Fairy Tale Ending

by Nina Shepardson

If I’m a witch, so is Evelyn, Clarissa thought as they tied her to the stake. Her younger sister had always gotten away with everything. She thought her pretty face and sweet voice were the only contributions she needed to make to the family. If anyone asked her to do even the simplest chore, she acted as if she’d been ordered into exile.

She must have known what the old woman was. That was the only explanation for her generosity toward the crone. Seeing her struggling with a heavy basket, Evelyn offered to carry it back to her house. Once there, she’d swept the house, cooked the old woman’s dinner, and mended her clothing. In return, the woman had promised that jewels and flowers would spill from Evelyn’s lips whenever she spoke.

And they did. Because the gems brought money to the village, people ignored the odd shapes of their facets and the faint music that ensued from staring into them for too long. Because the flowers were beautiful, the townsfolk pretended not to notice the way their petals flexed in the absence of any breeze.

Clarissa had seen through the crone right away. She might be old, but she wasn’t infirm. Nothing stopped her from sweeping her own floor or cooking her own supper. Clarissa demanded to know who she was, where she was from, why no one in town had ever seen her before. Finally, the woman got fed up and proclaimed that spiders and toads would leap from Clarissa’s mouth whenever she spoke.

And they did. They weren’t pretty or valuable, so Clarissa’s fellow citizens decided she must be a witch. Evelyn tried to intercede for her, but when Clarissa grudgingly thanked her sister, a toad-like thing with a mass of writhing tentacles where its eyes should have been squirmed between her lips and launched itself at Goodman Heinrich’s face. The horrified townsfolk stuffed a rag in her mouth and dragged her away, and none of them noticed the toad sliding its tentacles into the heart of one of Evelyn’s flowers to drink its nectar.

Clarissa tried to work the gag out of her mouth but had no luck. She struggled against the ropes holding her to the stake, but the knots held. She held back a whimper as Heinrich approached with a torch, not wanting some monstrosity to be trapped in her mouth.

She couldn’t stay quiet when the flames reached her. The thing that appeared in her mouth as she screamed felt much bigger than the others. Razor-sharp claws shredded the gag (and Clarissa’s tongue). Serves you all right, she thought as the creature slipped away, unbothered by the fire. More were crowding behind it, birthed by her howls, slithering and crawling and lurching toward her betrayers. Evelyn stood at the back of the crowd, flowers tumbling from her lips as she wailed. Serves you right.

Nina Shepardson is a scientist and avid birdwatcher. Her short fiction appears in On Spec, MetaStellar, and Utopia Science Fiction Magazine, among others. She's an Active Member of SFWA and a member of the Codex Writers Group. She occasionally blogs about tea, birds, and books at ninashepardson.substack.com.