Ms. Bunny reads! A new FREE colouring sheet from me to you!

I have a new colouring sheet for you today, this one is perfect for all the bookworms out there who love to snuggle down with a stack of books!

A new colouring page!

My second FREE colouring page is completed! 

This time, Ms. Bunny is baking in her pretty little kitchen! 

Ms. Bunny baking.

A Midsummer love story...

by Holly Cox

Roses.

Dense and deep at the heart of the wood roses grew. White roses mingled with red roses whose sharper thorns tore the petals of the white. They seemed to spread and flex the moment anyone drew close.

When Jean was young and filled with curiosity he would run off into the woods and play beneath the branches of the rose bushes.

Time and again he pestered the woodsman Franz until he told him the story of those roses.

'At the center of those roses,' Franz said, 'there lies a sleeper.'

'A tomb?' Jean asked. He knew the soft words people said when they meant death. He could imagine how a tomb, once lovingly planted with roses, could become so overgrown.

'No,' Franz said. 'A sleeper; one day, someone will approach and wake him.'

'Oh?' Jean was not sure he believed this story but he wanted to believe it.

'At the center of those roses, so they say, lies an enchanted Prince,' the woodsman frowned and hefted his axe. 'But who knows if the story is true or not.'

'Have you never seen it for yourself?'

'No, the roses will not let me near.' The woodsman gestured for Jean to watch as he swung his axe down on the mass of roses which strayed over the borders of the path. They swayed for a second and then, where the blade had struck, fresh shoots erupted each tipped with a tight red bud.

'Whatever lies within, it is touched by magic. That much I know for sure. The woodsman hefted his axe onto his shoulder and walked away humming an old country wedding tune. Yet it seemed to Jean that he the roses whispered to him, whenever he drew near he heard them saying;

‘Come to me, my love. Come to me.’

Jean stayed a moment longer and then he had gone home into the setting sun.

Years passed. Jean grew out of his habit of playing in the woods and applied himself to his studies instead. He forgot the roses and the woodsman's fairy tale till one evening, Midsummer Eve as it so happens; returning home from the University at which he studied Jean had cause to pause in the shade of those woods. He should have hurried through them, for at night the trees creaked and the shadows howled and it was all too easy to lose ones way. Ah, but Jean was a rational young man, student bold and brave. Jean did not hurry.

The roses were still there; growing in greater abundance than before. They bowed invitingly to Jean as he approached. The blooms so vivid; so mingled in their red and white he could not resist temptation but reached out a finger to touch them. The rose he touched was white as snow but beneath his finger it flushed as bright as a maiden's cheeks. How beautiful Jean thought and he touched the next bloom and the next till they were all flushed beneath his hand. Flushed their petals fell. With a creak the stems of the roses drew back. Dry bark sighed against dry bark. How could this be? Jean reached out again. He touched the bark of a branch but it shrank away from him. He watched the branches wither and part into the unmistakable shape of a passageway.

He recalled the story and he hesitated. One day, someone would come to awaken the Prince. However, even if there was any truth in the story that person would not be him. He was not a prince or even a nobleman. No, he was a poor student who would, in the fullness of time, inherit a bakery in the town.

Yet the roses parted to grant him entry.

He put one foot on the hearth and then, feeling a little bolder, he stepped all the way into the passageway. It was dark ahead of him; he put out his hand to feel the way and felt the rose thorns prick his skin. He feared that the entrance would vanish behind him; he feared that the roses would swallow him up but the woods remained behind him, twilight blue and full of noises. He took a few slow steps forward; he felt the prick of thorns with each step. There was a light up ahead, a flickering lantern flame whose light fell on a stone wall and a door of metal furnished oak.

There was a ring on the door and he reached for it. The door fell open at his touch. Dust hung in the air before him, bright sparks in the light of torches that ringed the walls of a large circular chamber. At the center of the room stood a dais draped in velvet which must once have been sublime but had succumbed to the passage of time and hung in dusty folds. All of this must have been here for some time yet the torches still burned and perfume scented the air.

'It cannot be.' Jean said to himself and he half expected that it would all fall away then like the figments of a dream. Nothing moved. He looked at the dais again and he saw, resting on the velvet, an object both beautiful and horrible: a glass coffin. Within the smooth crystal walls he could make out the shape of a body. Jean stepped back, he did not mind admitting that even his rational mind was afraid of the decay time must have wrought. However, fascination got the better of him. He stepped forward and was astounded to see the body of a young man about his own age and still very much whole. There were spices and solutions he reminded himself that could make a body seem whole for centuries. A clever trick, so carefully done in this instance that he could have sworn the young man was alive. Dark curls tumbled around a fresh face with flushed pink cheeks and lips red as cherries. Jean's footsteps echoed on the floor as he moved closer. He saw the hands of the Prince folded at his waist. He saw the Princes clothes, the style two or three hundred years out of style. He must have lain here that long at least. Jean brushed a little dust from the lid of the coffin. As he did so the whole coffin fell to snow and blew about the room leaving nothing between him and the Prince.

It must have been very fragile after all this time and shattered, Jean told himself. After all, glass does not turn to snow.

