Christina Elaine Collins

Sleeping Beauty’s Dreams

The Room: Dawn

Her lashes quiver. The skin on her eyelids ripples while, beneath it, the eyeballs writhe, squirm, try to break free.

Saliva trickles from the corners of her mouth. As she moans, the pillow absorbs the drool. Fifty years of drool.

She does not age, but her lips are not the color they were fifty years ago. They crack and bleed as she breathes. Her tongue does not know to wet them, and the blood hardens.

Morning yields the sunrise: its rays peek into the bedchamber through the parting in the curtains. But the sun wastes its light on the girl, who sees darkness.

Her body jerks, and she grabs hold of the pillow. Her hair—a tangle of knots and dandruff—smears grease on the satin and mats itself to her neck. One hand curls into a fist, deepening the nicks where her fingernails have dug into her palm. She feels the pain but does not know how to end it.

She waits, dreaming the same dreams over and over.

~

A Red Dream

…I am twelve years old. Maybe thirteen. The bath is ready: Paige has left a towel for me. I dip a toe in, then a leg. My body eases into the tub. Steam rises around me. Everything relaxes. My fingers, arms, shoulders, neck. I let myself sink until my chin grazes the water’s surface. I grin.

But why? Do I feel something? I am there in the tub, grinning and sighing, so I must feel something. I must feel that this is happening.

But my skin does not tingle as I know it should.

A gush of red clouds the water. In my laziness, I glance down. More red. It comes swirling and eddying from somewhere between my legs. I suspect that my peace is broken.

“Paige?” I raise my voice. “Paige!”

My nurse is there at the second call. She peers into the tub. A hand flies to her mouth and she calls a chambermaid, who comes running. Paige whispers in her ear. The maid nods and scurries off.

“You must get out of the tub now.” Paige takes hold of my elbows and lifts me up.

“Why? What have you put in my bath?”

“Nothing.”

“Why are you smiling?”

“Easy, up you go. Your mother will want to see you now you’re a woman, and you must be dressed.” She pulls me to my feet. I step out of the tub, letting her wrap the towel around me.

The maid returns, holding a chunk of cotton wadding in her palm. Her eyes dodge mine.

“Give it to me.” Paige snatches the strange lump and tips a bottle over it, smothering it with powder. She holds out her free hand. “The string, fool.”

The maid’s face reddens as she cuts a piece of string from the spool in her apron pocket. She hands it to Paige, who threads it through the wadding.

I stare at the lump. “What is that?”

Paige begins to tie the string around my thigh. “It will go under your garments—right down here. To stop your leaking.”

“My what?”

I look down to see the drops of dark red between my feet…  

~

The Room: Sunrise

Her feet hang over the edge of the bed, asleep too. Her toenails jut out of the stockings, pleading for room to grow. Her left foot twitches as an ant crawls over it.

A cobweb flutters down from the ceiling and falls across her forehead. The dust does not settle on her because she tends to move.

She is out of bed now, orbiting a flower design on the carpet. When she sleepwalks, she never travels beyond her bureau. Her hair will get in the way of her feet, or she will stub a toe, or a toenail will bend back. She will collide with furniture or trip over the hem of her gown before she can even pass the bureau.

So she walks in circles, still dreaming of the past.

~

A Ruby Dream

…I am fifteen, maybe sixteen, wandering through corridors that won’t end. Then the room finds me. It leaps out of shadows, flaunting a light in the corner. It must know that I’ve lost my way in my own home—that boredom has made a fool of me.

Relief nudges me into the room.

Someone is sobbing. A heap of a figure, hunched on a stool. A contraption sits on the floor—a device with a wheel. A wagon wheel? The look of it makes me titter. But the figure there…the figure is weeping.

“Is something wrong?”

The crying ceases, and the figure turns its head. A shawl slips to the floor, revealing a face made of creases. The woman squints at me. “Is that you, Lena?”

Lena? She must be blind to think I am a servant maid.

“Yes,” I say. I’ve never had an occasion to be someone else before.

“Ah. I had to guess. My eyes—they fail me.” While the woman speaks, the skin dangling from her chin trembles.

“What is that wheel for?” I point.

