Read Online Fairytales for Wilde Girls by Allyse Near - Free Book Online Page A

stairs, to ignore Mother the way that Father chose to.
    Isola allowed her gaze to rise skyward as she peeked through the ceiling with the X-ray vision she wished she had. Perhaps if she stared hard enough she could see through the ceramic tub, through Mother’s sun-speckled skin, to find the sadness that roosted in the red stew of her tragic guts, the depression that festered like tumours. She could shrink them with kisses, cut them out with razor-sharp lips like Ruslana’s.
    It was no secret that Mother was mentally ill. She had only gotten worse since Isola’s birth.
    Sometimes, very late at night, if she pressed her thumbs into her eyes and concentrated, making pictures in the electric shudders of colour that burst there, Isola remembered being inside Mother’s womb. The stucco pink walls were lined with stars, the mapped cosmos; soft gooey blush like the inside of a clam, and she was the grain of sand becoming the pearl.
    Mother had other baby pearls brewing before, but instead of hardening they had softened, melting through the porous walls. She took care of these babies too, but nobody knew: she cradled them internally, secretly squished between her organs, padding her ageing joints, collecting in her brain stem. These were seedlings, saplings, never to blossom, never to become trees.
    Isola was born to tears spilling from all eyes except hers. She never cried, never made so much as a squeak of befuddlement, and the nurses plunged her airways again and again, looking for the obstruction that didn’t exist.
    â€˜A quiet little princess you’ve got, Mrs Wilde,’ the nurse said, beaming. Isola was finally planted into Mother’s sweat-drenched arms: tiny, wrinkled hands flexing; crusted eyes blue through the gunk; hair like she’d been licked by the unicorns, frothy above her bothered-looking face.
    â€˜My princess,’ gasped Mother, flooded with pain-drugs and love-drugs. ‘My Isola.’
    Isola pushed open the bathroom door to reveal the gentle shafts of chandelier light, inhaling the gel and soap and candle scents.
    Her mother was in the claw-footed bathtub, hidden behind the Japanese-print screen, visible in pieces, a triptych; her toes at one end, at the other a twist of dark hair, pinned up. In between was a slinky silhouette, breasts and knees.
    Isola went to the porcelain bathtub, kissed Mother’s flushed cheek like she always did, dipped her fingers in to check the temperature (usually boiling past most people’s endurance), and asked if she needed anything.
    â€˜A doctor to double the dosage,’ sighed Mother, and then she laughed, lifting her pointed ballerina-foot out of the tub, soapy water dripping and spotting the bath rug. Isola saw her Mother’s whole life there – in the corns on her soles; the floaty-violet nail polish, slightly chipped; the dyed string anklet, woven on the shores of some faraway honeymoon beach.
    â€˜Tell me a story, won’t you, Isola?’
    It seemed to be one of the few comforting things Isola could administer to Mother; her voice, shaping the clay of a story, a tale that always had a happy ending. Isola didn’t think she was much of a storyteller, but she drew inspiration from Lileo Pardieu’s words, a vampire drinking in inky blood, and she wove tales until the bathwater ran lukewarm.
    Isola loved Mother so much it hurt. The pain only worsened when Mother was hurting. When she was sad, Mother Wilde was a Greek tragedy. She would stay in her bed all day, and got in the bath at odd hours, soaking instead of sleeping, trying in vain to soften the tightly wound cogs inside.
    A tealight candle floated past her fingers, and Isola stirred up a wave for it to travel on, a tiny tempest in the tub.
    â€˜Once upon a time,’ said Isola quietly, ‘there was a boy called Alejandro, who loved his sister very much.’

 
    The Boy – A Second Glance
    As autumn marched through the valley like an army