Skin as white as snow, hair as black as coal, and a temperament as warm as a summer day. I doted on her. At my knee, she learned her alphabet. I taught her to play the lute and sing as a princess should. I taught her to embroider. I told her stories, and she listened gravely.

Even then, young as I was, I did not care for the tales that the storytellers told. Even then, I thought their stories were half-truths at best. In their tales, the only thing that mattered about a princess was her beauty-she did not have to be clever or bold or strong. In their tales, a princess who married a prince always lived happily ever after-she was never lonely for her own people, her family and friends.

I did not like the storytellers' tales. So I made up my own stories to tell to the child. I told her of a princess who outsmarted the dragon that carried her off-and rode home in triumph with the dragon's gold. I told her of a peasant girl who planted a magic bean and grew a magic beanstalk. I told her of a little girl in a red hood who fooled a wolf and chopped off his head. In my stories, there were no wicked stepmothers, no helpless but beautiful princesses. In my stories, each princess was clever and kind and bold and strong-as well as beautiful.

The child was seven years old when the king finally won his prolonged war with the kingdom to the west. At the victory dinner, she sat between us. I fed her sweets from my plate, and the king did the same, smiling down at the child.

The next day, the king came to my chambers looking for his daughter. I did not think it strange that he loved the child. How could anyone fail to love her? He bounced her on his knee like any fond father.

Just a few days later, I noticed that something was wrong. Always a fair-skinned child, the princess had grown even paler. She had lost her appetite. She would not eat her dinner. She did not want the treats that I offered her. When I asked her what was wrong, she shook her head, bright tears in her eyes, and did not speak.

I called for the king's doctor, a gruff man more accustomed to performing amputations on the battlefield than to coaxing children to talk of their pains. He thumped her back and peered in her mouth and said there was nothing wrong with the child, she was as healthy as her father. But I knew that something was troubling her.

That night, I woke from a deep sleep, suddenly worried about the child. I don't know why I rose from my bed and threw on my robe. I was cold and frightened and I had to see her.

Wrapped in my robe, I went to the outer chamber where my ladies-in-waiting slept. If one of them had been awake, I might have spoken of my worries and been comforted, but they slept soundly.

I went to the chamber where the child slept, but her bed was empty. The peasant woman who had been nurse to the princess since she was a babe sat in a chair by the bed, her hands busy with her knitting.

"The king's man came for her," she said, before I could ask. Her needles clicked in a furious rhythm and her accent grew broader in her agitation. "He made me get the poor poppet up from bed, so that the king could see her." When she looked up from her knitting, I could see tears glittering in her eyes. "I had to let her go," she said. "I had no choice. I have no power here."

I hurried through the cold, stone corridors. I was near the king's chambers when I heard the sound of a little girl weeping. I paused in the hail, frozen by the sound.

The corridor turned ahead of me. A large mirror hung on the wall. In the mirror, I could see that the curtain that closed off the king's chambers had been carelessly left open. I stood still, staring into the looking glass.

The king sat on his fine bed. In his nightshirt, without his crown and finery, he looked like any other man. The princess sat on his lap, her head bowed. She was weeping softly.

"There now," the king was saying, his voice a low rumble. "Don't cry, little one." As I watched, his rough hand lifted the hem of her nightgown and began stroking her thigh. "Your father's here." I watched, unable to move, as his hand crept higher, exposing more of the child's soft skin. Just seven years old, she was.

Watching her now, I thought of the flower girl who attended me at our wedding. I thought of the look of lust on my husband's face when he saw her walking down the aisle.

"What are you doing here?" I heard a voice behind me. I turned to face one of the king's guard, a young man who had served in the army.

I straightened my back and faced him. "Is that how you speak to your queen?" I asked in a proud voice.

He stepped back, startled for a moment.

"I have come for my daughter," I said loudly. "It is past time for her to be abed."

Not waiting for a response, I swept around the corner. The king had heard my voice. He had pulled the child's nightgown back into place, and he was bouncing her on his knee. I snatched her up and hurried away.

