It was dark already, though it wasn’t yet five o’ clock. A short winter day. I’d tell stories until suppertime. Lately, I had taken to revising old fairy tales. Rapunzel, high up in her tower, couldn’t hear the prince so very well. When the prince yelled up, “Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair,” Rapunzel rummaged among bartletts and boscs to hurl down a pear. Cinderella couldn’t hear the clock strike midnight—the chime’s frequency was too high—so in my version of the story, it was the sudden chafe of her old rags emerging beneath her sparkling gown that sent her running from the palace and into the woods. And Snow White missed entirely the knock on the seven dwarves’ little arched door, and it was all for the best, because she never gave entry to the evil queen disguised as an old peddler woman with shiny, magic apples. I was just taking up Rumpelstiltskin when the phone rang. I switched on a favorite book on tape-All of A Kind Family-and took the phone call. It was a mother I’d recently met.
