A girl is born to loving parents. A king and queen, a noble and his wife, an inventor and his spouse… same story, different versions, and all. are. true. Tragedy strikes the mother– though god, why always the mother? Let it be the father this time. He dies; we need not explain how. The stories never grant their dead women such courtesy.

Her husband dead, the woman remarries. She marries as a clever political maneuver, to keep her throne secure; she marries for new love and the promise that her daughter will have another parent to be loved by; she marries out of desperation for security in a world that grants her little without a ring on her finger.

She is betrayed. The new husband, the step-father, does little to deserve his new titles. He is cruel, he is neglectful, he is absent. Perhaps his wife does not survive, or if she does, she is reduced to a shadow of her old self. This, too, is an old story with many versions.

Then the witch. The woman uncontrolled, the woman powerful, the woman terrible. She comes and she brings fear and magic. The magic is change.

“I give you a gift,” she says, or else, “I curse you.” Perhaps she says, “I curse you,” to the step-father, but to the daughter this is a gift. Words can mean more than one thing; that is their very great power.

“I curse you, girl,” she says. “When you receive true love’s first kiss, you will become a monster. You will be huge and terrible, a threat to all. You will have terror in your face and death in your hands.”

And the girl, she is afraid. But this is not new. She has been afraid for years.

Perhaps she finally flees to the forest, terrified of both her step-father and now herself. She swears off the company of men. Lost and hungry, she thinks she will die, but she is rescued by a company of women with untamed hair and pickaxes in iron-palmed hands. Seven become eight. She finds a home amidst these women. She shares a bed until her own bunk can be built, but by the time the new bed is framed, it isn’t necessary. It’s dangerous for the cursed girl to feel so tenderly towards another person, but this is not a man she is beginning to love, so… surely that’s safe, isn’t it? Surely true love’s kiss exists only between a man and wife; after all, that’s what the stories always said. So one day, she lets herself fall, and they kiss.

Or– perhaps, after the curse, she remains in her home. Cruel as this home and family is, it’s not so simple to just leave. People who say this have never experienced it. She continues to live in the shadows of her own house, flinching at shouts and obeying orders. She scrubs, she cooks, she launders– but in the small private moments, she is gentle still. She feeds the mice and scatters cornmeal for the birds. She coaxes a whipped stray dog to the kitchen doorstep, day by day, giving it food and water and all the time it needs to believe that her hand will not strike it. Slowly, it comes to trust her. The broken tail starts to wag; the sad eyes brighten. And one day, as it lies curled up in her lap in an ash-streaked hearth, the dog lifts its head and timidly licks her cheek.

The curse breaks. The curse breaks. The curse breaks. It always does. It always will. Change is inevitable: that’s the story’s promise.

All this time, the girl has been afraid of becoming a monster. She does not want to hurt others like she has been hurt. But she has been cursed, and now kissed. She grows. She becomes huge, and therefore terrible (isn’t that always the case with women?). She can no longer hide in corners, or be hidden away in locked rooms. She is twice as tall as her step-father, and five times as strong.

She is powerful.

“My, what big hands you have,” the woodswoman whispers, marvelling, her pickaxe-callused fingers wrapped around the girl’s. “What strong arms you have. What long legs you have. I’ve never seen a gem as wonderful and unique as you.”

“Kill the beast!” shouts the step-father, who tripped over the stray dog in the courtyard– and his daughter roars “NO,” rising over the garden wall from where she has been sitting all afternoon feeding her birds and mice. She was afraid of her strength with their fragile bodies in her hands, but now in her rage all she feels is brave.

As the witch said, it is true that her face brings terror to those who look on it. At least, to those who look on it when she is enraged. An angry giant is terrifying to most, but especially to those who have earned her wrath. The only sad thing about this is that the girl had to be made dangerous before her tormentors finally learned respect for her rage and fear.

She stays in the forest, or she goes to the forest. One way or another, the cursed girl ends up there, in the wild, outside of society. Forests are places of power, of un-making and re-making, of disruption and interruption, where rules change and queer things are common. All the stories say this. Forests are for witches, and giant women, and all other monsters.

“She steals babies,” people whisper in town. (But the truth is that it’s not stealing if desperate mothers leave their babies in the forest loam, swaddled against the cold as well as they can be, with notes begging for their protection. Please, I cannot care for this child. Please, he’ll kill her. Please, nobody can know. Please, she’s my firstborn. Please take her like you took the whipped dog, the half-drowned cats, the beaten horse.)

“She kills huntsmen!” people cry in town. (But the truth is that these men were hunting women, runaways and lost girls, or the woodswomen of the mine. Eight have become ten, fourteen, twenty-five. The cursed girl has learned to swing both a pickaxe and a club the size of a tree. She will not let harm come to the new family she has found.)

“She is a beast!” people howl in town. “She has hard, rough skin like scales! She has hair all over! She has a hooked nose! She is dusky, brown, black as night! She is lustful, she is angry, she is unrepentant!” (The truth is, these are not things that make someone a monster.)

The girl knows now that the curse is a gift. Words can mean more than one thing; that is their very great power. Words are magic, and magic is change, and change– thank goodness– is inevitable.