[story] rapunzel
author: tokyofish (tokyofish)
email: tokyofish [at] gmail.com
Everybody thinks they know my story. My name is Rapunzel, I was raised by a witch, I ensorcelled a king with my beauty, and my hair is very long.
Of these, two are falsehoods and one is a truth.
Oh, and there is the rhyme, I suppose. Everyone remembers the rhyme.
"Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair,
So that I might climb that golden stair."
Two truths, then.
My name is Genevieve. Growing up, people called me Rapunzel. 'People?' you ask. 'Didn't you live all alone in a high tower in the middle of a forest?'
Some versions get this right. There was certainly a sort of tower, but it wasn't in the forest and I didn't go there until I was twelve.
Perhaps I ought to have begun from the very beginning. My parents lived in a little village far to the South. My mother was very beautiful woman. Everyone says so. She was even courted by a nobleman, but my mother ended up in a village ten miles away from the one she had been born in and married to a young blacksmith.
There was nothing special about this village, save for the fact that it yielded the most delicious produce in the country. Why, even the raw ingredients for the King's daily salad came from it. Each household had its own garden, even. Outsiders often called villagers by derisory names, such as Radish or Carrot or Lettuce or Rapunzel, depending on what each family grew. Mother Gothel's largest field was planted with rapunzel. My parents grew chick-peas and tomatoes, so you can see what sort of fate I escaped from. Not so terrible, I think now, but as a child I should have been quite unhappy to be called, "Tomato."
The year I was born, there was a terrible drought and food became scarce. My parents got by on what food my father could buy, but the village gardens were soon depleted. Soon, the only place to get food were the fields to the west of the village. They were owned by an old woman that the villagers knew as Mother Gothel. She had several businesses in some of the larger towns, and had used its profits to procure some land. Some said she was a witch and her fields charmed since they had fared better than the rest of the village's. Several men, my father among them, staged raids on her fields in the middle of the night with varying degrees of success and were chased off by dogs and the old woman herself with her staff.
Finally, the town council called a meeting and the villagers voiced their concerns to which Mother Gothel turned a deaf ear. "What is it to me," she said, "if all of you were to die from hunger? Why should I support a village full of thieves? I am an old woman."
"Witch!" the villagers called. "Fiend!"
"What do you want?" the mayor pleaded.
"The baker's daughter, the miller's daughter, and the tanner's daughter," she said promptly, and the village fell silent. She owned two brothels in other cities.
"Never!" the tanner said passionately. "My daughter is to be married in the Spring."
"Mine likewise!" cried the baker.
"And mine!" said the miller. At least, this is the manner in which the old woman always recounted the story to me.
"Starve with your daughters and then we shall see how many weddings there will be!" she replied.
But there was no budging from the fathers, and finally the old woman said, "Very well. The cobbler's youngest two, and the blacksmith's unborn babe."
There was no protest. The cobbler had ten children, and his youngest were less loved than their brothers and sisters and prone to illnesses. My father said nothing; he had been caught too many times in her fields, and he did not know yet what it felt like to part with a child.
So, the old woman would tell me, I made an excellent bargain for the cobbler's daughters were comely enough, but I was bound to be a beauty with such a mother.
The village lived off of her fields until they were picked clean. Once the drought had ended, she tired of our little village, and we three girls grew up in Mother Gothel's city house. She eventually sold the two girls in another city once they turned ten and eleven. I ate less than the others and, she often told me, her strained nerves were soothed by my singing.
I was twelve when I started working in Mother Gothel's city brothel. It was a tall building with four floors, and I was given a room on the topmost floor. So, you see, it was not really a tower at all, and there was certainly a staircase. There were, in fact, two; a front and a back. The back stairs wound up the side of the building but no one used it because it was old and rickety, yellow paint peeling and flaking with age. Mother had a man keep watch out the back so no girl could escape nor any stingy man stint Mother her pay in the front.
