We recently published Jared Povanda’s brilliant “The Princess with Blood on Her Dress.”

Here, we ask him two questions about his story:

1) I love how this plays with the nature of “story” — how this seems like it could be such a familiar tale to us that we all know how it should go. And the narrative voice, too, invites us into the “story,” especially with those last lines: “We’re often right.” What sort of stories did you have in mind when you created this beautiful piece?

This story is meant to be an homage to fairy tales with an added pinch of Arya from A Game of Thrones. There’s a whimsy to fairy tales—a bright, comfortable magic—but there’s always darkness on the periphery. Bitter rot. How many fairy tales, for example, start with the orphan? Or find their characters, like Little Red, lost in the dark woods? You know evil is a page flip away—an ominous wind—and I wanted to try to capture that held-breath, shivery feeling by immediately describing the blood on the princess’s dress. As for the narrative voice, I was inspired by a favorite podcast of mine called Midst. Midst is fiction, and the three narrators who tell the story are constantly interjecting and commenting on both the plot and the characters from on high. It’s a satisfying way of telling a story, and I wanted to try my hand at what they do so well. The narrative voice—and I believe there are also a few narrators present here—tells us when the boy is manipulating the princess. The narrators give the reader purposeful insights that the characters themselves don’t intuit, and I hope their forceful presence makes the story feel all the more intentional and necessary. 

2) The story is spare, but the imagery is devastating: the blood, the sea, the ruined dress, the fireflies and silver knife. Was there ever a version of this story with other elements that you had to discard along the way? Or did this come to you, clear as a snapshot?

This story didn’t come to me all at once, no. The original beginning was, “The princess who would never be queen kneels on her mother’s dais and prays to loneliness.” I started the story in the throne room, and I originally described how the queen died and what happened to the princess’s father. The story was going to be a character study about someone who had to unlearn her guilt and force herself to be unafraid when facing the consequences of refusing to sacrifice her desired future for her born-and-bred duty. As soon as the boy shucking oysters strolled in, though, all wolfish and grinning, I couldn’t figure out a way to get the princess away from the castle and to the shore in an economical way. So, I condensed the timeline and had the two characters already know each other at the story’s opening. The boy, too, was described in a few early drafts as “river fog poured into a cup.” I still love this description, but between the fog, the river, the ocean, and the ocean’s tides, I found it a few watery details too many.