The woods lurk beyond the hedges, bramble-pierced and dusky, stretching for hundreds of years. Safe inside houses, our older sisters apply honeysuckle lips and moonglow eyes, wink at us as they ready themselves for foxglove princes.
It’s not your turn yet, they say. You’ll understand when you’re older.
We shrug, slipping out the back door. Shedding homework and chores like old skins. In the fading summer light, we scramble through hedges and into the pine-tangled dusk of Ponyhenge.
Our secret place, filled with merry-go-round ponies presiding over chipped barrettes and friendship bracelets. We climb astride their lilac and green lacquered bodies, weave glossy ribbons into their ragged manes. Imagine ourselves riding in the wind.
Pine sap drips on our jean shorts, turning to gold shards in our hair. Watermelon candy liquefies on our tongues. We talk about Stacy, the girl who kissed last year’s prince.
He tastes like autumn, she told us, before she left. She didn’t even have to finish school. The prince’s red pick-up truck swept her away on the pumpkin-lined road out of town.
When we’re tired, we lie on our backs under the ponies and a sky full of glow-in-the-dark stars. Try to pretend we know what autumn boy tastes like. Conjuring ideas like spells. Honey and apple cake. Pumpkin spice lip gloss. Buttery, salt-sprinkled caramel.
Stacy’s sister is the first one to think of something new.
We can follow the prince. We can learn what it means.
The suggestion is a thrill of electricity, shooting sparks, setting the trees on fire. Smoke thickens in the burnished air. But who of us will be the sacrifice, lamb leading lamb?
Catherine says it was her idea, so she should be the one.
Foxglove princes only like good girls, so we borrow Stacy’s pink dress from the blushing closet she left behind. We brush Catherine’s hair and clean her white Keds. Dab her wrists with a stolen bottle of perfume. Now Catherine is pretty and so, so good.
Give us a bite, Princess Catherine, we whisper, pressing our tongues through paper plates cut into prince faces. Collapsing in fits of giggles that empty our lungs and fill our blood with dizziness.
Midnight approaches, the summer sky hanging hot and heavy with stars. We thrust Catherine out of the woods. She stands at the edge of the foxgloves, her shoulders pinned into place.
The foxglove prince comes in all his finery, silver-girded, eyes full of want. He is handsome, with sparkling white teeth and best-friend-charm. He looks like a Phil, like a Henry, like a Marcus. Like he wins at everything.
He lays our Catherine down in the foxglove field, the bees humming in every blossom. What fun, this first kiss dazzle, these fingers gripping her hair. Until he becomes a fire, then a scythe pressing deep, slicing her free from the woods.
We don’t know who starts screaming first. Whose foot breaks his nose. Whose teeth chew his arms down to sinew. Why his skull is cracked. Catherine is crying and we rip the pink right off her, kiss her eyes and swallow the salt.
The only thing we know is where to take him.
We drag his limp body to Ponyhenge. In front of our devouring eyes, knotted ropes of gut and sinew feed the parched soil. Our ponies are hungry. Our ponies shimmer with blue waves of hair and bright lacquer hooves. We watch and watch.
The woods swallow our laughter and fill us with starlight. The sky falls on us like rain. We run home, hair catching in branches, drunk on glitter and blood. Our mothers wait at the wood’s edge, weeping.
But why, why?
They tell us how the story always ends with a prince come to slake his thirst, gilded and girl-blessed. Tithings and destinies etched into his filaments. How tenderly this world cradles him.
Shh, shh, our mothers whisper. Not yet.
But our cheeks are riven by hot tears, our filaments igniting into piezoelectric rage. We will sharpen our teeth and slick our tongues with nightshade. Each prince a notch in our blades, an offering to hoof and forelock.
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Faith Allington (she/her) is a genre-blending writer in Seattle, where she admires fungi and drinks too much tea. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Haven Spec, Broken Antler Mag and Adventitious. She can be found at www.faithallington.com. | |