prompt: beauty, title: beauty and the beast and werewolves in misc. flash fiction

In the large print of happy endings, certainly when wild and powerful magic’s involved, there’s almost always some unintended horror deep down in the small print. Belle and the Prince indeed got their happy ending, the kiss and the transformation and so on, but curses in the death-throes of grand unravelings are often far messier and more complicated than all that.

Years before, a woman came to the Beast’s palace, not as captive or as vengeful peasant, rather a lady seeking legends in hopes of kindred spirits. She’d been cursed lycanthropic but knowing no others searched out the man-made-monster she’d heard of in deep whispers. Upon learning each other’s tales, they decided perhaps if they fell in love, they could kill both curses with one stone swoop and how they tried. But of course, they couldn’t, love doesn’t work like that, out of mere convenience. You can tell magic what to do no more than you could hope to boss around love.

Over awkward weeks, they tried to figure out how to go googly-eyed over each other, in primly traditional ways. Dancing, fancy dinners orchestrated by animated furniture, flat-out staring into each other’s eyes for hours but none of it worked. It partly didn’t work as you can’t force these things, partly it didn’t work as they were too disgusted by their curses, both their own and the other’s. More than anything, though, the enchantment knew it an exercise in trying to life-hack their curses. Eventually, at the end of one of many fights, she was so enraged she spontaneously transformed into her personal monster, wrecked up the place and stormed out.

The Beast was left to clean up a bunch of shattered cups and chairs that used to be his servants, burying them honorably as he could, all things considered, in boxes in the cellar. Good news is, when Beauty finally broke the spell with true love’s kiss, they all reformed and came back to life as human beings. Bad news is, one of them had been bitten in the cushion by the werewolf while in ottoman form and after returning to humanity, upon the first full moon back in yonder village transformed into slavering were-furniture, clomping around hungrily, awkwardly trying to feast and pass along the curse of the Beast’s Ex-Girlfriend.

Centuries later, when you lose your sock, maybe you misplaced it or maybe you bought someone cursed as a sock at Wal-Mart. Your car keys could’ve been an unlucky fool at a car dealership by moonlight, bitten by a were-floormat. Deep in the background of all our lives, most of the things we lost turn out to have been just people doubly-cursed by the idiot forms hex-craft took back in the bad old days.

To be fair, it hasn’t been so negative for everyone. Talking chairs, talking globes, talking clocks and floorboards, how do you think Pee-Wee Herman got his goddamn Playhouse? But the great wizard Herman The Ageless, Tamer of Djinn, he’s a whole other story.