FAIRY TALE
Sue Allison

Once upon a time there was a girl who had no mother, her mother having died soon after the girl was born. Before the girl was a year old, her father married a beautiful woman who hated and resented the child, though the father didn’t seem to notice. “Do what your mother tells you!” he would say when his daughter complained. Through devices of her own, the girl learned her new mother had put a curse on her. The curse was this: before she turned sixteen, which was the age in those days and that place when a girl could marry and leave home, she would injure herself upon an instrument of domestic utility and die. Since the girl did not know which ordinary apparatus of everyday household use the instrument of her destruction would be, and since she naturally sought to save herself, she shunned them all. She just sat in her room and combed her hair, which got longer every day.

One day, when she was alone, as she usually was, the girl found a frog in the back of her closet and decided to keep him. She put him in an empty shoe box, along with some bread and water, and every once in a while would peek in to see how he was doing. One night when it was so dark no one would have been able to see her even if they had been looking, she climbed out her bedroom window, carrying the box with her. Although the frog was very ugly, even for a frog, the girl had been convinced since the moment she discovered him that that he was a prince in disguise who had come to save her. This is why, even though he retained the appearance of a frog, she loved him anyway and remained loyal to him to the end of her days.