the stuff of fairytales (mid res)

“Perhaps you have figured it out by now, but little girls don’t stay little forever. They grow into strong women that return to destroy your world.” McKayla Maroney

Once upon a time, long ago,

a little girl took her first breath

and was immediately promised a happily ever after.

She was told if she listened to all the sanctioned fables,

then she, and those like her, could make their homes

in fairytale castles, ruled by kings, and guarded by dragons.

These little girls quickly learned to live

in black and white. Good and evil. Safe and free.

They embraced their gilded cages. Clipped each other's wings.

Never strayed too far from their predetermined path.

They were the good little girls–beautifully innocent--

dependent on the world to love them properly–which it rarely did.

In time, they began to wonder what the world could look like.

What the world might look like?

If only, they could dream in technicolor.

These good girls could not stay little forever.

Eventually, these not-so-little,

too curious to be good anymore, girls

wander off into forbidden forests.

Where they face the stuff of fairytales–their worst nightmares.

They meet the big bad wolf

–only they are woefully unprepared for his charms.

Incinerated by his manipulations–these good little girls

now find that they are damsels in distress.

They slowly learn to play with the beast–

perverted–to do the world’s bidding.

Left abandoned– in these mystical woods–

charred–transmuted into something unknown.

These lost girls survive, become stronger.

Mutate into someone they no longer recognize.

They persist. They rise again.

They embrace the darkest of nights.

There will not be a fire hot enough to burn them

or a stone heavy enough to crush them.

Forged into women --

by the most grotesque imaginations of man--

even the fear of death itself will no longer

prevent these girls from getting what they want:

Their freedom, their revenge, their happy endings.

Like the Phoenix before them, they become the change the world fears.

Emboldened. They embrace the roles they are left to play:

The whores, the witches, the crones.

All come back to reclaim their stolen paradise

to destroy the very thing that created them–

Their worst nightmares--

The stuff of fairytales.