Briar Rose 10
Her true prince has come at last, just as promised! He is lean and strong with flowing locks, just a little hair around his snout and dirt under his nails, but otherwise a handsome and majestic youth, worthy of her and of her magical disenchantment. She sleeps still, eyes closed, and yet she sees him as he bends toward her, brushing her breast with one paw--hand, rather--and easing her thighs apart with the other, his eyes aglow with a transcendental love. It is happening! It is really happening! she thinks as he lowers his subtle weight upon her as a fur coverlet might be laid upon a featherbed. The only thing unusual about her awakening is that it is taking place in the family chapel and she is stretched out in her silken chemise on the wooden altar, itself draped for the occasion in fine damask. Her parents are watching from the upper gallery, having just wandered in from their bedchamber, her father still pulling on his cream-colored woolen drawers, her mother dressed in a long black tunic, clasped at the throat with a ruby brooch. Below them stand the steward and the marshal and the cook and the butler and chamberlain, the entire staff of domestic servants and household knights, but they all seem to be dead. No, they are merely asleep, awaiting your own awakening, explains the old crone, midwifing her prince's kiss, who seems not to know how it is done. His mouth approaches hers and she is filled with his presence, it is as though he is melting into her body or she into his, but when in joy (the new day dawns at last!) she opens her eyes he is nowhere to be found, nor is she in the chapel nor in her sickbed either. She is in what is probably the kitchen, where the familiar old crone, her head wreathed in a flickering glitter of tiny blue lights like otherworldly fireflies, is sitting by a door that is not a door, one leading to a hidden corridor (she does not know how she knows this to be true), slitting the white throat of a trussed piglet, which is squealing madly as though for a mother who has abandoned him. Probably this has happened before, perhaps many times, she doesn't remember, can't remember, Who am I? she demands. What am I? The crone hangs the gurgling piglet by its trotters on a beam to let it drain and says: Calm down, child. Let me tell you a story . . .