  Snow

  Tiny

  Glass

  Charm

  Wolf

  Rose

  Bones

  Beast

  Ice

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  SNOW

  When she was born her mother was so young, still a girl herself, didn’t know what to do with her. She screamed and screamed—the child. Her mother sat crying in the garden. The gardener came by to dig up the soil. It was winter. The child was frost-colored. The gardener stood before the cold winter sun, blocking the light with his broad shoulders. The mother looked like a broken rose bush.

  Take her please, the mother cried. The gardener sat beside her. She was shaking. The child would not stop screaming. When the mother put her in his arms, the child was quiet.

  Take her, the mother said. I can’t keep her. She will devour me.

  The child wrapped her tiny fingers around the gardener’s large brown thumb. She stared up at him with her eyes like black rose petals in her snowy face. He said to the mother, Are you sure? And she stood up and ran into the house, sobbing. Are you sure are you sure? She was sure. Take it away, she prayed, it will devour me.

  The gardener wrapped the child in a clean towel and put her in his truck and drove her west to the canyon. There was no way he could keep her himself, was there? (He imagined her growing up, long and slim, those lips and eyes.) No, but he knew who could.

  The seven brothers lived in a house they had built themselves, built deep into the side of the canyon among the trees. They had built it without chopping down one tree, so it was an odd-shaped house with towers and twisting hallways and jagged staircases. It looked like part of the canyon itself, as if it had sprung up there. It smelled of woodsmoke and leaves. From the highest point you could see the sea lilting and shining in the distance.

  This was where the gardener brought the child. He knew these men from work they had all done together on a house by the ocean. He was fascinated by the way they worked. They made the gardener feel slow and awkward and much too tall. Also, lonely.

  Bear answered the door. Like all the brothers he had a fine, handsome face, burnished skin, huge brown eyes that regarded everyone as if they were the beloved. He was slightly heavier than the others and his hair was soft, thick, close cropped. He shook the gardener’s hand and welcomed him inside, politely avoiding the bundle in the gardener’s arms until the gardener said, I don’t know where to take her.

  Bear brought him into the kitchen where Fox, Tiger, and Buck were eating their lunch of vegetable stew and rice, baked apples and blueberry gingerbread. They asked the gardener to join them. When Bear told them why he was there, they allowed themselves to turn their benevolent gazes to the child in his arms. She stared back at them and the gardener heard an unmistakable burbling coo coming from her mouth.

  Buck held her in his muscular arms. She nestled against him and closed her eyes—dark lash tassels. Buck looked down his fine, sculpted nose at her and whispered, Where does she come from?

  The gardener told him, From the valley, her mother can’t take care of her. He said he was afraid she would be hurt if he left her there. The mother wasn’t well. The brothers gathered around. They knew then that she was the love they had been seeking in every face forever before this. Bear said, We will keep her. And the gardener knew he had done the right thing bringing her here.

  The other brothers, Otter, Lynx, and Ram, came home that evening. They also loved her right away, as if they had been waiting forever for her to come. They named her Snow and gave her everything they had.

  Bear and Ram built her a room among the trees overlooking the sea. Tiger built her a music-box cradle that rocked and played melodies. Buck sewed her lace dresses and made her tiny boots like the ones he and his brothers wore. They cooked for her—the finest, the healthiest foods, most of which they grew themselves, and she was always surrounded by the flowers Lynx picked from their garden, the candles Fox dipped in the cellar, and the melon-scented soaps that Otter made in his workroom.

  She grew up there in the canyon—the only Snow. It was warm in the canyon most days—sometimes winds and rains but never whiteness on the ground. She was their Snow, unbearably white and crystal sweet. She began to grow into a woman and although sometimes this worried them a bit—they were not used to women, especially one like this who was their daughter and yet not—they learned not to be afraid, how to show her as much love as they had when she was a baby and yet give her a distance that was necessary for them as well as for her. As they had given her everything, she gave to them—she learned to hammer and build, cook, sew, and garden. She could do anything. They had given her something else, too—the belief in herself, instilled by seven fathers who had had to learn it. Sometimes at night, gathered around the long wooden table finishing the peach-spice or apple-ginger pies and raspberry tea, they would tell stories of their youth—the things they had suffered separately when they went out alone to try the world. The stories were of freak shows and loneliness and too much liquor or powders and the shame of deformity. They wanted her to know what they had suffered but not to be afraid of it, they wanted her to have everything—the world, too. And to be able to return to them, to safety, whenever she needed. They knew, though, she would not suffer as they had suffered. She was perfect. They were scarred.

  She loved them. That is what no one tells. She loved them. They smelled of woodsmoke and sweet earth, where flowers grow. They spoke softly, kindly, sometimes they sang. They were strong and browned from the sun. She believed that they knew everything, could make anything. They loved her as their daughter, sister, mother…they loved her. That maybe has been hinted at before, but not that she loved them.