I worked for two years before I met the prince.
One day, when I had finished working, I took down my hair - which was long enough to fall mid-back, but certainly nowhere near long enough to serve as a rope - as I sat by my window and was surprised the next instant to find a man there.
My window was open so he climbed through. "So this is what a common whore's room is like."
"How did you get past Mother's man?"
"Oh, him? I asked him to step aside."
"So you haven't paid?" I asked him, annoyed by his rudeness. I recognized him from his profile on silver coins and idle gossip between customers. He was, they said, unhappily married and expecting his first child.
"Pay?" he said, and laughed. "I am the prince of this country! Why should I need to pay?"
"Everyone has to pay."
"Not I." He looked displeased at my lack of subservience.
"Then I shall scream and you shall be disgraced." I did not care whether he was a prince or a king. If he was found in my room after hours, it was I who would be beaten.
"I haven't any money," he said, looking at me. "I will give you my handkerchief and you will show me whether your services are worth the price of a coin."
The handkerchief was of a high-grade silk and delicately embroidered. It was certainly worth quite a bit of coin and as the prince was unlikely to leave without getting what he wanted, I acceded. We have to put up with a lot of nonsense in our line of business.
He was pleased enough that he returned the following night and began to make a habit of visiting. He waited, he said, for me to take down my hair. It was in a moment of whimsy that he recited that infamous verse:
Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair,
So that I might climb that golden stair.
Really, there was nothing romantic about my story. He came to sate his lust and complain about his wife, and I thought it too much trouble to take him to task. And no matter how many times he came, he only paid with a silk hankerchief, which I thought was rather cheap of him. However, Mother would check our rooms for squirreled away coins, and handkerchiefs were much easier to hide. I even entertained the notion that I might save up a great many and buy my own freedom. That, probably would take as long as waiting for Gerald to fulfill his promise.
I was very fond of Gerald. He was a well-known gold worker who made a respectable living. He heard me singing one morning while passing on the street. He visited when he could and we spoke often of our dreams. He had so many for us. "But they will not," he told me apologetically, "come to fruition for a while."
Gerald was going blind. There was a man who knew how restore sight to the blind, or repair failing eyes, but his fee was exorbitant. Gerald, his services so highly in demand, was amassing it, bit by bit.
"When my affliction is cured," he told me cheerfully, "then I will earn the money to buy your freedom."
I humored him and loved him, but not for an instant did I believe. Many men had told me much the same and they were all liars. Gerald, I thought, did not mean to lie, but sooner or later he would settle down with a nice village girl and forget that he had ever made such a promise.
One day Mother Gothel came to my room.
"You've grown fat," she said. "Whose child do you carry?"
I shrugged.
"Who is the father?" she snapped.
"I don't know."
She looked at me before rummaging through my things. She pulled out square after square of embroidered silk. "You must have conceived during the week we took holiday, and you had no customers then."
Ah, I thought to myself. So I had been caught at last.
"Hans told me there'd been a man to see you nearly every night, but he would not tell. Speak now!"
"The prince," I said, plainly.
Her hands stilled and she spat, "Stupid, stupid girl!"
"I didn't want him."
"We cannot kill the child for fear of his displeasure. You cannot work as you are, and after the child is born what shall I do with it? Make a gift of it to prince and wife? We cannot raise it, nor can it work within these walls. You have made quite a nuisance altogether!"
"So what is to become of me?"
"I do not know! You would be better off dead!"
At that moment, the door to my room opened and Gerald said, "I will pay for Genevieve's freedom."
Mother took it as a sign. She took care to squeeze every last penny but sent me away with a smile. "To be sure, child, I will tell your prince that you have gone to some place I do not know."
The morning we left, I cut my hair and left it and my former life behind me.
We passed through many lands, but eventually came to a place that Gerald had spoken of often. It was an isolated spot, close to mountains whose names I still do not know. With the last of his sight, he built us a home and we settled as best as we could.