He could have sworn he saw the Prince's lips part a little revealing moist pearly teeth. The Prince's nose twitched with breath. Jean leaned forward and stared at these signs of life. He must have lost his footing for a second because in a second his own lips touched the Princes lips; lips deceptively hot as blood. He drew back, reached for the handkerchief in his pocket and dabbed at his lips. He was not a superstitious man in the habit of kissing dead lips and relics.

'At last,' a soft voice whispered, 'you have come!'

The Prince's dark eyes were open and his mouth curved into a smile. He spoke in the most beautiful voice and with each word the roses that choked the windows fell away with a great rustle of leaves. 

'I knew you would come,' The Prince said. His lips pressed; warm, against Jean’s lips. Jean’s arms slowly moved to enfold the prince. Outside the windows of the tower, the roses died away to a last few delicate blooms and the moonlight fell cool upon the tower floor.

On Midsummer Night, by the light of the moon, Jean and the Prince talked and embraced until 

falling asleep, on the cusp of dawn, the sunlight of the longest day found them and warmed them as 

one.   

©Holly Cox 2019

Writing Wednesday... The land of Fairy Tale

I have always been fascinated by Fairy Tales. Something about them sings to the blood. That might be a strange way to describe it but Fairy Tales deal in the elements of existence, blood, water, snow, woods and shadows. They make our dreams flesh and our fears manifest. When I think of fairy tales, I think of a low hanging apple, bright red and crisp but perhaps when one bites into the flesh one will find a pale little worm writhing away from your sharp toothed kiss.
Strange truth, it has been many years since I last found a worm in an apple. Sometimes I find the thin paths they make. Perhaps the worms have begun to tell fairy tales about people and know to run away in fright.
Like many children of the 20th Century my first introduction to fairy tales was through the bright, wide eyed fantasies of Disney. Like many children of the 1990’s my first princess was Belle, heroine of “Beauty and the Beast”. How I wanted to be her!
Strangely, if I try to recall Belle now, almost twenty years after our first encounter I can call to mind only the rose and the bell jar of the film. A few notes of songs linger but it’s the rose I can see clearly. Year by year, the image becomes a little more steampunk, darker and more Victorian.
Interesting, since my relationship with fairy tales did not end with those flickering cinematic images.
I moved on from Disney to my Mothers collection of Arthur Rackham’s Grimm and Angela Barrett’s Snow White, to a world where Queen’s expressions shift imperceptibly like sweet glaciers as they lean out from their windows and marvel at the contrast of a drop of blood on the snow.
From Rackham and Barrett I moved on to Angela Carter and the reinvention of fairy tales, tracked down editions of Grimm’s fairy tales which included those tales which they included in their notebooks and not in their finished editions for the fear of upsetting the children.
Now, I have moved on to Marina Warner and her marvellous analysis of Fairy Tales: “From The Beast to The Blond”. Since this beautiful tome arrived in the post, my second hand edition from 1994 even came with the delightful bonus of newspaper reviews clipped out and tucked in by it’s first owner, I have been fixed to the page absorbing detail after detail.

 From Anne of Austria and Louis XIV’s adulation of St. Anne and childlike spontaneous spirituality influencing the emergence of Fairy Tale culture in 17th Century France (not to mention womens writing and the Frond) to the symbolism of hair in fairy tale, every page one turns overflows with gems a little like a brush through enchanted hair.
The path into the land of fairy is a strange one, as much in the shadows of the woods as in the clearings and who knows where it will finally lead you.
In my case, it has led me back to my own writing. Whilst my first books were very much the product of Victorian Gothic, Stoker and Wilde ran in their blood, my most recent novel and the ideas in my notebooks have been rather more fairy tale than hansom cab in the fog (of course, some have been a little bit of both).
When I write I often begin with an image I know has drifted down from the vast library of fairy tale knowledge. I begin writing with falling snow, a crisp apple, a fat red rose, a monstrous key or a glass coffin dancing in my head. I have developed a slight obsession with a version of “Beauty and the Beast” recorded by the Grimm's called “The Winter Rose” and find it’s themes dropping like snowflakes into my paragraphs. Perhaps that is only natural, after all we now know that audiences have been delighted by that particular story for over 5,000 years just as Cinderella and her lost slipper have struck a note with thousands of generations and across continents. Something old stirs in these tales, maybe we don’t yet know how old? But I’ve played with that idea before, asked if stories so strange might have roots of truth
Once you begin to pursue fairy tales you risk toppling over and falling headlong, like Alice, down a rabbit hole of imagery and allegory, see I am doing it now. I don’t expect to ever be an Angela Carter, to her alone was left some rare knowledge of the human heart. But I cannot help but follow the thread of fairy tales and ask my own questions: what would have happened if Cinderella saved herself, if Sleeping Beauty were a man, if Little Red Riding Hood had not gone into the woods?
Such exploration can take strange paths but they can pay off well, Terry Gilliam’s Brothers Grimm is far from a conventional retelling of fairy tales or of the lives of the brothers themselves but I adore it’s playful inventions and the way it conjures old imagery into fabulous new forms. Authors as disparate as Tanith Lee, Neil Gaiman and Helen Oyeyemi have all done remarkable things with fairy tale building blocks Nothing is set in stone, the fairy tales are not exhausted as a source of inspiration, please do pick them up and have fun, from ancient lips to our modern ears they are still singing.