Emily Kissell received her MFA in creative writing from the University of Florida. Her fiction has appeared in The Battered Suitcase, Dante's Heart, Kalliope, The Rose & Thorn E-zine, and Word Riot. She lives in Jacksonville, Florida.

I wanted a tower. I’d always known I was a princess. I thought I just lacked the proper equipment.                                                                              

I knew one thing about architecture, and that’s all I needed. Queen Anne was what you called the houses that looked like castles, the ones with turrets and fanciful eves. Porch swings were assumed, and you could always hope for spiral staircases, secret passageways, and shadowy corridors. It’s as close as you can find to a proper residence for royalty in 21st century America.

A Queen Anne was my goal. It’s why I deserted California for New England. I thought if I hadn’t fulfilled my destiny, at least my daughter could grow up in a tower.

 

As a child, I loved to ride. I felt so aristocratic galloping through Californian fields. Even lacking gown and side saddle, I’ve never felt closer to my princess self. Then, in poetic foreshadowing, Lancelot tripped in a gopher hole. He got shot. I got spinal cord damage.

The doctors told me I was lucky. I was only temporarily paralyzed, and after four operations, it appeared there would be no lasting effects. But my life is an unlucky one. Over the years, my spinal chord has slowly shrunk. By the time I was twenty-five, I had a slight hunch. By thirty, I had to use a cane when I left the house.

I was not popular in school. I was never beloved by the masses. The other girls thought I was snobby and weird. They say if you have enough money, you’re eccentric, not strange. That, I’ve found, only applies to men. In this, as in all things, princesses are their own category.

For many years, I avoided the aggression of the hostile peasants. But one day by the bike rack, the multitudes had a revolt. I, being a princess, had never learned to brawl. Even as I was bloodied, I remember thinking, “If I had a tower, this never would’ve happened.” I could’ve been locked away with a spinning wheel as my only friend. Instead, I laid on the burning pavement, the mixed tastes of gravel and vomit on my tongue.

Most of the scars faded by swimsuit season, but my nose healed crooked. The queen advocated plastic surgery. The king argued it added character to an otherwise bland face.  Of course, my face had been smooth—what else would a princess’s face be?—but now, it was forever broken. For, you see, the king always wins.

 

History slipped by me in the night. I was living in the age when males shoved rings on the fingers of the girls they “got in trouble.” The rest of the world had moved on.

When I told my dashing prince (or rather, I admit it, the dwarf I slept with) of our impending bundle, precious gems seemed far from his thoughts. “I’ll pay for the abortion” had replaced “love, honor, and cherish” without dropping me a memo. I was stunned. I was knocked up, knocked around, and knocked out.

Good thing my parents still knew their roles as beneficent, if distant, rulers. The trust fund was tapped, and the palace was purchased.

By the time I held the deed to my castle, I still had five months of joy, five months of unflappable belief. I bought pink and white things: a canopied bed, lace curtains, a vanity, plush carpet. My tower was the home for a princess. I caressed my belly as I told my daughter of our future.

I should’ve suspected that my story didn’t have room for another queen. I should’ve known from the straight driveways and bright lawns of the quiet, suburban paradise that housed my castle—the 21^st century has reserved no place for princesses.

 

I started having pain in my hands when I was a sophomore in high school. I held the steering wheel of my father’s Mercedes, thinking it was the car causing my hands to ache. It was telling me I wasn’t fit for anything more strenuous than riding shotgun. I wholeheartedly agreed.

Once again, I was placed before the scrutiny of white coats and stethoscopes. Once again, they failed me (my life has left me with the certainty that courses on the physiology of princesses are severely lacking in contemporary medical education). They diagnosed juvenile rheumatoid arthritis. They pushed pills down my throat and shoved needles into my swollen hands, but their remedies were only partially effective. They told me many children outgrew it. My chances were good.

Whatever they did then, I now have claws instead of hands and not much use for doctors.

 

They ripped screams from me. As soon as they started, I knew I’d been fooled.  Princesses were not born in blood. Their flesh separated from their mother’s like new buds forming on a cherry tree.

The monster clawed its way out of my belly. They cut me open to reveal its grisly head.  They wanted me to hold the thing, but I refused.

I’d already had a name picked out. The name I had always wanted for my own. A princess’s name. It was too big for this creature. They cut it down to make it fit. They told me this was my son. 

A week later, I walked out of the hospital, clutching a baby that was once a monster. The sun blinded me. I felt as if I was seeing the world as it really was for the first time.

 

It seemed the gray came in the night. It set up colonies and multiplied. It invited relatives and their children. My hair was suddenly finer, thinner. Some mornings I would wake to new patches of my scalp, as gray and sickly as the hair that no longer clothed it. 

I was disintegrating. My youth was melting away. I was going down the same drain where I found huge clumps of my colorless pelt. I became afraid to shower. I certainly wasn’t going out in the rain where gleeful girls pranced with their yapping dogs.

I wondered if the morning would come when I would no longer recognize myself as the creature in the mirror. Logically, I know it must’ve been a process of years, but as I remember it, one day the mirror assured me I was a blonde, the next, I was old.

 

His penis is a cruel joke. The rest of him is perfect. His features delicate. His limbs lithe.  His skin flawless. His hair silk.

I used to stand above his cradle thinking how easy it would be. No one would know. The trust fund could support another castle in a town where no one knew about hidden differences. I watched him sleep. My heart, beating too rapidly, assured me he should’ve been a princess.

I’ve never cut his hair. Loose, it hangs to his knees. In a braid, it cannot yet serve as a ladder, but someday, it will. I brush it every night. My twisted fingers catch in its gossamer gold.  He sits within its fairy cloud. For half an hour, I forget my life’s disappointments. I say to myself: at least, the hair is perfect. At least, my child has the hair of a princess.

 

Can you see me yet? Hunched. Scarred. Twisted. Gnarled. Broken. 

I’m old before my time. I can hardly remember what young felt like. I’m certainly not a princess anymore. I barely seem human. I look in the mirror only when necessary. It brings too much bubbling to the surface—foul-smelling regrets and the bitter taste of thwarted ambitions.

The scar has never healed right on my belly, but after their final betrayal, I won’t let the doctors near it. Now, I could afford to fix my nose, but they would only pile another disfigurement onto my hunched shoulders. 

 Only one part of my grotesquerie infuriates me. My guise precludes another attempt.  What sort of prince could I hope to enchant like this? I will only ever have one princess—an imperfect one. These days I feel I should be grateful for even that.

I wonder about the benefits of accepting one’s fate gracefully. I wonder about the costs of sorcery. I wonder about the stories of those with beautiful faces but who are truly ugly inside.

I wonder—am I ugly inside?

 

I watch him running through the yard with his friends, his hair obscured under a baseball cap. His clothes are the strictly boyish ones he buys with money he extracts from me.

One would think the hybrid creature I’ve created would be spurned by the normality of suburbia’s children, children without towers or canopied beds. One would think I’d have been at least partially successful in instilling proper aristocratic sensibilities in my child. But with this, as in all things, I have failed.

He draws others like moths to a flame. He glows with beauty and this dispels his freakish nature. Maybe, he, too, is a witch preying on the innocents around him. Maybe they all appear as friends now, but later he will stick them in the oven to eat instead of peanut butter and jelly. A mother always hopes.