• … once upon a biblical time, beastly patriarchs incinerated their children … amorphous apparitions whispered in hisses, their susurrations peeling from mottled walls … a princess sobbed in the middle of the night, her knight in shining armor found stabbed in the moat …

　 　 Hot-eyed Daisy shuts the leather-bound omnibus of dark fairy make-believe & heaves it across the library, knocking down stacks of Renaissance romances, Shakespearean drama & Spenserian poetry, her face rubbed raw from jags of crying. The salt of tears roughens the texture of her skin, so she bathes her eyes with icy white water to freeze the downpour. How do you make a comb kill Snow White anyway?

　 　 “By dipping it in napalm, silly,” replies Rose-on-the-Fur. “Medea did it with a dress & a diadem. Burnt up a little bitch.” The young crone takes a swig from a little lithopane teacup enameled with slinking cobalt dragons hiding vanilla vodka in orange cream soda: orange & white, striped orange twist. The glowing image of a skull grins from the bottom of the teacup, recalling last night’s discovery of the little poppet with the sewn heart. Momentarily shaken by the sight, Rose fetches the leather-bound volume of tales & flips through its water-damaged pages onto a history of Erzsébet Báthory, the diabolical countess immortalized by little red flowers sprung from the wan corpses of doomed pubescent chambermaids, blood oozing from their lips: a thousand rouge lipsticks, red cherry twist. The young crone tears out the pages as she reads them aloud in a frenzy while meandering to the dungeon, silent maidservants backing away upon her approach.

　 　 Daisy likewise paces to & fro, up & down twisting staircases, nerves crackling & forgetting relayed messages, her mind buzzing like a hummingbird’s heart, yearning to break through, to… dance & to leap? to split into a grand jetée? to be flung into the heavens, into inebriating space, the sky brimming with flickering stars at which to smile widely & wildly, intensity pouring forth in raging torrents? Feeling giddy, Daisy wants to bite a Wonderland mushroom to shoot to a dizzying new height, as tall as a redwood, unloosing flurries of winged creatures from her hair & peeking at bird-nests shaded under sun-kissed tree-tops. Or regress to half her size, to run around & scream & bang on gongs & pans, fingers stuck in wooden slats, poking curiosity, smashing pies with her fists & tipping carts over at the supermarket. Wait a minute, she thinks. I refused to dance at that age. Tell me another story.

• Once upon a time, about half a millennium ago, foreign imperial conquistadors set sail in giant billowing galleons that landed randomly on some tropical jungle islands where they proceeded to destroy the myths & mystical practices of Daisy's pre-colonized ancestors, bulldozing them with wooden crosses & leaving trails of saintly simpering sampaguitas in their wake. Some blooms of sambac jasmine manage to burst into flames, singeing at centuries of gendered & racialized constraints, but Daisy is too far away in the diaspora to care much about these struggles. Fairy tales & mythologies tend to inspire her envy because of the huge blank void where her rightful heritage ought to be. No fairy-witch-godmother or fierce goddess exists in the records for her to invoke, although remnants of native dryads & fairies & water nymphs still poke through religious trappings in the form of superstitions, urban legends, & religious syncretism. Some monsters still lurk around, but not as looming as the specter of colonialism. The main myths are either lost or locked in high ivory towers, filtering out simple folktales & silly origin stories propagandized by a stupid dictator. The erasure of her ancestors’ knowledge weighs heavily on her. “You have no literature or culture,” it mocks. “You hardly exist.”

　 　 Sweet things & gardening console Daisy, who summons hard candy rain to clack against high arched windows of stained glass candy, colored cellophane wrappers & shards of rock sugar glittering & littering the ground as she putters around the labyrinth, snow melting at the touch of spring. She clips overgrown hedges, trims toppled topiaries, & tends to her asphodel, unsure whether to add their petals to soporific tea steeping in a teapot of imported Lethean water, laced with vanilla dew. (“Heart of a hummingbird, I’m homing in on honeysuckle.” Mellifluous, melichrous, honey-crusted. Pour of tea & silver infuser.)

　 　 She prunes here & there, encouraging vines & flowers to creep up & dress sections of trellises at a time. Cultivating dark eyeliner lilies, frozen moments in the garden, little creatures darting around or disappearing in a time-lapse. Tiny chinoiserie bells twinkle in the firmament as an allée of herbaceous borders invite with the smell of roses, White Triumphators, Queen of Night tulips with dark velvet petals, their heads threaded with gold & seed pearls. The variegated floriation lends itself to a stained glass Palladium window, behind which a chaise longue glows absinthe-green.

　 　 Later, upon an old wooden escritoire in her writing chamber, Daisy struggles to conjure the elusive Sophie's stone out of nothing, extracting words suspended in ether, giving life to little girlish homunculi that collect very few notes/comments/likes on the Internet. She wishes to become disembodied consciousness: no body, nobody. In her head dwells an angry girl who wishes to alter her identity. She feels gross in her own skin, wants to squirm out of it or flay it away in martyr-like strips of flesh to reveal a cardiovascular system pumping inside, bodily organs spilling out—sinew, synapse, & skeleton. She studies twenty different charts of the anatomical heart with not one beating blood to pump into her imagination, although mysteriously wet black poppies begin to flower within the palm of her hand, perhaps the side effect of a faded stigmata prank.

　 　 Her lack of craft maddens her, so she distracts herself by sifting through her junk email where an invitation addresses her in fancy looping script:

　 　 Borrow/steal the young crone’s willowy gray lace & throw on a wig of Louise Brooks’s bob. There is a small silent movie premiere & a birthday party to go to.