With Real Toads: evil fairy tales?

Princess and the Pea, and Blackbird Shores
images from favim.com, originator unknown,
supplied as prompts by Real Toads.

For the Friday Picture Prompt at the writers’ group Imaginary Garden with Real Toads, Kerry has offered two photos and asked us to take a “familiar story-line and twist it up a bit, mix in something dark and haunting, or turn a favorite heroine or hero into a more plausible and fallible anti-hero.” Kerry also said she has “read many inspiring poets, who have the creative ability to invent their own faerie tales.”

*

Neither of these things sound very much like me, or like my writing style, but I sat down and thought about good fairies and bad ones in folklore and literature.

*

There was the evil Queen Mab, with her amazing ability to appear once in English literature and almost immediately be taken up and featured in the works of many another writer and poet forever after.

And, of course, there’s always Tinkerbell.

There. You see. That’s how my mind works. Not a proper fairy tale in the whole heap, so the best I could come up with is this:

fairies, good and bad,

charm little girls,

and then—

little girls charm little men