Free Fairytales for Wilde Girls by Allyse Near

face. ‘ Lady of the Unicorns? The Seventh Princess? Talismans? The Wolf Prince ?’
    â€˜Edgar!’ shrieked a small girl who was bouncing on a trampoline and surveying the vast woodland behind the house with every jump. Isola recognised her piercing pitch: the screamer. ‘Edgar, I can see them! They’re running into the trees!’
    â€˜What happened?’ asked Isola.
    â€˜Come look.’ Edgar led her over to the crater in the yard. She expected to find a pulsing meteor or a NASA-stamped fallen satellite, but all she saw was a network of half-collapsed catacombs.
    â€˜We tried to plant an apple tree for Mum and accidentally caved in a rabbit burrow. They all came scrambling out like fluffy zombies – Portia flipped. That’s her,’ he added, pointing at the bouncing girl with brunette pigtails whipping the air like helicopter blades. ‘She’s six. You met Cassio, he’s ten. Don’t worry, he hates everyone.’
    Isola had never looked at Edgar this closely in natural light. He matched his slouch with a nervous air, like a groom left at the altar forever ago. She envisioned a beautiful girl trailing lace and a honey-gold veil as she ran down the aisle, leaving Edgar alone in his rented suit, a lilac in his buttonhole, a chip on his shoulder.
    His face was a ghost story: graveyard eyes, cheekbones as sharp as urban legends, a sealed-coffin mouth. The grin was not forced, but seemed so out of place. Isola didn’t understand how he did it. For her, trying to force happiness was like slipping on a ring a size too small – she’d spend the rest of the day trying to pull it off.
    â€˜This is the girl from Number Thirty-six, Portia,’ announced Edgar. ‘The house with the shiny tree you like so much. She says her name’s Annabel Lee.’
    â€˜It’s not. I’m Isola,’ she called.
    â€˜Edgar drew you,’ said Portia matter-of-factly, with the honesty of the innocent. ‘In his book; I know, I saw .’ She stopped bouncing and sunk into the mat, her windswept pigtails settling over her shoulders, and added, ‘I think he likes you!’

 
    Wings and Wanderings
    Mother was crying so softly, like the overtures before a musical. Isola opened her music box and listened to the nameless tune – it had no company branding, no scrawl to number the opera the melody had been borrowed from – and waited for the noise in the walls to grow silent.
    Late night telly – the insomniac’s battleground. The newsreaders were still wearing roses in their lapels, a smidgen of extra blush settling in the hollows of their cheeks. They were discussing the previous month’s teen suicide, and its tragic broadcast by a morally bankrupt rival network. They were making a list of Things We Must Do, strapping on their preaching armour in the quest to save the youth from themselves, thudding their fists against the desk, firing off bulletpoints. Bullying drugs sex depression divorce the internet the media the government the filth they play on that wicked rival network, all of it to blame!
    Isola went downstairs for a glass of water. Father was awake, jaundiced in the streetlight and staring out the living-room window at the dolled-up plum tree. His arms were clasped behind his back and he looked uncomfortable as he always did when faced with proof of Isola’s eccentricities. Isola knew he grew doubly cross whenever Mother encouraged it.
    She waited until he closed the curtain and padded back to his bed before she crept mouse-quiet upstairs, tugging her dressing gown closer.
    She wasn’t sure why she bothered to sneak about. He never noticed anything.
    Â 
    Walking to school the next day, Isola was starting to think that the unicorns had moved on. They had been endangered in this forest for some time now. She would not blame the stragglers if they followed on.
    She tried not to think about the cage with the body inside,