We passed many years in that tiny cottage in that far away country before the prince found us.
That day Gerald was catching fish in the river and I was singing as I hung clothes to dry. The children were inside.
He rode up to the house alone. His retinue stayed behind.
"Your Highness," I said, curtseying. My hands were shaking.
"Ah," he said, "I would recognize that voice anywhere!"
"How did you find us?"
"Mother Gothel is a very wise woman."
So she had sold us out, had she? How typical.
"A word?"
"If you wish," I told him. He followed me inside.
My children stared at the visitor.
"Mother must speak to her guest. Run along."
The obeyed, my son taking his sister's hand and leading her outside.
He watched them run out the door. "What lovely children. How old are they? Is the boy mine?"
The boy is Gerald's and he is certainly a handsome lad, big and healthy as an ox. The girl is his, my poor, tiny girl child, born too early. She is beautiful, delicate and fair as any princess, and we worried constantly. They were born ten months apart and alike as two peas in a pod. We have always treated them as though they were born together so I said, "They are both mine and eight years old."
Satisfied, he drank in the sight of them trying to pet his horse and shrieking with laughter when it snorted and stamped its hoof.
"What do you want?" I asked.
"I propose a bargain," the prince said, and I could see how the years have changed him. His face was lined with troubles and his eyes were tired. "Perhaps you have heard of the many misfortunes that have beset me. My wife died in childbirth and my son grew ill and followed her. My second wife was barren and I have since divorced her. My life has been full of woe."
I bit my tongue to keep from telling him that other people's troubles were as heavy as his own.
"However," he continued, "after much thought, I have hit upon a solution that shall work very well indeed. I shall marry you and our son will be king. People shall have no objections to such an healthy heir." He looked pleased.
"No," I responded firmly.
"What?" he sputtered. "I will make a queen of you, you a whore. And our son shall one day be King!"
"I am already married. My son wants to be a fisherman and travel the river to the sea and back."
"Married?" he repeated, and shook his head. "A poor sort of marriage it is. If you value your husband, then you will listen: there is a man who can restore his eyesight. It is more money than either of you will ever see, but I will pay it if you and the children come with me."
What could I have said? My greatest regret has always been Gerald's sacrifice. Never once had he ever spoken a word about his lost dreams. Did I love him so little as to deny him this chance?
"The girl child," the prince said, pressing on, "does not look too strong. She has the look of my dead wife about her. I will have my finest physicians attend to her until she is like her brother. I will deck you in jewels and finery to your heart's content until all the world believes you a princess. I will treat you well far better than your husband."
As I opened my mouth the reply that that was impossible, my husband spoke from the doorway, "You must go with him."
I could see that he had not heard the prince speak of restoring his sight, but was thinking only of the child, the daughter that was not even of his own blood, and tears sprang to my eyes.
"It is settled," the prince said in the silence that followed. "I will send for you and the children in the morning."
He clapped Gerald on the shoulder as he passed him in the doorway.
We had nothing to say to one another, afterwards, but that night, when the children were fast asleep, we made love to one another for the last time. No jewels or fine things were worth more than this man's love. Even if I could give him back his sight in return for all that he had given me, it would still be too little to ever show him the depth of my regard.
I wept when I left him, the children crowding around us, eager for a journey and confused as to why their father wasn't coming with us. Even as Gerald clung to me, he kissed their little faces and told them to behave for their mother and to live happy and contented lives. They nodded and laughed, little understanding the import of his words. I could only kiss him again and again in my sorrow and pray for his happiness.
I am now Queen. I no longer sing, but from time to time, I hear stories of a man with restored vision who travels the land and my heart sings its own song. He is doing well, it seems, and when my children are grown, I will join him, and we will go far, far away and seek out our happiness once again. My son, like his sister, treasures the memory of his father. Someday, when they are older, I will tell them the real story of Rapunzel and the only man who truly loved her.
the end
email: tokyofish [at] gmail.com
Everybody thinks they know my story. My name is Rapunzel, I was raised by a witch, I ensorcelled a king with my beauty, and my hair is very long.
