The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye: Five Fairy Stories

Once upon a time, when men and women hurtled through the air on metal wings, when they wore webbed feet and walked on the bottom of the sea, learning the speech of whales and the songs of the dolphins, when pearly-fleshed and jewelled apparitions of Texan herdsmen and houris shimmered in the dusk on Nicaraguan hillsides, when folk in Norway and Tasmania in dead of winter could dream of fresh strawberries, dates, guavas and passion fruits and find them spread next morning on their tables, there was a woman who was largely irrelevant, and therefore happy.

You are a born storyteller," said the old lady. "You had the sense to see you were caught in a story, and the sense to see that you could change it to another one.

All English stories get bogged down in whether or not the furniture is socially and aesthetically acceptable.

I wish," said Dr Perholt to the djinn, "I wish you would love me." "You honor me," said the djinn, "and maybe you have wasted your wish, for it may well be that love would have happened anyway, since we are together, and sharing our life stories, as lovers do.

And she was angry because she knew she was capable of many things she couldn't even define to herself, so they seemed like bad dreams - that is what she told me. She told me she was eaten up with unused power and thought she might be a witch - except, she said, if she were a man, these things she thought about would be ordinarily acceptable.

One of you needs food,' said the Old Woman, 'and three of you need healing.' So the Princess sat down to good soup, and fresh bread, and fruit tart with clotted cream and a mug of sharp cider, and the Old Woman put the creatures on the table, and healed them in her way. Her way was to make them tell the story of their hurts, and as they told, she applied ointments and drops with tiny feathery brushes and little bone pins ...

It is as though our dreams were watching us and directing our lives with external vigour whilst we simply enact their pleasures passively, in a swoon.

-in almost all stories of promises and prohibitions, the promises and prohibitions carry with them the inevitability of failure, of their own breaking.