Alice Trapped (An Excerpt)

Revised January 31, 2006.

I was a beautiful seamstress.

I made corsets for royalty.

I had a nightingale for a husband. He was such a handsome little bird. He would make me lovely pancake breakfasts. He liked to sing to me in bed.

I was sewing a blue corset for her highness the Duchess of Danish. It was done up in silk and diamonds, with laces that I'd made to look exactly like twining sampaguita vines. When I presented it to her highness for inspection, she was most satisfied, until her own husband, the Dutch of Danish (who looked like a puff pastry with ears), saw her in it.

"I banish you from my kingdom," he screamed at me, "how dare you make the Duchess look like a jungle woman!"

The Duchess begged him to reconsider, but his mind was set. He ripped the corset off of her. He threw it at me, and then had his guards hustle me out of his castle.

The Duchess had secretly slipped us one-way tickets to Albany. We were on our way to the Danish Puff Pastry Airport (where all the airplanes looked like giant croissants with wings and wheels). It was high noon by the time we reached the bridge.

There, an old woman asked us if we had any food to spare. We only had a jug of wine and a round of foccacia bread that we'd hoped would last us the whole 8-hour trip. Pitying her, we gave them to her anyway.

She threw off her cloak, and produced a magic wand from inside her skirt.

You are kind, lovely people, she said, I will grant you your most heartfelt wish.

We asked that my husband be turned back into a man. She waved her wand, and in a blink, he was back to his old self: the smiling, spectacled professor I'd met back in Seamstress University. After we were married, he was cursed by a witch to become a nightingale because he had tried to disprove the authenticity of black magic in Danishlandia.

After we crossed the bridge, we kissed each other, my bird-man and I.

To my surprise, I began to grow wings, then a beak, then I felt myself flying high, high above them all.

I was transformed.