Fairy tales make one promise above all: if you wait long enough, someone will arrive, whether with a kiss, a prince or a transformation. Abbie's «Our story» takes two of the best-loved examples and quietly withdraws the promise. In under sixty words, it argues that the most epic love story may be the one in which nothing ever happens.
The poem is built on repetition. "This is the story of beauty and the beast" and "This is the story of Cinderella" sound like the start of a bedtime reading, and the formula lulls us into expecting the familiar plot. Then each sentence fails at its crucial moment. Beauty's love "failed to do the / magic", and the line break leaves the word "magic" stranded alone on its own line, a tiny flat ending where a climax should be. In the Cinderella couplet, the person who should rescue her "never came". The poem gives that failure to the king, not the prince most versions feature, and to a "leg" instead of a slipper or a foot. Whether this is deliberate or a slip of memory, the effect is the same. The glamour drains out of the scene and leaves something bare and slightly clumsy.
The third stanza steps outside the tales to comment on them: "Its nothing like how / legend narrate." Here "legend" is almost a character, a storyteller who has got things wrong. The grammar is rough, with a missing apostrophe and a verb without its -s, and the same looseness appears in "two soulmate". Whatever the reason, these slips give the poem a plain, spoken voice, as if someone is telling the truth quickly without dressing it up. That suits a poem against polished endings.
Next, the poem escalates. In the two fairy tales the characters at least meet, and then love or rescue fails. In the new story the "two soulmate / That never met" do not even get that far. The phrasing changes too, from "the story of" to "about", and the borrowed named heroes give way to anonymous figures. Together with the title «Our story», this suggests, though the poem never says so, that the speaker is speaking from personal experience and that the story belongs to the speaker as well. The word "never" carries the weight here. It appears three times ("never came", "never met", "Happily never after"), and each time the absence grows, from a missing prince to a missing meeting to a missing future.
The next stanza, "but very / Epic story", is the poem's quiet twist. The lowercase "but" sounds like a reluctant afterthought, as if the speaker is insisting against their own disappointment. The break after "very" makes us wait for the adjective, and "Epic" arrives with deliberate grandeur. It is a paradoxical claim, since epics are about journeys and battles, and this one contains no events at all. The size of the feeling is set against the tiny space the poem allows it.
There is no rhyme anywhere, which also denies the pleasing click that fairy tales usually offer. The rhythm is irregular, and the lines keep breaking in the middle of a phrase: "do the / magic", "how / legend", "very / Epic", "Finished in / Happily never after." Each break delays the thing we are waiting for, so the form acts out the theme of arrival that never quite comes. The final line is the sharpest example. "Finished in" leads us to expect the stock ending, and "never" cuts it off. The inverted formula works like a verdict and gives the poem its title-worthy phrase.
What makes «Our story» worth reading is how much it does with so little. It does not dismiss fairy tales so much as admit that real longing doesn't follow their rules. It also refuses consolation. There is no lesson, no promise of another chance, only the insistence that a love that never began deserves to be called epic. For a student reader, it shows how a familiar formula, a few line breaks and one repeated word can say more than a long explanation could.