Prologue
I know a thing or two about fairy tales.
Not the Disney kind. The kind that gives children nightmares.
When I was a kid, a family friend gave me a recording of Rumpelstiltskin
for Christmas. Either they had never listened to it, or they had a sick idea of
fun, because nothing about that recording was suitable for children. The memory
of Rumpelstiltskin’s scream as the queen got his name right still makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.
That kind of fairy tale.
Look up the definition and the first one will say a fairy tale is a magical story set
in an idealized world, filled with happiness. But the sting comes in the second
definition: a fabricated story, especially one intended to deceive.
It’s a paradox, and one I’ve lived. I was the little girl orphaned young, sent off to live with the wicked relative. The teenager who fell in love with a dimpled prince, only for forces of darkness to separate us. The woman who realized I had read the moral of the story wrong from the start, and battled evil for my own survival.
I experienced the magic, and confronted the lie, in search of my happy ending.
Because even in the Disney fairy tales, happy endings aren’t simply granted—they’re earned.
This is how I earned mine.
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