Of these, two are falsehoods and one is a truth.
Oh, and there is the rhyme, I suppose. Everyone remembers the rhyme.
"Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair,
So that I might climb that golden stair."
Two truths, then.
My name is Genevieve. Growing up, people called me Rapunzel. 'People?' you ask. 'Didn't you live all alone in a high tower in the middle of a forest?'
Some versions get this right. There was certainly a sort of tower, but it wasn't in the forest and I didn't go there until I was twelve.
Perhaps I ought to have begun from the very beginning. My parents lived in a little village far to the South. My mother was very beautiful woman. Everyone says so. She was even courted by a nobleman, but my mother ended up in a village ten miles away from the one she had been born in and married to a young blacksmith.
There was nothing special about this village, save for the fact that it yielded the most delicious produce in the country. Why, even the raw ingredients for the King's daily salad came from it. Each household had its own garden, even. Outsiders often called villagers by derisory names, such as Radish or Carrot or Lettuce or Rapunzel, depending on what each family grew. Mother Gothel's largest field was planted with rapunzel. My parents grew chick-peas and tomatoes, so you can see what sort of fate I escaped from. Not so terrible, I think now, but as a child I should have been quite unhappy to be called, "Tomato."
The year I was born, there was a terrible drought and food became scarce. My parents got by on what food my father could buy, but the village gardens were soon depleted. Soon, the only place to get food were the fields to the west of the village. They were owned by an old woman that the villagers knew as Mother Gothel. She had several businesses in some of the larger towns, and had used its profits to procure some land. Some said she was a witch and her fields charmed since they had fared better than the rest of the village's. Several men, my father among them, staged raids on her fields in the middle of the night with varying degrees of success and were chased off by dogs and the old woman herself with her staff.
Finally, the town council called a meeting and the villagers voiced their concerns to which Mother Gothel turned a deaf ear. "What is it to me," she said, "if all of you were to die from hunger? Why should I support a village full of thieves? I am an old woman."
"Witch!" the villagers called. "Fiend!"
"What do you want?" the mayor pleaded.
"The baker's daughter, the miller's daughter, and the tanner's daughter," she said promptly, and the village fell silent. She owned two brothels in other cities.
"Never!" the tanner said passionately. "My daughter is to be married in the Spring."
"Mine likewise!" cried the baker.
"And mine!" said the miller. At least, this is the manner in which the old woman always recounted the story to me.
"Starve with your daughters and then we shall see how many weddings there will be!" she replied.
But there was no budging from the fathers, and finally the old woman said, "Very well. The cobbler's youngest two, and the blacksmith's unborn babe."
There was no protest. The cobbler had ten children, and his youngest were less loved than their brothers and sisters and prone to illnesses. My father said nothing; he had been caught too many times in her fields, and he did not know yet what it felt like to part with a child.
So, the old woman would tell me, I made an excellent bargain for the cobbler's daughters were comely enough, but I was bound to be a beauty with such a mother.
The village lived off of her fields until they were picked clean. Once the drought had ended, she tired of our little village, and we three girls grew up in Mother Gothel's city house. She eventually sold the two girls in another city once they turned ten and eleven. I ate less than the others and, she often told me, her strained nerves were soothed by my singing.
I was twelve when I started working in Mother Gothel's city brothel. It was a tall building with four floors, and I was given a room on the topmost floor. So, you see, it was not really a tower at all, and there was certainly a staircase. There were, in fact, two; a front and a back. The back stairs wound up the side of the building but no one used it because it was old and rickety, yellow paint peeling and flaking with age. Mother had a man keep watch out the back so no girl could escape nor any stingy man stint Mother her pay in the front.
I worked for two years before I met the prince.
