Read Online Travellers in Magic by Lisa Goldstein - Free Book Online

after—” the godmother said.
    â€œI don’t want it,” the princess said. “Give it to someone else. Give it to Flora, she could probably use it. Oh, don’t look so sad. You’ve done all you can for me, and I’ll always be grateful. But right now—” The bell rang for dinner. “I’ve got to go. Good-bye.” She kissed her fairy godmother on the cheek. “Good-bye, and give my love to Flora.” She ran down the corridor lightly, happy as she’d been in years.

A FTERWORD
    I’d had the idea for “Ever After” for years and years, and one day on a long walk I worked the whole thing out in my mind. Were Prince Charming and Cinderella at all suited to each other? What would a peasant woman have in common with the aristocracy? Now, rereading the story, I see that I wrote it around the time of the marriage of Prince Charles and Princess Diana; perhaps that was at the back of my mind. I’ve always been suspicious of happy endings.
    I’m fond of this one because it was my first published story. I’d already sold two novels, but it seemed as if I was under some sort of short-story curse until Shawna McCarthy bought it for Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine.

T OURISTS
    He awoke feeling cold. He had kicked the blankets off, and the air conditioning was on too high. Debbie—Where was she? It was still dark out.
    Confused, he pulled the blankets back and tried to go to sleep. Something was wrong. Debbie was gone, probably in the bathroom or downstairs getting a cup of coffee. And he was—he was on vacation, but where? Fully awake now, he sat up and tried to laugh. It was ridiculous. Imagine paying thousands of dollars for a vacation and then forgetting where you were. Greece? No, Greece was last year.
    He got up and opened the curtains. The ocean ten stories below was black as sleep, paling a little to the east—it had to be east—where the sun was coming up. He turned down the air conditioning—the soft hum stopped abruptly—and headed for the bathroom. “Debbie?” he said, tentatively. He was a little annoyed. “Debbie?”
    She was still missing after he had showered and shaved and dressed. “All right then,” he said aloud, mostly to hear the sound of his voice. “If you’re not coming I’ll go to breakfast without you.” She was probably out somewhere talking to the natives, laughing when she got a word wrong, though she had told him before they left that she had never studied a foreign language. She was good at languages, then—some people were. He remembered her saying in her soft Southern accent, “For goodness sake Charles, why do you think people will understand you if you just talk to them louder? These people just don’t speak English.” And then she had taken over, pointing and laughing and looking through a phrasebook she had gotten somewhere. And they would get the best room, the choicest steak, the blanket the crafts-woman had woven for her own family. Charles’s stock rose when he was with her, and he knew it. He hoped she would show up soon.
    Soft Muzak played in the corridor and followed him into the elevator as he went down to the coffee shop. He liked the coffee shop in the hotel, liked the fact that the waiters spoke English and knew what an omelet was. The past few days he had been keeping to the hotel more and more, lying out by the beach and finally just sitting by the hotel pool drinking margaritas. The people back at the office would judge the success of the vacation by what kind of tan he got. Debbie had fretted a little and then had told him she was taking the bus in to see the ruins. She had come back darker than he was, the blond hairs on her arm bleached almost white against her brown skin, full of stories about women on the bus carrying chickens and temples crumbling in the desert. She was wearing a silver bracelet inlaid with blue