Teresa Milbrodt, Fictioneer

Changelings

She lived alone in the forest and loved her quietude. The green smells were calm and comforting, but not so the cries of children left by the river. She found them two, three, four times a year, wailing for a mother’s tit. They came to her naked, small limbs flailing as they cried a protest. She took them home. They had flat foreheads, swine snouts, club feet. She knew the city had labeled them monsters, fit only for sacrifice to the wild. She held them to her breast, and her body mothered many.

Each child was a work of art, a living sculpture to be molded, something she discovered the first time she smoothed a baby’s cheek and found it yielded like clay dug from the riverbank. She remembered that in the city babies were swaddled, their unformed bodies wrapped tight as packages so they would emerge shaped like humans with straight backs and perfect posture. She didn’t care for humans much, so it was a joy to discover she could form the children as she pleased.

Some she gave small robin wings. Others she gave tiny horns because they smirked like they were already up to something. To all she gave knowing gazes, old and wise. She molded their ears pointy like cats, or rounded as shells to mimic mice. A few she gifted with third arms so they could reach and grab, or tails to hang upside down from branches.

They were happy, her children, and she was pleased to be surrounded by cherubs and devils and satyrs, the formerly outcast. The oldest learned to toddle to the river and bring home more abandoned babies. She crafted a race that became tiny boogeymen at dusk, scaring women who came to the stream for water and hunters who gasped and dropped their arrows in horror. She never set a bedtime for her dear little ones, but the secret to fearlessness at night was to know dark did not conceal evil but was merely a pleasant blanket, a rest for the eyes. She loved going out after dusk to listen to her children play, the hoots and whispers and giggles and shrieking laughter that kept humans inside until dawn. In their waking hours they offered more blessed children to the riverbank, assuring her cottage and their nightmares would never be empty.

***

Following that theme of fairies and fair folk, my story “Over Coffee” just came out in an anthology about fairies. It’s titled Wee Folk and Wise, has some lovely reviews on Goodreads, and is available as a Kindle book on Amazon.

The Prince Frog

What he missed the most were his green legs–they were spindly, sure, and French chefs salivated when they saw him, but those magnificent muscles had propelled him into the air so wonderfully high, it was almost like flying. Since the enchantment had been broken his joints were stiff and achy, and the palace magicians had to remind him about the sad life expectancy of frogs. Even the largest and hardiest toads didn’t live long. He was left with the eternal dilemma–a short life of freedom or a long life of boredom. He was sure he’d chosen wrongly.

Why had he asked for that kiss from the princess? Sure she was pretty, but not really his type. She liked music and astronomy, didn’t care about horses, and said heights made her ill. There went his trips to the mountains. She made him listen to his horoscope every day at breakfast, and she was a vegetarian who gave him stern looks when he brought home rabbits and pheasant. Sometimes she didn’t even dine with him and his royal parents because she said the stench of blood made her ill.

His mother smiled tightly and said the girl was a delicate creature, many princesses were like that. Everyone at court thought she was odd, but they were too polite to say it to his face. He said it alone in his room, when she was in the garden with her telescopes and tutors. He wanted her to run away with some rogue astronomer, then he could return to the dark forest and find the right fairy, evil or not, pleading for the spell to turn his legs supple and spindly again. His end might come sooner than it might have otherwise, but it would be happy.

***

I’m going to have another funky fairy-tale-ish story in an upcoming anthology of stories about fairies, titled Wee Folk and Wise. More on that soon!

Click on this link to read my essay “Teaching Kindergarten in Thailand While Contemplating Fortune Cookie Fortunes Found In My Purse”, recently published in Atticus Review.

My poem, “All the Saints Are Looking Through Your Trash,” was just published in the online lit mag Farrago’s Wainscot. Check it out, along with other great, weird writing, at this link.

If you’d like to peruse some not-quite-serious poetry, check out Parody Poetry, a literary magazine that also posts poems on its web site. You can read my poem “Octavia” by clicking on this link. 

My story “In the Dim Below” was just published in the online arts and politics magazine Guernica. Click here to read it!

Click on the link below to read my interview about Larissa Takes Flight: Stories on the Lighthouse Writers Workshop blog.

My new e-chapbook came out today!  It was published by Wordrunner eChapbooks, and you can read it for free at this link.  Many thanks to J0-Anne Rosen, my fantastic editor!

Enter on Goodreads to win a copy of my short story collection, BEARDED WOMEN: STORIES.

https://www.goodreads.com/giveaway/show/103074-bearded-women-stories

One of her many adventures that was not included in LARISSA TAKES FLIGHT: STORIES

Larissa and the Neighbors

 The guy who lives next door to me in the apartment complex stands in my doorway with a plate of peanut butter cookies and says he learned the recipe from a nuclear physicist when he was a janitor at a bomb-making plant. She knew how to save the world by not blowing it up and that was why he loved her, but he left that job and became a bank teller since he knew life would be simpler. I nod and smile because his stories are never the same, so he could be hallucinating or lying or he’s filtered out lives from the television programs he watches at three in the morning. I hear him when I use the bathroom, his TV muttering through the wall, but he’s a lot saner than the conspiracy theorist who used to live next door and skulked to my welcome mat at ten o’clock at night to give me earnest pamphlets filled with stories of how the world was going to hell in a handbasket and the people who controlled everything were ones with money. I’m familiar with the arithmetic of haves and have-nots since I survive on a shoe store salary and my boyfriend quit his job at the insurance company to get one in a produce department and dispense his knowledge of Aristotle and Socrates and how to select a good melon. When I asked the conspiracy theorist how we should right the world’s economic wrongs and if he had a pamphlet with a twelve-step plan and easy to-follow-instructions he didn’t have much to say, but most people who like to complain are bad when it comes to proposing solutions and then having less to complain about, so I told him I needed to do some writing I’d put off for ten years, and he said he was working on a novel about a guy who saved humanity from destruction and the plot to convert us to a new unreality. I smiled and closed the door and played solitaire on my computer and wondered when he’d move to a Michigan commune, but in the end I don’t know where he went, just that he left in the middle of the night and the guy who replaced him will be back this evening with more cookies and an explanation of how he used to work on the Empire State Building and has connections to Superman, and if anyone had an easy twelve-step program on how to right the world’s wrongs it would probably be Superman but the guy next door seems to have forgotten his phone number. My philosopher boyfriend laughs when I tell him this, but most of us dream of being bigger than we are, and even if we can’t save the world we want to know people who can.