One day, when I had finished working, I took down my hair - which was long enough to fall mid-back, but certainly nowhere near long enough to serve as a rope - as I sat by my window and was surprised the next instant to find a man there.
My window was open so he climbed through. "So this is what a common whore's room is like."
"How did you get past Mother's man?"
"Oh, him? I asked him to step aside."
"So you haven't paid?" I asked him, annoyed by his rudeness. I recognized him from his profile on silver coins and idle gossip between customers. He was, they said, unhappily married and expecting his first child.
"Pay?" he said, and laughed. "I am the prince of this country! Why should I need to pay?"
"Everyone has to pay."
"Not I." He looked displeased at my lack of subservience.
"Then I shall scream and you shall be disgraced." I did not care whether he was a prince or a king. If he was found in my room after hours, it was I who would be beaten.
"I haven't any money," he said, looking at me. "I will give you my handkerchief and you will show me whether your services are worth the price of a coin."
The handkerchief was of a high-grade silk and delicately embroidered. It was certainly worth quite a bit of coin and as the prince was unlikely to leave without getting what he wanted, I acceded. We have to put up with a lot of nonsense in our line of business.
He was pleased enough that he returned the following night and began to make a habit of visiting. He waited, he said, for me to take down my hair. It was in a moment of whimsy that he recited that infamous verse:
Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair,
So that I might climb that golden stair.
Really, there was nothing romantic about my story. He came to sate his lust and complain about his wife, and I thought it too much trouble to take him to task. And no matter how many times he came, he only paid with a silk hankerchief, which I thought was rather cheap of him. However, Mother would check our rooms for squirreled away coins, and handkerchiefs were much easier to hide. I even entertained the notion that I might save up a great many and buy my own freedom. That, probably would take as long as waiting for Gerald to fulfill his promise.
I was very fond of Gerald. He was a well-known gold worker who made a respectable living. He heard me singing one morning while passing on the street. He visited when he could and we spoke often of our dreams. He had so many for us. "But they will not," he told me apologetically, "come to fruition for a while."
Gerald was going blind. There was a man who knew how restore sight to the blind, or repair failing eyes, but his fee was exorbitant. Gerald, his services so highly in demand, was amassing it, bit by bit.
"When my affliction is cured," he told me cheerfully, "then I will earn the money to buy your freedom."
I humored him and loved him, but not for an instant did I believe. Many men had told me much the same and they were all liars. Gerald, I thought, did not mean to lie, but sooner or later he would settle down with a nice village girl and forget that he had ever made such a promise.
One day Mother Gothel came to my room.
"You've grown fat," she said. "Whose child do you carry?"
I shrugged.
"Who is the father?" she snapped.
"I don't know."
She looked at me before rummaging through my things. She pulled out square after square of embroidered silk. "You must have conceived during the week we took holiday, and you had no customers then."
Ah, I thought to myself. So I had been caught at last.
"Hans told me there'd been a man to see you nearly every night, but he would not tell. Speak now!"
"The prince," I said, plainly.
Her hands stilled and she spat, "Stupid, stupid girl!"
"I didn't want him."
"We cannot kill the child for fear of his displeasure. You cannot work as you are, and after the child is born what shall I do with it? Make a gift of it to prince and wife? We cannot raise it, nor can it work within these walls. You have made quite a nuisance altogether!"
"So what is to become of me?"
"I do not know! You would be better off dead!"
At that moment, the door to my room opened and Gerald said, "I will pay for Genevieve's freedom."
Mother took it as a sign. She took care to squeeze every last penny but sent me away with a smile. "To be sure, child, I will tell your prince that you have gone to some place I do not know."
The morning we left, I cut my hair and left it and my former life behind me.
We passed through many lands, but eventually came to a place that Gerald had spoken of often. It was an isolated spot, close to mountains whose names I still do not know. With the last of his sight, he built us a home and we settled as best as we could.
