“YOU’RE GOING TO tell that story to little children?”
They were still in the principal’s office. Apollo remained standing and Cal behind the table, the Rapunzel puppet on her hand. She hadn’t used it the whole time. Instead she’d become lost in the telling itself, as had Apollo. Even the guards had stepped out from the corners, hands down by their sides and heads tilted as they listened.
Cal pointed at Apollo. “Bingo! Fairy tales are not for children. They didn’t used to be anyway. These were the stories peasants told to each other around the fire after a long day, not to their kids. This was how adults talked with each other. Fairy tales became stories for kids in the seventeen-hundreds. Around that time this weird new group started appearing in parts of Europe. The merchant class.
“Merchants were making money, and they wanted to live better than the lower classes did. This meant there were new rules about how to behave, both for the adults and for the kids. Fairy tales changed accordingly. Now they had to have a moral, something to train those children in the new rules. Which is when they started turning to shit. A bad fairy tale has some simple goddamn moral. A great fairy tale tells the truth.”
Cal picked up a bag of socks and held it out to Apollo. She pointed to the sock puppets she’d been wearing when he arrived. “One of those was going to be the enchantress, but I can’t make her scary enough. You give it a try.”
He pulled out a gray sock. “Are you going to tell me about my wife? Is Emma here?”
To this there was no answer. It was as if he hadn’t spoken at all.
“Your guards tried to kill me,” he said as he laid the sock flat on the table.
Cal followed Apollo’s example and took out a gray sock of her own. “Years ago one husband found us,” she said. “This is long before we moved to this island. He brought two guns with him and so much rage. I made the mistake of trying to talk with him, to make him see, but it didn’t work. He did a lot of damage. He killed three women and seven kids. Shot me twice but I came through. Since then I decided we had to protect ourselves. We left the world and came to this island. We armed ourselves the best we could. And if men showed up, we were more…proactive.”
Apollo slipped the sock onto his right hand, then brought his thumb and fingers together until he saw the semblance of a face, his knuckles the top of a ridged skull.
“Exactly how many men have you killed here?” Apollo said.
“We’re like the police,” Cal said. “We don’t track those numbers.”
She walked around Apollo and plugged the glue gun into an extension cord that ran across the room and into the generator. Already he’d become used to the faint chug of the machine. When she plugged in the glue gun, the generator chugged slightly louder. She handed the glue gun to him.
“Can I get some of those cotton balls over there?” Apollo asked. He spoke to Cal but looked at the dark corners where the guards stood.
She picked up a stick of glue and tapped him gently on the nose. “That’s the spirit.”
Standing here, Apollo could look at the desk where the big word processor sat and beside that a small jumble of papers. They were children’s drawings. The picture on top was of a tall, craggy mountain and at the bottom of the mountain a deep, black cave. Inside the cave two yellow eyes floated. He thought he saw the faint outline of an open mouth below the eyes. He felt mesmerized by the picture.
“Cotton balls,” Cal said, pulling him from his trance, dropping a handful into his palm. “Will your enchantress have gray hair?”
She held up the glue gun and pulled its trigger gently until a teardrop of glue appeared. Apollo looked down at the cotton balls. For a moment, it seemed as if he held a cloud in one hand.
“How do we protect our children?” Cal said quietly.
Apollo watched the soft little shape in his palm. “Obviously I don’t know.”
“No,” Cal said. “That’s what Rapunzel is about. That’s the question it’s asking.”
She brought the glue gun to the sock on her hand and dabbed twice. Then she affixed two googly eyes. She opened her hand flat inside the sock and squeezed out a few circles of glue. She pressed an oval of red felt to the spot, then brought her hand closed again so the red felt became the inside of a mouth.
“The old man and woman have the child,” Cal said. “But they do nothing to protect it. They’re completely hands off, and the baby gets snatched away.”
Quickly, expertly, Cal took some green string from a pile and glued it to the top of the sock, locks of mossy-looking hair. She found small, precut bits of black felt and affixed them above the googly eyes. Eyebrows. Two small pieces of brown felt became ears.
“The enchantress hides the girl away in a tower. She won’t let the child do anything in the world without her. She’s a helicopter parent.”
Two longer pieces of brown felt turned into a pair of arms.
“But the prince still finds a way inside, doesn’t he? No matter what we do, the world finds its way in. So then how do we protect our children? Hundreds of years ago German peasants were asking one another this question. But rather than frame it as a question they turned it into a story that embodied the concern. How do we protect our children? It’s 2015, and we’re still trying to find an answer. The new fears are the old fears, and the old fears are ancient.”
She held up the finished puppet.
“Now I know this isn’t frightening,” Cal said, grinning. “But when I do the show tomorrow night, the children will talk to this puppet as if she were as real as me. Actually, they’ll think of this puppet as more real than me.”
She held the puppet up close to Apollo’s face until her own lost focus and disappeared. She didn’t move her hand to pretend the puppet was speaking, and she used her normal speaking voice. She just let it hover there before him, and the longer he looked at it, the more it came to life.
“The Scottish called it glamer,” Cal said. “Glamour. It’s an old kind of magic. An illusion to make something appear different than it really is. A monster might look like a beautiful maiden. A ruined castle appears to be a golden palace. A baby is…” Her voice drifted off.
Apollo found himself speaking to the puppet just as Cal said the children would. “Not a baby,” he whispered.
“What a smart boy,” the puppet said.
“But this isn’t a fairy tale,” Apollo answered.
“Are you sure?”
“Best way to clear the air is to have it all out in the open!” A man’s voice. Outside. In the courtyard.
Cal’s fingers closed into a fist, and the puppet lost all animation. The mouth shut, and the eyes curled over—it was like watching a soul slip out of a body. Cal dropped the hand, and Apollo watched the guards move quickly to the two windows and look down.
One of them said, “Another man.”
Cal looked back at Apollo with such fury, he thought she’d order the guards to tear his skull open right there.
“You didn’t come alone,” she hissed. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
Apollo wanted to explain. He’d completely forgotten about William from the moment he’d stepped into this room.
“You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view,” William Wheeler shouted in the courtyard. He sounded giddy. Or insane. “Until you climb into his skin and walk around in it!”
“Seclusion rooms,” Cal ordered. “Both of them.”