Truly Grim Tales

The story that I intended to eat them is a fabrication. People will make up anything I did intend to observe them closely under conditions of stress, and more blood would have been very useful to me.

In the end, I would probably have let them go back home. Their father, my husband, was making my life as wretched as his own. In the end, it would have been a choice between having the children back and pretending (for a while) to be a happy-ever-after fairy-tale family, or getting rid of all three of them and moving on.

from "The Prince"

Suddenly I looked down. The current damsel was gloriously attired in something with pearls and ermine trim.I hardly saw her dress. My eyes fixed on her feet.

Glass! I could see right through her shoes!

I stopped immediately. She almost fell. I steadied her.

My eyes had not left her feet as they nestled like twin birds in their delicate little cages. Such feet! Oh, Stephen, you'd have loved them too. How I longed to put them into the footbath, to pour in the perfumed oil!

The music stopped. Everything stopped.