The woman drags her eyes to the contraption. “You mock my age? To think I could forget? Ah—” Her foot presses down on the pedal by the floor, and the wheel begins to whir. “This here’s the treadle. And this here the wheel, makes everything move. And these, the fibers, that wrap round the bobbin here.” She reaches out to the bobbin. Her hand shakes. “And the bobbin rotates on the spindle…” Her fingers struggle to maneuver the threads around the bobbin. “…and there’s the yarn.” She withdraws her hand. It stiffens like a claw. She rubs her knuckles. Her toe retreats from the treadle, and the whirring stops as tears stream through the wrinkles in her cheeks.

The sobbing rises to a wail that cracks and gurgles, and I fear she might die.

“Here.” I dash to her side. “Let me help.” I hesitate, studying the bobbin. If I just mimic the old woman…

I begin to pump the treadle with my toe.

“Ah.” She stops sobbing and smiles, without many teeth. “You’ve always liked my spinning wheel, Lena, Lena, my chick-a-Lena…”

I nod, wondering who the real Lena is. As the wheel spins the yarn, I guide the threads around the bobbin and the spindle—

Oh!

I draw back my hand. I laugh. I’ve embarrassed myself by staining the woman’s yarn.

I watch the ruby speck grow on my thumb. It is all I see before the world shifts, before its hues and shades rearrange, and it never goes back…

~

The Room: Midday

Her lips close around her thumb as she dreams. She sucks on it while a spider wanders over her cheek and into her ear.

Something rumbles. Her belly. It does not need food—hers is a self-feeding slumber—but she teases it. She continues to suck her thumb, encouraging salivation. Her stomach prepares itself for food, but the food never arrives.

The spider naps.

The sleeping beauty huddles on the edge of the mattress, leaving space beside her for three or four bodies. Her eyelids have stopped swelling now. Beneath them, the eyeballs do not roll back, but look forward. They see a future.

~

A Scarlet Dream

…there is a corpse in my bed.

No. Not a corpse. It is me. I am sleeping.

Someone has opened the door to my bedchamber. A man wearing a velvet cloak is panting and wiping sweat from his forehead. He has finished a race, it seems, and won. His eyes flit over the bed, over the body. Over me.

Then my prince approaches, coughing and spluttering as the dust swirls around him. He kneels by the bed and leans into my face. My breath makes him retch. And retch again. But he shakes his head, pinches his nostrils, and goes on, pressing his lips to mine.

I watch myself wake. My eyelashes are crusted together and I have to fight, have to wrench my lids apart. There it is: his face. I cannot breathe—his mouth blocks the air. His tongue pushes its way in.

Stop.

He stops. His eyes water in the dust as he retches again. He blinks. Then he stares at me. His jaw falls. “Was that…supposed to happen?”

I notice that the girl on the bed has changed. Her lips—my lips—are smooth and pink, no longer cracked and bloody. My hair dances around me in smooth ringlets, no longer greasy and matted. And my face is fair and glowing, not ashen and dusty. I look as I did when I was sixteen.

“I didn’t expect…” He touches my neck. “Your kingdom was all I wanted. But now…”

I do not feel his touch in time. My body is confused by reality. I cannot rouse my muscles, which still sleep. He is on top of me. I try to shout, but my throat throbs from disuse. Nothing can be done.

I bleed, and the scarlet leaks out of me onto the sheets, brightening stains that have dried there. Stains that I do not recall. They look like relics of a century’s menstruation.

Church bells peal in my ears. I cling to the sound. Is there a wedding today? I cannot remember what day it is. I cannot remember yesterday.

“They are waiting for us,” he says, and his voice scrapes my eardrums, shredding the tinkle of the bells. As he takes me in his arms, I wake my jaw and sink my teeth into his hand. But I still have the bite of a child…

~

The Room: Sunset

The teeth marks on her pillow renew the ones that have faded from yesterday. She twitches, and the pillow slips to the carpet. She snores through the clusters of snot in her nostrils.  

The spider emerges from her ear and crosses her cheek. After a moment’s pause, it disappears into her mouth.

Her snores carry her farther into a future.

~

A Russet Dream

…a birthday cake. It is June and the castle residents gather in the gardens. I sit at the head of the table, next to my parents. “Remember, that lady saved your life,” my mother whispers through a regal smile, as she nods at her guests. I realize that she is talking about the woman sitting between two of my ladies-in-waiting. The rosy woman stuffing her cheeks with biscuits.

“Saved me?” I frown. I don’t feel like I’ve been saved.

My mother’s smile stays, but a hiss slithers through her teeth. “I’ve already told you. The curse could have killed you. She let you sleep instead. She found a way. She even arranged for all of us to sleep, so your life would be the same when you woke. Wasn’t that nice of her?”

