About the author:
Nancy Scott has over 990 bylines in magazines, literary journals, anthologies, newspapers, and audio commentaries. She won First Prize in the 2009 International Onkyo Braille Essay Contest. Her work appears in *82 Review, Black Fox Literary Magazine, Braille Forum, Chrysanthemum, Kaleidoscope, One Sentence Poems, Persimmon Tree, Pulse Voices, Shark Reef, Wordgathering, and Yahoo News.

Every witch has a magical familiar,
but outsiders cannot understand them.
They are a witch’s poison and puppet.
 
My mistress loved to bake. “To lure
the dear children in,” she’d say.
Their bones littered her garden.
 
Two brave ones tiptoed inside once,
without her knowledge,
without my usual warning.
I wanted to see how far they’d go.
 
The boy was on a mission,
his sweet tooth crying out
for the gingerbread men,
who waved, sneering and daring
the boy to munch on their bodies.
 
The girl was more cautious,
hesitating at the open spread feast
my mistress had spellbound eternal.
No one is able to resist, not even the girl,
and one bite can corrode control.
 
Like flies to honey,
the pair fluttered to the food,
and I sighed in disappointment,
aware that my mistress was hurrying,
salivating from my call.
 
Mistress trapped them in the kitchen
and prepared the oven, but
the fire refused to grow hotter.
The girl volunteered, claiming
she knew a trick with extra firewood.
 
She knew a trick indeed.
I watched helpless, as she pushed
my mistress into the oven
and sealed her inside.
 
My mistress burned.
Her screams polluted the air,
her fingernails marked the oven door,
as her flesh blackened to ashes.
 
I never saw the boy and girl again,
and though it pained me
to lose my mistress, my host,
I can’t say things will change much.
 
Mistress called me Sugar,
invisible, chronic, unknown,
whispering children inside
my gingerbread walls
like a sickness.

You are familiar with the tale.
A mermaid, sang with the most beautiful angelic sound.
Had to surrender voice to be human
and marry the prince.  He wanted another
princess, and poor mermaid dissolved
in the ocean.
 
Aphasia is:
A snake that coils and hisses.
Diabolical Ursula schemes to rule the ocean world.
An evil witch who casts a spell over speech.
A toothy fox ready to bite your head off.
A sudden end to your dreams,
only able to see a dark tunnel, the sun blocked.
 
Disney gave the story a happy ending, so Ariel
married the prince.   With courage and strength,
you overcome disability and are much better. 
You have learned much and are still alive.
A fairytale ending to a scary fable.

They told me the curse was a kindness,
a spindle’s prick to spare the kingdom
from the burden of my broken mind.
“Let her sleep,” they said,
“Her thoughts too sharp, her tongue a thorn,
her dreams too vast for walls to hold.”
But I did not sleep.
Not in the way they meant.
In my cage of roses, I lay awake,
each thorn a needle threading whispers:
What if the curse was never kindness?
What if the silence wasn’t mercy?
What if my dreams were a forest
they feared to enter?
I grew wild there.
The briars were mine.
When the prince came, blade in hand,
I laughed to see him bleed--
for once, the world bent to my thorns.
He begged for a kiss to break the spell.
Instead, I offered him my dreams:
a tangle of shadows too sharp to untie.
Let him sleep now.
Let him know what it means
to carry a forest inside.