I was twenty-three years old, and I did not know who to talk to. I knew that the bishop would only tell me to pray for release from the devils that whispered such evil thoughts in my ear. I knew that my ladies-in-waiting would turn away and murmur among themselves that I had gone mad. In the end, I spoke to the peasant woman who was nursemaid to the princess, and she helped me send the child to safety.

Over the passing years, the storytellers have made up lies about me. They said that I was jealous of the princess, envious of her beauty. She was the fairest in the land, and I could not bear that. And so, the story goes, I asked a huntsman to take the little girl into the woods and kill her. I asked the huntsman to bring me her heart, so that I might eat it and know she was dead. Over the years, the storytellers have claimed that I was a monster, that I was wicked, that I was jealous.

It makes no sense. But the world listened to these lies. After all, I was a woman and I was a queen, a powerful position. Everyone knows that women can't handle power. I was a beautiful woman and I was growing old, and everyone knows that drives women mad.

Let me tell you the truth of it. The peasant woman took me to a nunnery that was on the edge of town. And I spoke to the sisters there of my troubles. The nuns told me of a group of women who lived in a cottage in the forest, where they meditated and prayed. I kissed the princess good-bye and sent her away with the nuns, to hide in the forest and be safe.

The storytellers say that the princess stayed in a cottage in the forest with seven little men, seven dwarfs. In the stories, old women rarely play an important role-unless, of course, they are evil. Old women make evil potions, old women work black magic, old women envy the young and the beautiful, poisoning them, killing them, turning them into frogs. That's what the storytellers say.

In truth, seven old women in the forest cared for the little princess, keeping her safe. They taught her how to brew herb teas for the sick, how to tend a garden, how to knit and sew. The princess made friends with the animals in the forest-the birds sang to her, the squirrels and the field mice frolicked at her feet. She learned to be clever and kind and bold and strong, as well as beautiful.

The king searched for her, of course. I told him that she had been spirited away by magic. He did not believe me, but he could do nothing to prove me wrong.

He called me a cold woman, an evil woman. He shouted and blustered. But though he longed to strike me, to lock me up, to torture me, he could do none of that. He was preparing for war with the kingdom to the east, and he needed my father's goodwill.

Sometimes, I would slip away to visit the princess, to assure myself that she was safe and happy. I went in disguise, wearing a cloak like a peasant woman, so that the king's men would not follow me. And she remained hidden in the woods and safe.

While she was hidden, I kept myself busy. Before I had been content to amuse myself with stories and embroidery, but now I had a new interest in politics and power. Whenever the king was off fighting his battles, I engaged in court intrigues, determining which of the king's councillors were weary of war, which were interested in ruling well, rather than conquering more lands. I aided these men wherever I could, providing them with status in the court, with money, with information gained from contacts at my father's court.

It took time to erode the king's power, longer still to find an officer in the king's army who could be bribed to do my bidding. But at last, when the princess was eighteen, I received word from the north. The king was dead. Killed in the heat of battle, when arrows were flying and barbarians had crashed through the king's guard. Who was to say which man's hand had killed the king-a barbarian prince or a soldier whose loyalty was no longer with the king?

I knew that the people of the kingdom would not trust me-a foreigner about whom strange stories were told. It was then that a knight, wandering in the forest (and carefully following instructions I had given him), discovered the princess in her hidden cottage. He brought her back to the palace in triumph. There, with the aid of the noblemen I had cultivated over the years, she took the throne.

The storytellers say that a prince found the princess and took her as his bride. That's not quite so. The princess became a queen-not by marrying a prince, but by taking her father's throne.

The storytellers say that the wicked queen went to the princess's wedding, where she was forced to dance in red-hot iron shoes until she was dead.

The storytellers have a great deal of imagination-but only in certain areas. They cannot imagine a king lusting after his daughter-but they can imagine a wicked queen killing a child for jealousy. I don't understand why the people believe these foolish stories. Don't they ever wonder, in all the times they hear about the evil queen, what the king was doing while the queen was sending the princess away and working her terrible spells? If the king was so good and the queen was so evil, why wasn't the king protecting his daughter?

