It was a beautiful day outside. The sun was shining and the sky was cloudless, but sixteen- year old Rapunzel could not enjoy it. She was trapped in a tall tower on the edge of nowhere. She didn’t understand it. One moment, she was a little girl playing in a river, the next, she was secluded from the rest of the world in a tower.
“So no one gets hurt,” the nurse had explained countless times. But Rapunzel didn’t believe her. It was all one big conspiracy against her. Even her parents were in on it… They were the ones who had forced her up the stairs so many years ago, never to show their faces again. Sometimes Nurse brought letters from them, but Rapunzel always threw them out the tower window without a second glance. They weren’t worth reading, her parents hating her and all.
Sometimes her mirror image told her she was paranoid. After a while, she got tired of the criticism and punched it. When Nurse replaced it, she punched that one, too, and the one after that and after that. Eventually, the nurse stopped replacing them.
All of the sudden, Rapunzel’s thoughts were interrupted by a gentle voice that sounded to her like nails on a chalkboard.
“Rapunzel, sweetie,” Nurse spoke from outside the door, “Dinnertime.”
Rapunzel let out a long, piercing shriek as the nurse opened the door. Rapunzel’s nostrils flared, her eyes wide. “Eat dinner with me,” she loudly whispered.
“Okay, honey, just this once,” the nurse warily made her way over to the kitchen table and set down her picnic basket, pulling the chair out from underneath the small circular table.
As they began to eat, though, Nurse stopped chewing and her eyes opened wide.
“Help,” she gasped through short, struggling breaths. She grasped her throat, trying desperately to breathe. Her face was far beyond rubicund, nearly purple, and her eyes were extremely frightened.
Meanwhile, Rapunzel sat across the table, cackling like the mad witch from the lie she would later create. Finally, Nurse stopped struggling, sinking in her seat. Rapunzel primly stood up straight like the lady she was raised to be, pushed her chair behind her, and walked over to the nurse’s corpse to check her pulse.
‘Dead,’ she confirmed to herself, breaking out into one final cackle. She reached into the nurse’s deep pocket, her shaking hand emerging with the set of keys. Rapunzel walked over to the door, a smile on her face for the first time since her entry to the tower. She stuck the key into the first padlock, and turned. Then she unlocked the second. Then the third and fourth and fifth. As she made her way down the winding staircase and past the different rooms of the asylum, thoughts of freedom ran through her head.
Her heart pounded as she stepped out into the open air for the first time in years. At last! A bottle clattered to the ground as it slipped from her fingers. On closer inspection, that bottle was marked with the word, ‘Poison.’
She walked toward the sun, skirts hiked up, long golden hair braided down her back, until she reached the nearest town at nightfall. When she met the townsfolk, she filled their heads with her false stories. She told of the ‘horrors’ of the ‘evil witch’ who ‘stole’ her from her parents as a young child and locked her in the tower, treating her ‘unspeakably.’ She told of her ‘prince’ who had climbed up her long hair to rescue her, who was unfortunately on a quest at the moment.
And her lies were embraced, told, retold, and redeveloped for centuries.