  When she was of a certain age the gardener came to visit. He had been reminded of her. The white petals scattering in the garden…something, something reminded him, and he came to see what had become of her, if he had been right when he saw her baby face and imagined it grown, and knew he could not keep her.

  Lynx looked at him and his eyes were guarded, Lynx’s eyes. He did not want to let the gardener in. But he knew, too, this was wrong. The time had come, as they all had known it would. She was a woman now, and restless, and no, they were not her fathers. It was time. So he let the gardener into the house, where she was sitting surrounded by the six other brothers, reading aloud to them. She was wearing a white dress she had made herself, almost as white as her skin, which showed here and there beneath it, and heavy black hobnailed boots like the ones the brothers wore. Her face was flushed and her eyes burned with firelight. The gardener wondered, why had he come here?

  She smiled up at him. He was the first man she’d seen, they kept her so sheltered. The first man that was not one of them—a much taller man with a head more like hers. But he did not have their eyes or their strong and lyrical hands.

  The gardener was invited to share in the cherry-mint pie she had made for the evening, and he spoke with her, asked about the books she liked to read (they brought her children’s stories of magic, and old novels with thick, yellowish pages about passionate women in brutal landscapes) and the music she listened to, did she sew her own dress? She showed him through the night garden she had planted and he knew all about the different bulbs and shrubs, and she liked the way he towered over her and the way his shoulders blocked the moonlight.

  The brothers were inside the hous
e trying not to spy, trying to be calm. What could they do? It is time, they told each other.

  The gardener left and went back to the woman with whom he had been living all these years. The woman who was Snow’s mother. Why had he gone where he had? He could hardly look at her. Why had he gone? He had been right about what that baby would become. Snow’s mother was crying when he came home, something was wrong, she could tell it, she could see in his eyes. Something had died.

  No, he thought, something has been born.

  Something had died.

  Snow turned over and over in her bed, her fingers exploring the palpitations of her body under the nightdress. She closed her eyes and saw the gardener’s dark curls and tall body. But when she dreamed of him, it was a nightmare. He was cutting down trees with an ax and blood ran from their trunks. He was carrying the body of a very pale child into the woods and holding the ax…

  They tried to console her, seven brothers, as seven fathers would. They tried to be fair; how could they keep her from living her life? Who were they to keep her? They told her that if he came again she could see him but that they didn’t want her to be hurt. Maybe there was another man they could find. She didn’t know why, but he was the only one—she wanted to speak to him again. Maybe she could sense her mother on his skin. Her mother. She hardly ever asked about this. She assumed she had been lost and they had found her and there was no one. She was her own mother. But oh something else. Breast. Flowers. Silk. Hair. Lavender. Milk. Apple. Blood. Lost.

  The woman who was Snow’s mother followed the gardener into the canyon one night. She had grown sick with premonitions. She walked around outside the house in the dark, her feet sinking into the damp earth, the crackle of branches, the smell of crushed flowers. Maybe she was looking for what she had lost too. She thought it was the man, but it was more.

  Through the window she saw them, the girl and the gardener. The girl was nightmare. Young young young. Silver white. Perfect. Untorn. Perfect.

  The gardener was haloed by her light. Dripping her light. After all, she was the baby he had rescued, she might be dead by now if it weren’t for him. After all, she was the same flesh as the woman he had made love to for these years. After all, she was young, perfect, untouched. And he had to rescue her from these seven strange, deformed (suddenly he saw them as deformed) men who would suffocate her, make her a freak like they were.

  Poison, the mother thought, poison.

  And she came back there when the men were away at work, came back with the apples injected with poison. She had read about it—simple recipe—too messy with razor blades. She had thought of using it on herself in the past. Wouldn’t this almost be the same thing?

  Snow opened the door and love filled her. She had never seen a woman before. A woman with pale skin and dark hair like hers. Even the redness of the lips and the way the incisors pointed slightly. Something was so familiar that she swooned with it. She had been told not to let strangers in, but this was not a stranger, this was someone she sensed deep in her bones. Like marrow.

  The woman said she had brought her a present. Why a present? Your beauty is famous, the woman said. I wanted to honor it. I wanted to see you, too. Some people say we resemble each other.

  Snow had never thought of herself as beautiful. For her, beauty was Bear’s voice telling her bedtime stories and the way Buck’s eyes shone and Lynx’s small graceful body. She thought it was strange that this woman would want to give her a present because of how she looked.

  The brothers had told her not to accept gifts from strangers, but this wasn’t a stranger. This was a woman who seemed so familiar. And the apples were so luscious red sleek. They would be hard clean white fresh inside, chilling and sparking her mouth.

  Snow asked if the woman would like to come in? No no she had to be on her way. She was glad to have seen Snow’s face.

  The woman hesitated for a moment before she left. She looked sad, Snow thought, or worse—but she wasn’t sure what it was, and then the woman was leaving.

  Snow went inside and washed the apples and began to cut them up for a pie she would give to the brothers. She felt excited—her heart was pounding and, strangely, she wanted to sing. She hummed the lullaby that her music-box cradle had played when she was a baby, rocking by the fireside while the brothers read aloud or talked softly to her.

