Briar Rose 29
The fairy sits spinning in the tower, entangled in her storied strands, joining thread to thread, winding them into seductive skeins, awaiting the dreamer's visit, her accusations, her demands. It has not been easy, trying to fill her limboed head through all this time, by some calendars as much as a century or more, so from time to time over the years (call them that), in order to rehearse her craft, respell the wound, she has returned here to the source, The scene, as they say, of the crime. Of course, given the child's inability to put any two thoughts together in succession or to hold either of them between her ears longer than it takes to think them, the fairy might just as well tell the same story over and over again, and indeed she has repeated most of them, one time or another, it has been a long night. But, for her own sake more than her auditor's, fearing to lose the thread and sink away herself into a sleep as deep as that she inhabits, thus gravely endangering them both, she has sought, even while holding fast to her main plot, to tell each variant as though it had never been told before, surprising even herself at times with her novelties. She has imagined, and for Rose described, a rich assortment of beauties and princes, obstacles, awakenings, and what-happened-nexts, weaving in a diverse collection of monsters, dragons, ogres, jests, rapes, riddles, murders, magic, maimings, dead bodies, and babies, just to watch the insatiable sleeper wince and gasp and twitch with fear and longing, wicked fairy that she is. She has rarely gone afield in her tales, wandering instead the tranced castle, using it some times as a theatrical contrivance, others as a kind of house of the dead, touring intimately its most secret recesses. Castle-bound as the dreamer is, the illusion of boundaries, above all that of the body, has been one of the fairy's frequent themes, along with the contest between light and dark, the passions of jealousy and desire, cannibalism, seduction and adultery, and the vicissitudes of day-to-day life in the eternal city of the tale, the paradoxes thereof. That between gesture and language, for example. This she illustrated one day, when asked, But why does he have to kiss her, by describing in exhaustive detail every nuance of the sleeper's expression as witnessed by the hovering prince, down to the subtle chiaroscuro of light as it grazed her brow at different angles and the movement of the fine hairs in her nostrils, a cartographical epic that might have gone on without lips meeting lips for the rest of the century, had not her capricious audience, screaming for release, retreated in spite to a passing nightmare about a prince who awoke her by sinking his teeth suddenly into her throat.