Happy birthday, Big Other contributor Martine Bellen! Celebrate by reading this Bellen fiction we published in 2025!
Left alone, an empty jug will replenish, so it has been written; mirrors will cast flashes from one’s past; an apple will bleed; an acorn will swell into a giant. How dependable is the behavior of objects!
Though when some insignificant fairy had been slighted and a misbegotten butterfly flapped its monarch wings over this now-clamoring fey, the tranquil dénouement had been upended, and even common objects lost their ability to patently follow age-old patterns. Thus, fairytales began to recalibrate; and Mutter, far from showering me with golden coins of love as was ordained, fabricated a stone wall—snuggled within were gnats and snails and ugly slugs—to protect me from this binding, blinding spell that compelled such fear. From here on, everything will be fleeting was the fairy’s unfair pronouncement! This will be the end of the ending “happily ever after…”
And so dear readers, now you know why our libraries are filled with multitudes of wayward final pages of resolutions that drive us to weep.
The wall of which I speak, therefore, functioned as the extremity—or skin—of my penitentiary, and Mutter protected me—from exactly she knew not what—with a web of tiny pests as bodyguards and a fairy window out from which I could peek. Though, truth be told, my wall magnified an inner shameful ache for liberty. Was it freedom I desired or kinship I craved? Inconceivable airy constructions both, unlike the burden of my emotional tower. Isolated in this cell, I could speak of nothing, as my voice, too, grew lighter, lanky, and shrank, fading into a wisp, a whisper.
At night when I peer at the burnt-edged heavens through the fairy window, I consider that, maybe, my captor who had pronounced me a lock-in was not Mutter but, rather, an adamant gargoyle who had been lying in wait inside me since my birth, my turnkey—my abductor and seducer, the instinct to self-protect—steered by a gnarly, smiley spewing spirit, sitting on my solar plexus, like a grappling sumo wrestler, sipping all the light there ever was from my sacral chakra.
In my dreams, walls of all sizes sprang up. Lupine walls, lazy daisies chaining me to sleep. In gardens, I see stone walls. Metal walls closing in on me, the mosh pit wall of death, I see the writing on the wall of my yearning for rampion bellflowers, their rumply, lush, lusty spires of spinachy green. I see the wall that has split my mind, walling up my volition. I am the girl described by her walls, and, so, I become the wall: my muscular legs grow long and trim, rust-brown, like the bricks of load-bearing walls and my hair, tangled dreads, as long as a tower wall. This is my soul sickness, this wretched illness of my outer casing.
As a tower, I grow leaner and harder, though days pass and newly concocted enticements are left by my door. They charm with lilting voices that suffuse my senses. On Monday, parmesan-crusted lobster; Tuesday, marzipan caramel melts; Wednesday, warm French toast soaked in sweetened egg. Days shadow weeks, shadow months. And not one crumb will I take into my chambers. I feel my captor’s iron eyes surveilling me, willing me to weaken. She can lock me in this tower but cannot force open the door to my walls. And though my lips touch not any allurements, and, as I said, I appear lean, my walls feel thick and corpulent, an earthly hinderance I cannot bear. I eye her, this fox, this Mutter, nibbling the outskirts of the forest, taunting me to join her in a repast; my stones rumble, then reset, begin to crumble, yet even if I wanted, I am powerless to partake. It is no longer my will, my wall, that refuses, but something more ancient has carried me away, has me wrapped in its thrall.
And now I hear grace as a euphonious refrain, “Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair.”
The voice mirrors Mutter’s, though no longer am I sure from where such sounds and sweet airs come and what they bid. Are these airs offering freedom?
“Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair.”
How I desire to free my locks, to be freed of my locks, to skip out of the stories that cripple, to roll away from you, dear reader, dear speaker, who tells me who I am, who spells me with your fairy mind.
A window overlooks me, and I look out of it. At first, I muster my timid voice. And then ocean’s breath—supported and accompanied by sprites and spirits in the ten directions—waves through me. My potency flows from the roots of my scalp to the roots in the soil. Bodhisattvas, dakinis. I let them dance in my halls.
And I do let down my hair so I may climb my golden stairs, and I chant syllables that release me from the bondage of self. Deep-rooted lore informs that there had never been a spell, that the discontented fairy simply sourced the Tao as though it were sorcery. Everything has always been a fleeting forming form; and ends will never find endings.
So out spins another cloth, woven from golden thread, from robes of our teachers, from plucked quill feathers, a new story cast on children who will follow a piper to the ends of earth, abandon tales told by their forebears, trail after sweet aftertaste, scale a wall of sounds to hear the tinkle of a dream in an hourglass, in a bell jar’s silence, the wing flap of travails that travel toward a perceived safety, into a twilight cloud of once upon a time…
