Sublime

Touch her precious pigtail, even by accident, and she’ll kick you in the shins, the brat.

She was eating a Three Musketeers Candy Bar. She was wearing tri-focal lenses in harlequin frames,

Maxine Tarnow,

Pearls would become Belle’s signature accessory. She wore them as a long rope, circled around her neck once or twice, with a third loop that hung far down in front, finished with a glittering ruby or two.

Whatever the story of the moment happens to be, Princess Heidrophobia is always the lead babe while Lady Maxipad is the fastmouthed soubrette, the heavy lifter, the practical elf who comes while the Princess is sleeping or, more typically, distracted, and gets the real work of the princessipality done.

Her father once told her casually that she was built like a plum on toothpicks, and the phrase was at once so cruel and so poetic that it clicked into place around her like a harness.

she was “a wrinkled old fairy all the same.”