A Bedtime Story
Published in
1 min readMar 17, 2018
Fairy tales weren’t really for children. They were for the adults who read them aloud, to remind them of the bad things — betrayal and avarice and evil and how death comes to the innocent and unwary more often than to those who deserve it. To make them see what they do to each other.
Scream pigs! Cackle, witch! Howl and slash, wolf! Show them how black the dark really is.
In her mind, there was only punishment. The good father was useless. The evil stepmother had won. The beautiful princess slept on and on and on, no prince had come.