This morning I woke up with a stranger in my bed. My first instinct was to scream, which I did, then to throw something, which I managed to hold off on. For a minute I didn’t know where I was. But then, “Calm down,” he said, “it’s only me,” and I remembered it was Second Charming, on the run from his boring wife again. Sometimes I wish he came with a warning, like a giant candle that might slowly fill up the room with its light, so that I might remember he was there; that or a rooster, which would probably startle me more than a buck-naked man in my bed. It’d be nicer still if he’d think to get up and climb back out the window before I wake up, but I don’t suppose it’s any use asking for miracles. That’s the problem with being locked in a tower, you know: I’ve been taught a lot of things, but entertaining male guests was not one of them.

Sometimes I think it’s not such a big deal: I live, despite everything. I have fresh air through the window and food appears regularly, and mother doesn’t want me to cut my hair, so I don’t even have to talk to anybody really, except for Second Charming. There’s mother, of course, but that’s another story. Sometimes it actually seems almost all right. But at other times I’m desperate to get out. Second Charming knows me too well, he knows me too much. Knowledge is power, which is only another way of saying control. I don’t want to be known, by him or by anybody. Sometimes, when his snores are echoing off the quietest corners of the room and the lights in the forest seem to flicker and waver, I wonder what it’d be like just to brain him with a frying pan out of nowhere—wouldn’t that give him a surprise?—but I can’t handle whatever comes next. I used to think it was love that stopped me, but now I just think I don’t want to be bothered. And sometimes when I’m alone I lie curled up on the floor by the window, wondering how bad it would be, really, just to step off the sill and out of this world. It would be something to do, anyway. But I don’t want to be bothered with that either. When I’m alone I slip between elation and indifference and rage, and in the gaps I talk to Second Charming and I smile, and smile, while my fingers itch for the frying pan. I could start a war. I could get mother’s head lopped off for human trafficking, wouldn’t that put the wind up her. Or I could sit and sit, or pace and pace, and listen to Second Charming, while the words ooze out of him letter by letter.

Sometimes I’m peaceful at night. Mother tells me that maidens should think about unicorns and flowers and sometimes I try, though maybe it’s hard because I’m not a maiden anymore. But unicorns are boring and flowers make me sneeze, as Second Charming found out, and that usually doesn’t last too long. And still other times I lie awake in stifling night as in dark water, and I wonder how much it matters in the end that I hate mother, that I can’t stand Second Charming, that I want to be free of this mess. Sometimes I wonder if I’ll ever come to terms with him, with any of it. I wonder if it’s normal to feel this way, if all women want to murder the only two people they know, if only to make them stop talking for a minute. And sometimes I wonder how much it matters that First Charming fell through the window and broke on the thorns below, where mother has told me to throw all the trash. Could it have happened to anyone? I don’t know how these things work out. Back to earth with a bump and some blood, and maybe a few tears. I don’t know, I didn’t watch. I went back to my knitting, and when mother came back she said wasn’t I a busy little bee and wasn’t this a cunning little red scarf, and she didn’t say anything about the dead man in the trash and she didn’t even ask me why there was a C knitted into the red. And later I dipped the ends of this scarf into the fire, when mother was gone, and I tossed it out the window and onto the thorns, and watched as their oily smoke rose up to the sky. Ashes to ashes, flesh to smoke. I suppose it doesn’t matter. My world stops at the window; after that nothing is real. This is my everything, this is my life.