After the princess returned to the palace, I remained for a time to make certain that there were no threats to her sovereignty. But the people loved her, and I had chosen her advisors well. She had learned wisdom in her years in the woods, and she knew how to rule fairly.

Having had enough of court intrigues, I retired to the cottage in the woods where the little princess had stayed so happily. That's where I live now, with the seven old women who saved the princess.

The men in the nearby village fear us, thinking we are witches. Women who live without men-especially old women who grow herbs, heal the sick, and befriend wild animals-are always suspect. The men fear us, but the village women know better. They stop by the cottage when they are out gathering firewood in the forest. They sit by the fire and drink tea, while they listen to my stories.

Sometimes, I tell them of Snow White, the true story rather than the storytellers' lies. I think the true story should be known.

JOHN CROWLEY.

John Crowley lives in western Massachusetts. He is a master of the literary fantasy form, for which he has twice won the World Fantasy Award. He is the author of several novels, including Engine Summer, Little Big, Aegypt, and Love and Sleep, as well as two excellent collections of short fiction, Novelty and Antiquities. Crowley rarely writes short fiction nowadays, and "Lost and Abandoned" is the result of three years of, shall we say, "encouragement?"-by the editors.

The protagonist of "Lost and Abandoned" has a dilemma that is utterly contemporary in this rendering of a traditional tale that will soon become apparent.

LOST AND ABANDONED.

by John Crowley.

1. LOST.

The logic was perfect and complete; there was a beginning, a middle, and an end. The beginning was love, then came marriage, then two children even before I got out of graduate school and got a real job. There was even a baby carriage, a real one, the blue-black kind with great rubber wheels, chrome brightwork, and a brougham top with a silver scroll on the side to raise and lower it. I wonder where it is now.

The next story element, therefore, was divorce. She with the kids, I with the job (it wasn't logical but as a story element it has verisimilitude, meaning that it was always done that way then). I taught. I taught American poetry to children, to college students, and over time began to forget why. I thought about it a lot; I did little else but reason out why I did what I did, and whether it was useless or not, why they should be interested, why I should try to capture their attention.

None of this intellection helped my chances for tenure. The word was that I wasn't a team player; I wasn't. I was an Atom. I had no reason beyond physics for anything that I did.

Then she showed up again. With the kids, she and he. She had a lot of plans. She was moving, she told me, to Hawaii. She'd already shipped over her cycle, and the rest of the guys were waiting for her over there. The kids were going to love it, she said. Water and fishing and cycles.

And when would I see them?

Whenever you can come out.

Money?

Somebody had told her somebody was opening a speed shop in Maui and she might work there.

It's odd how quickly two people who have seemed to be practically one person since before they were wholly out of childhood can diverge as soon as they part. I was awake most of that night, lying beside her (old times' sake), and by dawn I'd made a decision. I wanted the kids. She couldn't take them. She said she sure as hell was taking them. I said that I would take her to court and get custody before any judge: I worked, I was a college teacher, I had a suit and tie, she was a biker, or could be made to seem one. It might not have been true, that it would have been so easy; but I made her believe it. She wept; she talked it out; she hugged them a lot; she left them with me.

And when I went back to classes in September I had, instantly, a reason to teach American poetry to adolescents, and do it well, too. Love costs money; so love makes money, or is willing to try. What I could not find a reason for doing in itself became quite easy to do when I did it for them. I went and talked all day about Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman to put bowls of oatmeal before them, bicycles in the garage for them. And oddest of all (maybe not so odd, how would I know, I've only done all this once) I think I was a better teacher, too.

Unfortunately I had stumbled into all this-ordinary life, I guess, the thing that had kept all of my colleagues at their work and playing for the team-just that little bit too late. Despite my new need and my new willingness, I got turned down for tenure. And that in academe being equivalent to dismissal, I now looked into a kind of abyss, one I had heard about, read about, been touched by in stories, and had not thought was possible for me to encounter, though a moment's thought would have told me that countless men and women live facing it all the time.

