Mad angels screamed in the firelight,
paper hair twining into flames,
paper toes coiling into gray ash.
She watched, mesmerized, 
the night she burned her fairy tales.
She fed the flames,
watching pieces of her soul fly up and be eaten
in the angels' cleansing frenzy.

The self she could not be, dying.
Like a stone phoenix, the self remaining 
sat staring at the gray walls,
the scattered clothing,
watching the evening turn black, then gray.
In the gray almost-dawn, she packed her suitcase,
watching the wind blow ashes against hard walls,
watching all she knew grow distant.
Reality is cold, but fantasy hurts.

So she fled towards the city, reality's pulsing heart,
where money and death rule the leaves and grime,
the urine-soaked men sleeping in subway cars.
She caught the ferry out of fairyland,
giving her last golden coin to the friendly boatman.
A twinkle, and it was gone.

And cold in reality, alone in reality,
she built her nest, twig by aluminum twig.
For weeks she happily played at adulthood,
learning the right masks to wear,
the right words to say,
binding herself to the new land with bills and paperwork.
Objects bind, the scattered photocopies as much as shed skin
keeping her tied to the apartment that drinks money like blood —
symbiosis or parasitism?

And in the harsh quiet of reality,
she fell back into her own thoughts.
She worked, she slept, she wandered,
let feet and iron dragons carry her down to the waterside,
between building and building,
pacing the walls of her mechanical city-cage, 
looking out at beautiful freedom,
deceptively beautiful New Jersey.
The bars are glass and steel, water and wood — but a cage no less.

Looking out at the black depths, she started at her name.
Surprised to see the boatman, familiar and unfamiliar.
She saw New York in the lines of his face, heard New York in his cadence,
she knew him for one of them.
And yet — she asked him for directions to the library.
He gave her directions — and more.
Fairy gold sparkled from his palm to hers
before it vanished with the scent of old memories.

So — friendship.  
She brought him stories, he listened.
Sometimes he gave advice.
He brought her familiar wonders from across the sea.
New York would have disbelieved, dazzled.
For her, it was a taste of home.

He gave her friendship — and more.
One day she persuaded him to unhood his face.
She saw his eyelashes, brushed with paraffin, half-familiar.
One night he peeled off his galoshes,
and rubbing his pale dry feet, with their thick toenails,
she saw the round, irregular scars on his ankles, on his legs.
She asked — how?

He said it had been tallow.
A cheap candelabra on the bedside table,
an unhappy love affair
with a girl who destroyed all that she said she loved.
Not here — in the far northern lands,
where there was neither east nor west.

She cried.
If it were a fairy-tale,
her tears would have healed his wounds.
But it was New York, so he only stared, confused,
while slow conversation wove together what had been broken.
And they made love in the boat between worlds,
in the twilight that needs neither candles nor electricity,
between past and present.
Lying together — for a moment,
they could stop wearing out seven-league boots,
stop waiting for a happy ending,
while gold coins twinkled into illusion
like the lights of beautiful New Jersey.