Fairy Tales

Maddi dumped her bookbag on the ground with a heavy sigh of relief. She had made it through all day at school, blasting through droves of work due to her uncanny intelligence. The sheer excitement gnawed at her like starvation at the hungry. It was her eighth birthday and she was ready to receive the gift she had been incessantly begging and nagging her mother to get her for months. Nearly jumping in anticipation, she joined her mother at the table. Her innocent face glowed in the light of the candles. Her sparkling blue eyes were only accentuated by perfectly straight blonde hair that ran down past her shoulders. She wore her best dress that day, and like usual was every elementary schoolboy's dream.

After blowing out the candles and scarfing down a piece of birthday cake, Maddi's mother presented her with a beautifully adorned present bag. Amidst her child's elation, she felt a numbing guilt that one more person should have been there. Her husband lost a long fight with cancer a few years back. He was a successful businessman, but the corporation he worked for claimed all the money he had left her in his will due to a clause. The only thing that was left to her in the settlement was the expansive house. In spite of all that, the mother was taken care of. She was a renowned psychologist who provided more than enough for her and her daughter.

The young girl's eyes shone like two miniature oceans as she reached inside of the bag and pulled out its heavy treasure. The present was exactly what she had been asking for: A book of fairy tales. Most children Maddi's age were past this phase, but there was a reason her mother made an exception in getting her this gift. Her father used to read her a book of fairy tales every night before she went to sleep. She continued to read the tales to herself all the way up until the family yard sale, where the book was sold and forever lost. Maddi never really got over this, and her receiving this new book washed away the painful memories of her father's death.

That night Maddi clambered into bed, clutching the book. Inspecting it, she saw the book was a lovely shade of lavender with a white satin bookmark. The cover had no title. She also noticed it had no other markings than the text and illustrations in the book itself. Disregarding this, she opened the book and began to read.

Little Miss Needle

There once was a lady named Little Miss Needle. She lived out in the middle of the forest. Alone. Sad. You see, Miss Needle had a funny way of making people hate her. She would make them think she was the sweetest in all of the land. But just when you thought she was your friend, she would turn around on you and hurt you. Miss Needle had wronged all the people in the village she used to live in, so she was sent away to the forest to live there forever.

One day, Mr. Sun wasn't as yellow as he usually was. Instead, he was quite black. All of the townspeople were very scared of him. The only one who wasn't scared was Miss Needle. She walked right into the middle of the forest and greeted that black sun. As the whole town was slowly dying, he told her these words:

"Everything is in place. I need you to kill her.."

That was when Maddi blacked out. She lie unconscious in her bed for two days. Strangely, her mother had not noticed her absence. Maddi walked down to a horrific sight and discovered the cause of her neglect. There was a knife in her mother's disemboweled stomach. The little girl stepped over the remnants of her mother to reach the phone and call 9-1-1.

The police got the call from a run-down mobile home. None of the officers on duty were prepared to see what was inside of that house. Dirty, broken heroin needles littered the stained carpet. Piles of feces had collected from wandering animals and the young girl who made the call. A body of a woman, presumably the girl's mother, was slumped on a nearby sofa. There were three or four vials of heroin in her arms, but this was not the cause of death. Her innards were spilled on the floor by a knife of some sort. The culprit of this gruesome murder stood nearby.

In a floral dress caked with blood and dirt stood a girl of about nine years of age. Her hair was greasy, and her clothes were hopelessly soiled. In one hand, she gripped the knife that she had killed her own mother with. In the other, she held a tattered diary with the words FAIRY TALE crudely scribbled in nail polish. Inside the diary were nothing but blank pages. She said this:

"Fairy tales don't always have happy endings."

Then never spoke again.

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