“My life is not the same.” I glance across the table, to where the prince sits at the opposite end, telling a story with exaggerated hand gestures. His audience laughs. My jaw tightens. “Everything is different. Everything is—” My mother jams her heel into my toe, but no one sees it happen under the table. I flinch, so I must feel it. I must feel that this is happening.

But my toe does not throb as I know it should.           

Guests approach me, presenting gifts. They keep curtsying and bowing and marveling at how well the fairy lady preserved my youth all those years.

But none of them knows which age to honor. I watch their mouths whisper: Is it her seventeenth birthday? Or one hundred and seventeenth? My century of sleep has confused them. They decide to avoid the subject and congratulate me on my pregnancy.  

My hand glides over the bulge in my gown. My pregnancy. Is it mine if it was not my choice?

Someone chuckles, and I look up. The prince—my husband—is making his rounds, chatting with my father, the chancellor, the fairy lady, everyone but me. They say he is handsome, but I think his chin dimple is too big. It distracts me. And his smile is like my mother’s—a disguise. I hear him say something about his child—our child—and what a joy it will be, when autumn comes, to have an heir.

I tell Paige that I am going for a walk. She starts to follow, but I tell her to stay. I take the path to my meadow—I call it my meadow because no else seems to go there. The path winds and swivels, and my feet know what it will do next. They remember it after all this time. The weeds soften; the trail fades. My toes meet the path’s end, where the grass will start to spread and I will raise my eyes to the meadow in all its tranquility.

I look up and see no grass, no rabbits, no deer. No quiet.

Cottages crowd together, breathing smoke through chimneys on russet roofs. Roads clamor with the sound of wagon wheels and horseshoes and children. A village.

On my wedding day, when my mother first told me how long I had slept, I didn’t believe her. But now I know she must have been telling the truth.

The prince’s heir kicks inside me. I blink and turn around…

~

The Room: Dusk

The dream unsettles her. Her nostrils flare and her tongue reaches out for air. She wheezes. She does not see that, in her tossing and turning, her tresses have wrapped around her neck. But her fingers know. They reach up and claw at the hair, tugging, pulling, loosening its grip.

Then the fingers pause.

As the sun sets outside the window, the girl’s eyebrows rise. The left one arches. Her lips curl up into a grin, revealing the layers of film on her teeth.

She jolts up in bed.

~

An Almost-Black Dream

…I jolt up and hurl the quilts aside. I scramble to my feet. If I crane my neck, I can see the eagle carvings that crown the bedposts. Why did I never think of it before?

Why did I never think to save myself?

I unravel the hair from around my neck until the ends smack the mattress and slide to the carpet. Starting at the roots and working my way down, I press and twist. Press and twist. I do not try to braid the hair—its snarls are inseparable—but the grease and oil help to solidify it into a cord.

I toss it over my shoulder, wrap it around my throat once, twice, and tie a knot to secure it. I gather the rest of the plait and make a loop at the end. A rope.

I swing it, fling it, aim it at the top of the left bedpost. It misses and drops. A trial run.

I step back onto my pillow. A running start—swing—fling—it catches this time. It holds. I leap off the bed as it tautens. For a moment I am flying.        

My feet halt inches above the mattress. The bedchamber spins while my hair swings me around and around. I hear my blood squeal as the plait squeezes it out of the veins in my neck. The air cannot come through—as if the prince is kissing me again, in a future I know well. But this will end it. This will prevent it.

My head droops. My limbs go limp and do not stir. My heart does not beat. My lungs hold nothing. All has happened as it should.

But I continue to exist.

I dangle, waiting. Waiting for the world to dissolve. For everything to turn black. But my mind is there, and it will not die. It will not die because the dream will not die. The dream goes on. My fate goes on.

But is it mine if it was not my choice?

Minutes, or hours, pass before I loosen my hair and let myself drop onto the bed. I crawl back under the quilts and roll onto my side…

~

The Room: Midnight

As she rolls onto her side, she tumbles out of the bed. Thud. She lies there on the carpet, snoring, while the moonlight tickles the curtains. Then she rises to her feet and walks in circles again, round and round a flower on the carpet. When she trips, the carpet burns a hole in her gown.

She stumbles back to the bed, where she tosses and turns until sunrise, dreaming the same dreams, the same colors. But only fifty years have passed in her century of sleep. Her eyelids go on rippling while, beneath them, the eyeballs writhe, squirm, try to break free before her prince comes.