Rags & Bones: New Twists on Timeless Tales by Melissa Marr and Tim Pratt

long enough.
There are always choices.
    She made her choice.
    The queen began to walk, and the dwarfs followed her.
    “You
do
know we’re heading east, don’t you?” said one of the dwarfs.
    “Oh yes,” said the queen.
    “Well,
that’s
all right then,” said the dwarf.
    They walked tothe east, all four of them, away from the sunset and the lands they knew, and into the night.

 
    A UTHOR’S N OTE …………………………………
    The first book I remember owning was a picture book about a mermaid. The first book I loved was an illustrated “Snow White.” The illustrations were, to my three-year-old self, beautiful, and the story was gripping, terrifying, and it ended perfectly. Years later I retold it as something very dark, and that version of the story seems to be making its own way in theworld.
    As a young journalist, I was assigned to read a small pile of “sex and shopping” blockbusters and write about them. I noticed, with a small amount of surprise, that the plots were all fairy-tale plots. I remember constructing, as an exercise, a high-tech, contemporary version of “Sleeping Beauty.” I did not write it—I was not that cynical—but Sleeping Beauty has hovered at the edges ofmy mind ever since.
    When Melissa and Tim asked me to visit a story I had loved, I thought of so many authors I have loved, so many stories. And then I asked if I could go back to the Sleeping Beauty In The Wood, and felt very lucky when they said yes.

Kai Lung’s Golden Hours (1922). English author Ernest Bramah wrote several collections of stories that feature his droll storyteller, Kai Lung, beginning with
The Wallet of Kai Lung
and followed by
Kai Lung’s Golden Hours
, and then by
Kai Lung Unrolls His Mat
and
Kai Lung Beneath the Mulberry Tree.
They are all set in a China created entirely from Bramah’s own imagination (since he never onceeven visited the country), a misty landscape rife with sly dragons, ferocious bandits, wily mandarins, and beguiling maidens continually placed into dramatic circumstances that always offer his titular hero yet another chance to spin a tale studded with small delights and exquisite language.
    On first reading, I simply fell head over heels into Bramah’s world, and my imagination still patientlytreads its subtle paths.
    —Charles Vess.

The Cold Corner
    T IM P RATT
    I left home five years ago, and haven’t been back since—so why do I still think of it as home at all?
    After almost a week spent driving across the country on I-40 East, I cut north on Highway 202, and within an hour reached the outskirts of my hometown, Cold Corners. The only corners are in the endless rectangular fields of soybeans and tobacco, and with triple-digitheat and 90 percent humidity in summer, it’s hardly “cold,” so I don’t know where it got the name. (Local wisdom contends the name is a corruption of some Cherokee word meaning “fertile land,” but I’m willing to bet that’s pure Carolina invention.)
    I thought about pulling off to the gravel shoulder and calling David to let him know I’d arrived safely, but decided against it. When he threw allmy clothes, my best saucepan, and my knife bag out the window of our—technically his—condo in Oakland, that was probably his way of saying “Don’t call me, I’ll call you.” His flair for the dramatic was one of the things I’d loved about him, when he wasn’t being dramatic at
me
. David was my first real boyfriend after culinary school, and I’d been dumb enough to think it was forever. Dumb enoughto think I could go more than a couple of years without screwing it up, anyway.
    The closer I got to Cold Corners, the less eager I was to finish the trip. I decided not to go up to the “big house”—once owned by my grandparents, now home to my older brother, Jimmy, his wife, and nephews and nieces I hadn’t seen in years—right away. I wonder, if I
had
gone to their house first, taken my place asthe younger child, slipped into