  A woman had come to her door. There were women out there, in the world. How many of them looked like this one? So like her. They couldn’t mostly, could they? Who was this woman? Why had she come? Why did she seem sad and her teeth were sharp. Snow imagined them puncturing the sealed sweet red of the apple skin. She reached down and fingered a slice between her thumb and pointer. The skin was dark dark red like blood. Snow put the piece to her lips and ran her tongue along the ridge. She bit.

  They found her lying on the floor with the poison in her veins and the apples spilled where they had rolled. She was the green color of certain white flowers. Each of them tried to expel the poison from her, to breathe life into her. She had a pulse, but hardly—very shallow. They carried her upstairs to the glass bed they had made for her when she outgrew the cradle. When they laid her out in her white dress they wept because without her they knew they would have nothing and their own deaths would come knocking on the door. Seven truncated deaths in fourteen big boots.

  My darling, they thought. Sometimes they could not tell if they were having an individual thought or sensing each other’s. My darling, we never deserved you. Wake up and we will let you go into the world where you belong. This was our fault, we were wrong to keep you like this. Don’t blame us, though. Look at our lives before you. Look at what you gave us.

  They called the gardener.

  When the gardener came they let him go to her alone. They sat downstairs in the dim—just a single candle—working on the gifts they would give to her if only she woke. These gifts she would take into the world—dresses of silk, necklaces of glass beads and shells, glass candlesticks and champagne glasses and tiny glass animals, candles and incense and bath salts and soaps and quilts and coverlets and a miniature house with a real garden and tiny fountains that she could keep at her bedside.

  The gardener went to her and held her hand. It felt like it would slip away, it was so thin and light; it felt boneless. The gardener said he was going to take her away with him, help her get better. Why was he hesitating? He wanted to look at her like this, for a while. He wanted this stillness. She was completely his, now, in a way she would never be again. His silent, perfect bride. Not like the woman who had come screaming to him—what have I done? He brushed the dark, damp strands of hair off her smooth forehead. He leaned close to her, breathing her like one would inhale a bouquet. He looked at her lips, half parted as if waiting for him. He wanted to possess.

  But when he touched her with his mouth and her eyes opened she did not see him there. She called for the men, the seven brothers. She wanted them. More than gardeners or mothers. She wanted them the way she needed the earth and the flowers and the sky and the sea from her tower room and food and sleep and warmth and light and nights by the fire and poetry and the stories of going out into the world and almost being destroyed by it and returning to find comfort and the real meaning of freak. And I am a freak, she thought, happily. I am meant to stay here forever. I am loved.

  She pushed the gardener away and called for them. In her sleep she had seen love. It was poisoning. It was possessing. Devouring. Or it was seven pairs of boots climbing up the stairs to find her.

  TINY

  The woman named her lost babies Berry, Ivy, Oxygen, Pie, Whistler, Willow, Wish, and Pear, never knowing if they were boys or girls. Each one taught her something about life. Sorrow, Pain, Fortitude, Tenderness, Patience, Courage, Awe, Love. She made eight tiny symbolic graves in her garden and planted flowers on them all.

  The woman sat alone in her garden of memory flowers, rocking a cradle full of iris bulbs, whispering to babies who could not hear her. She felt like the anc
ient cracking husk of a pomegranate, rattling with dried seeds.

  And then she found she was pregnant again.

  The doctors were amazed because the fetus was much too small, but this time there was a perfectly normal heartbeat flickering on the screen like a miniature star.

  The woman prayed to the spirits of the lost babies that this one would come out all right.

  And it did. Except that the baby was tiny, just about the size of a thumb. Her mother called her Tiny. You are perfect, the mother told her, the baby I always wanted. She was careful to make sure her child did not feel sad because of her small size.

  Tiny had to sleep in a cradle made from half a walnut shell and drink out of a thimble. Even dollhouse doll clothes were too big for her, so mostly she ran around naked or clothed in scraps of silk.

  Tiny didn’t know there was anything wrong with her for a long time. She loved her mother and thought all mothers were big like that. She believed that when she was older she might suddenly grow and one day have a child the size of her own thumb. Her life was happy. She sat on the edge of the flower box filled with red, white, and magenta impatiens and watched the garden bloom. She could see the most infinitesimal movements of the plants as they grew. It was enough to occupy her all day, that and being with her mother. She could gaze at her mother forever as if her mother were a lush and flowering plant towering above all the rest.

  Tiny was protected from the outside world in the gated garden full of roses, irises, and azaleas, orange, lemon, and avocado trees, and she didn’t mind. The garden got more radiant and abundant and redolent every day that she watched it and, as her mother said, blessed it, although she didn’t know how she did that, really. She had so much going on inside her head—so many things to dream about. She had eight imaginary playmates that came to her and taught her things about life. About how sad life is, but also how full of wonder, and about being strong and letting go and believing that things will bloom again. Tiny was fine in her tiny world. But one day she saw the boy.