We passed many years in that tiny cottage in that far away country before the prince found us.
That day Gerald was catching fish in the river and I was singing as I hung clothes to dry. The children were inside.
He rode up to the house alone. His retinue stayed behind.
"Your Highness," I said, curtseying. My hands were shaking.
"Ah," he said, "I would recognize that voice anywhere!"
"How did you find us?"
"Mother Gothel is a very wise woman."
So she had sold us out, had she? How typical.
"A word?"
"If you wish," I told him. He followed me inside.
My children stared at the visitor.
"Mother must speak to her guest. Run along."
The obeyed, my son taking his sister's hand and leading her outside.
He watched them run out the door. "What lovely children. How old are they? Is the boy mine?"
The boy is Gerald's and he is certainly a handsome lad, big and healthy as an ox. The girl is his, my poor, tiny girl child, born too early. She is beautiful, delicate and fair as any princess, and we worried constantly. They were born ten months apart and alike as two peas in a pod. We have always treated them as though they were born together so I said, "They are both mine and eight years old."
Satisfied, he drank in the sight of them trying to pet his horse and shrieking with laughter when it snorted and stamped its hoof.
"What do you want?" I asked.
"I propose a bargain," the prince said, and I could see how the years have changed him. His face was lined with troubles and his eyes were tired. "Perhaps you have heard of the many misfortunes that have beset me. My wife died in childbirth and my son grew ill and followed her. My second wife was barren and I have since divorced her. My life has been full of woe."
I bit my tongue to keep from telling him that other people's troubles were as heavy as his own.
"However," he continued, "after much thought, I have hit upon a solution that shall work very well indeed. I shall marry you and our son will be king. People shall have no objections to such an healthy heir." He looked pleased.
"No," I responded firmly.
"What?" he sputtered. "I will make a queen of you, you a whore. And our son shall one day be King!"
"I am already married. My son wants to be a fisherman and travel the river to the sea and back."
"Married?" he repeated, and shook his head. "A poor sort of marriage it is. If you value your husband, then you will listen: there is a man who can restore his eyesight. It is more money than either of you will ever see, but I will pay it if you and the children come with me."
What could I have said? My greatest regret has always been Gerald's sacrifice. Never once had he ever spoken a word about his lost dreams. Did I love him so little as to deny him this chance?
"The girl child," the prince said, pressing on, "does not look too strong. She has the look of my dead wife about her. I will have my finest physicians attend to her until she is like her brother. I will deck you in jewels and finery to your heart's content until all the world believes you a princess. I will treat you well far better than your husband."
As I opened my mouth the reply that that was impossible, my husband spoke from the doorway, "You must go with him."
I could see that he had not heard the prince speak of restoring his sight, but was thinking only of the child, the daughter that was not even of his own blood, and tears sprang to my eyes.
"It is settled," the prince said in the silence that followed. "I will send for you and the children in the morning."
He clapped Gerald on the shoulder as he passed him in the doorway.
We had nothing to say to one another, afterwards, but that night, when the children were fast asleep, we made love to one another for the last time. No jewels or fine things were worth more than this man's love. Even if I could give him back his sight in return for all that he had given me, it would still be too little to ever show him the depth of my regard.
I wept when I left him, the children crowding around us, eager for a journey and confused as to why their father wasn't coming with us. Even as Gerald clung to me, he kissed their little faces and told them to behave for their mother and to live happy and contented lives. They nodded and laughed, little understanding the import of his words. I could only kiss him again and again in my sorrow and pray for his happiness.
I am now Queen. I no longer sing, but from time to time, I hear stories of a man with restored vision who travels the land and my heart sings its own song. He is doing well, it seems, and when my children are grown, I will join him, and we will go far, far away and seek out our happiness once again. My son, like his sister, treasures the memory of his father. Someday, when they are older, I will tell them the real story of Rapunzel and the only man who truly loved her.
the end