Did I think of shipping them to Hawaii? No, never. Some doors cannot be gone back through.

So the next scene is the dark of the woods.

I used all my contacts to get a job that almost no one, it would seem, would want to have, thereby entering into another level of this thing, where the hewer of wood, the drawer of water, grows desperate not for release but for more water to draw, wood to hew, so his kids and he won't have to beg.

An inner-city enrichment program for no-longer-quite-youthful offenders, which had tenuous state funding and a three-story house downtown that had been seized for taxes. They were given courses in basic English and other work toward a high-school equivalency diploma, and seminars in ethics and self-expression. They got time off their probation for attending faithfully. Do you have better ideas?

The group I taught English to was about the same age as my old students, a group who had appeared ordinary enough then but now in hindsight and from here appeared as young godlings awash in ease and possibility. Days we worked on acquiring the sort of English language in which newspapers and books and government documents are written, a language different from the one most of them spoke, though using many similar words. We diagrammed sentences, a thing I am the last teacher of English on the continent to remember how to do; they liked that. In the evenings we met again. We were going to write stories.

They have stories, certainly. They tend to spill them rather than tell them. It seemed grotesque to try to chasten them, and make them shapely, make them resemble good stories; but that's what I was hired to do, and simply to listen is too hard. "A beginning, a middle, and an end," I say. "'The king died and then the queen died' is a story. 'The king died and then the queen died of grief' is a plot. Who, what, when, where, how." And they listen, looking at me from out of their own stories, inside which they live, as street people live within their ragged shelters. Not one grew up with a father: not one. I know what crimes some of them committed, what they have done.

Late at night then I bus over to the adjacent neighborhood, one small step up in the social ladder, and climb the stairs to my apartment; let myself in, awake the sitter, asleep before the glowing television, and send her home.

They grow so fast. In the city even faster. Most of my salary goes to their private school, called fatuously the Little Big Schoolhouse, but really a good place; they love it, or did. They're getting restive, weirdly angry sometimes in ways they never were before, which leaves me hurt and baffled and desperately afraid. They don't want sitters anymore. I am going to come home and find them gone; or find one of them gone and the other silent, looking at me in reproach, can't have her, couldn't keep her.

"Let's retell a story," I told my students. "Just to get our chops. We'll all write the same story. Not long. Three pages max. A story you all know. All you have to do is tell it, from beginning to end, not leaving anything important out."

But it was not a story they all knew, and SO I had to tell it to them. They listened with both eyes and ears, as my children had once. My boy, at the point in the story when the two lost children understood that the new protector they had found intended them not good but mortal harm, had cried out it's their mother! Which seemed to me to be an act of literary criticism of the highest order; and for the first time I noticed that indeed the mother, like the other, is dead at the story's end.

A girl named Cyntra wanted to know: Was I going to do this, too?

I said yes I would. I would do it in three pages. I hadn't thought of doing it but yes I would.

I know this story. I know it now, though I didn't before. I will write mine for me, as they will write theirs for themselves; we will trade them and try to read them with eyes and ears.

Three pieces of mail in the box on this night when I got home. A postcard from Hawaii. An official letter telling me that the enrichment program is being zeroed out, and my services will not be required. An answer to my personal ad in the Free Press, written in a clear strong hand. A picture, too.

My children still there, asleep but not undressed, unwashed and sprawled over the couch and the floor: they would not permit a baby-sitter, said they could take care of themselves. They are at least still here.

I will write my story with a beginning, a middle, and no end. No bread crumbs, no candy, no woods, no oven, no treasure. No who, what, where, when. And it will all be there.

Where will they go, those kids?

