Fairytales for Wilde Girls by Allyse Near EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available for Free Download
- Author: Allyse Near
- Language: English
- Genre:Fairy Tales
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 2 MB
- Price: Free
The Seventh Princess
‘Believe only half of what you see
and nothing that you hear.’
– Edgar Allan Poe
Death Meets Isola Wilde
Once upon a time, Isola Wilde was watching late-night television with her
eldest brother, Alejandro, when Channel 12 broadcast a live suicide.
The teenage boy in his leather jacket had hair the colour of desert dust and
freckles like actual spots of desert dust. The news camera zoomed, and he
blurred then sharpened, a drunken vision.
Isola Wilde’s shoulders tensed. Her hands curled into sucker-punch fists.
Intrinsically, she knew this boy. He knew her.
They had never met.
He was at a county fair an hour north of Isola’s hometown, Avalon. The
boy had clambered from his fairy-lit gondola at the top of the Ferris wheel
and stood amongst the network of steel. He didn’t look frightened. He
wasn’t even shaking.
A crowd had gathered, forming an ouroboros around the Ferris wheel.
Some pointed their phones and cameras at him, recording his silent last
words. His Aladdin eyes flickered like candlelight – at the earth he’d soon
slam into, at the news camera fixed on him – and he stared through the
television to Isola, who met his gaze with rapt attention.
Her: curled up in a pile of pillows, in her striped socks and summery
bloomers, gnawing on her necklace chain.
Him: standing at the precipice.
Then the boy was falling, and the air whistled around his plummeting
body like somebody saying, I love you.
Too late, Alejandro realised and reacted. He ducked over Isola as though
to shield her from the impact, as though he could take the folly of gravity
upon himself.
At the top of the Ferris wheel, the empty carriage rocked with the
momentum of his jump. Or maybe that was his ghost, already taking up
residence, cursed to ride the glittering Ferris wheel forever.
There are worse destinies to be had, Isola supposed, as Alejandro
apologised profusely for a death he didn’t die, as the crowd’s screams were
intercut with shots of frazzled newsreaders pawing loose their ties that
seemed suddenly like nooses.
Isola Wilde was watching television with her brother Alejandro.
She was an only child.
Dramatis Personae
ISOLA WILDE: Sixteen. Unnatural blonde. Avalon’s
resident ingénue misfit.
MOTHER WILDE: Gemini. Middle-aged and still
beautiful, whose dazzle has dimmed in the years
since her diagnosis. Likes washing down her sundry
medications with Dickensian helpings of gin.
FATHER WILDE: Tradesman. Bearded. Once nicked
a few of his wife’s pills to see if life looked any better
from the middle of the haze. Disappointed to learn it
just looked foggier.
Curtain Up – A Setting
EXT. AVALON, a mousy village on the south-west English coast, sunk at
the bottom of a valley, ringed in scrubby woodland and leviathan hills.
The highest hill was dense with VIVIEN’S WOOD, deigned haunted by
superstitious townsfolk and merely creepy by the sceptics. An unpaved road
around the woodland was the only means of access, unless one wanted to
tackle the hour-long trek through the rambling woods. Nobody did, except
For More Read Download This Book
EPUB