A Grimm Ending

• Sophie Hatten, Grade 11
• Poetry
• 2007

She was never going to belong.
The world outside her window looked to be a chaotic and forbidding place, her tower the only sanctuary from the hands that grabbed and pulled wanting her for her beauty and charm. The prince was afraid of heights, afraid of staring out at the sky. Rapunzel sta up there tracing the constellations with a slim pale finger or watching the villagers scuttle about. Her old tower still visible in the distance, calling her from beyond the fields and meandering paths within the darkening woods.

“What’s the matter princess?” A voice breathed in her ear as the wind solidified and lovingly brushed her ear, memories of a woman kissing her forehead and dancing until she was giddy entered her mind and she sighed leaning into the beautiful deity’s caress. A Godmother.

“I miss my mother.”

“But she has come, the one they call your mother is a part of your court.”

“That woman is not my mother.” Her voice is harsh, too harsh for a princess but Rapunzel is hardly claiming to be one anymore. “She gave me up without even thinking to come find me after and is now reaping in her rewards for a burden she so obviously didn’t bear. My mother is dead and I brought her wrath down upon myself in my stupidity and I would give anything to get it back.”

“You cannot have it back, my love.” She whispered into the silent night and Rapunzel wept anew as she realized how pointless her dreams were, how complexly inadequate she really was in the eyes of the person who mattered most. Her own.

“Can you not turn back time? Can I not mourn the loss of my innocence and plead ignorance and pray my mother dances into this room, full with stories with the squirrels, bees and doe that frolicked upon the grass as she watched with loving eyes?”

“I am afraid that, my child, you have driven yourself into madness of sorts. Are you not happy with your ever after?”

“Is a wolf happy in an entrapment? Can the bird be driven to sing when you cut off its wings and sell it for its beauty? I can never be happy. Not within these walls.”

She is a dancer whose feet were bound.

She was a poet who had nothing to write.

She was a princess who is denied her solitude. The only life she had ever truly known.

“You made your choice my child.” The fairy is gone as and she suddenly just knows she will never see it again. Her path is twisted and wrong, she had never thought herself to be happy but now she knew. She had been in Heaven and she was now trapped in a world of sin.

This time her hair would not grow long enough and no amount of magic could erase her happily ever after…

The one sentence she would never wish upon anyone. the a promise of eternal confinement.