2. ABANDONED.

Poverty is not a crime. Infatuation is not a crime either; and when a man who has loved his wife dearly, and had two children with her, boy and girl, children he loves deeply and in whose eyes he sees her every single day-when that man falls helplessly in love again, those children might find it in their hearts, if not then perhaps later on, after a period of transition, to forgive him. And to love this new woman, too, as he loves her, without ever forgetting-as he himself cannot-the other and earlier woman.

Children, though, spring from but one mother; and they, even if they cannot remember her, can't forget her either. The fact that he can see in their eyes the reflection of the woman who bore them can come to seem a reproach. Perhaps it is a reproach. That's certainly the way the woman who comes to replace her in their home might see it: a constant reproach, a claim never able to be made good and yet never withdrawn. And it's possible that-she being as infatuated as he, filled up with that domineering love that allows no rival (no crime; it happens), might scheme somehow to remove them, shut their eyes, shut their mouths for good. Especially if there weren't enough for all of them.

Was it a crime that he listened, that he chose between her and them? That was a crime, and he knew it when he abandoned them. Abandoned: went away from them when he thought they could not return, though at the same time he brought them back with him, of course, he would have to, have to bring them with him back home where they would trouble his sleep thereafter.

But we are always abandoned. We abandon our parents as we grow, and yet it seems to us that they abandon us; that's the story we tell. And often-usually, not always-we discover that abandonment is flight, too: our flight away. We leave a trail to guide us back, but it can disappear behind us as we go on.

Harder than it seems, abandonment; they who are to be abandoned are often more resourceful than we who abandon expect them to be or than the act or the name of the act (abandonment) allows them to be. Often enough they will not suffer being abandoned, must be shed or forced out or tricked into remaining behind when we go. Often they must be abandoned not once but more than once, each act of abandoning hardening our hearts further, until in the end the logistics of the deed are all we can think of, the awful logic, just get it over with.

Abandonment implies redemption, the finding of the lost, not always but sometimes: safety discovered in the midst of danger, altering the new equation of loss and abandonment again, and posing a question usually, a judgment to make though we aren't wise enough to make it; we make it anyway because we have no choice. Look how wonderful, all sweet, all good, and we so hungry and needy.

Finding out then that we have made a wrong decision, the worst possible decision, one we can't help having made and that we know as soon as we have made it was the wrong one, and that it can't be taken back. Finding out that this is what abandonment means: death at the hands of those we have relied on. They taught us to rely on them, on the two of them, their love, and then abandoned us: but still we only know how to rely on others, and have done so, and we were wrong, and now we will die. We didn't know this about life.

Only perhaps it isn't death, perhaps there is an exit from the cage, the death; perhaps we know better than we thought. Perhaps we have ourselves got reserves of cleverness, and will, and cruelty. Yes we have. We, too, can fool. We can do as we have been done by. And it is abandonment that taught us.

So this is life not death after all. It's even profit. We didn't know this about life either, what can be won from it by need and the willingness to be cunning, and cruel.

It was a long time ago. You find that even if you have lost the way home there is a path that reaches out to you from there, a path that you are bound to discover like it or not: and then, when you return there with what you have won, it isn't the place you left. You can forgive them, if they are still there to forgive: or you can refuse to. What you did and learned from abandonment-yours of them, theirs of you-has made home different. Now you can go or stay.

NINA KIRIKI HOFFMAN.

Nina Kiriki Hoffman lives in Oregon, with four cats. She is the author of two solo novels-The Thread That Binds the Bones, which won the Horror Writers Association's Brain Stoker Award for Best Achievement in First Novel in 1994 and The Silent Strength of Stones, published in 1995. She also collaborated with Tad Williams on Child of an Ancient City, a novella. Common Threads contains the text of The Thread That Binds the Bones plus fourteen other stories about the characters in the novel. Her more than 150 short stories have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies. This is her first professional poetry sale.

Nina Kiriki Hoffman says "I owe my life to fairy tales. My mother had a radio program called Stories Children Love, in which she read fairy tales aloud, and needed a recording engineer; my father had a recording studio. That's how they met. As a child I grew up listening to records of my mother reading fairy tales aloud. Sometimes she read them to us in person."