Author's Note: This is something of a departure for me. I'm currently really fascinated by fairy tales and myths, and the affect they still have on our culture. It's partly a result of reading too much Angela Carter. I'd love some feedback- so please read and review.
Snapshots From a Rose Garden
Sleeping Beauty
It is very early in the morning when he arrives. The ward is almost completely empty, except for a large, dark haired woman in a nurse's uniform who sleeps, snoring gently, at the reception desk, and doesn't respond when he tries to ask her for directions. He has to search for her room on his own. The light is odd, ghostly, everything has taken on a strange dark blue tinge. Everything is unnaturally still. He has travelled so far to get here. It has taken him so long.
Her room is full of flowers. They flow off the bedside table and onto the floor. They are piled up on top of the cupboard. There are vases of them next to the T.V. Lilies, and tulips and michelmas daises, and roses; bunches and bunches of roses of all colours. The smell of them is almost overpowering. He has to pick his way through them to get the bed. He wonders about all the others who have been here before him. The ones who have failed.
She looks impossibly small lying there, dwarfed by all the flowers, and by the tubes and wires that link her to the various machines which are keeping her breathing. Her red hair is spread out vividly against the septic white of the pillow, her face is pale, the skin of it seems somehow stretched thin, translucent, he can see purple shadows under the surface of it. She looks like something out of a Pre-Raphaelite painting. He almost laughs at that thought, knowing how she'd hate the idea. Her eyes are closed. He spends minutes staring at the veins in her eyelids. One bony hand lies on top of the bed covers. There is a needle taped into it. It is strange to him that all the force and fire and passion that she has when awake can be reduced to this.
He sits down on a hard plastic chair. It is cold in here. He wonders anxiously whether that can be good for her. There is silence, except for the soft clicking and whirring of the machines, and the steady tick of his watch. He puts a hand through his hair, he stands up, he sits back down. He wishes he could talk to her, yell at her, ask her why she has done this to herself. But she is not here. There is a lifeless pale doll in the bed beside him which wears her face, but she is gone into some other realm of ghosts and shadows, and he has been so long looking for her.
Hours pass, the light changes. Blue gives way to yellow and gold. He grows stiff and tired and hungry. It is no good. She is not here. He turns to leave. He gets as far as the door of her hospital room. He turns back, chest constricted, face burning, his eyes stinging with unshed tears. He leans down and touches his lips to hers. They are soft, and smooth, and cool. He straightens and presses her hand.
Her eyes flicker open.
Cinderella
She sits down on the pavement outside, breathing hard. Somewhere in the distance, perhaps a few streets away, a clock strikes midnight. She had promised to be home by now. The pavement is hard, cold and uncomfortable. She wishes she had thought to bring a cardigan or a shawl. It is raining. She can feel the drops landing softly on her bare skin. Everything smells wet and heavy. She can still hear the music blaring from the party. Loud and tinny techno tunes with a heavy bass that beats into her. Her head aches painfully, as if there is a metal band tightening slowly and painfully around her skull. She kneads fiercely at her eyes, attempting to clear her mind somewhat.
She tugs open her silver leather handbag and pulls out a small hand mirror. Time to asess the damage this evening has done to her face. She sighs as she examines ruefully the wreck of all her finery. Her mascara has run badly. There are great black smudges down her cheek. It is as if a spider has dipped its feet in ink and run up and down her face. Her hair is still full of glitter. There is a golden sheen all across her light brown hair. The shimmering lip-gloss that lit up her mouth when the night began is long since gone. She looks worn out and exhausted. The illusion of perfection is broken.
Her dress (God, how she had adored it when she bought it three weeks ago) is thoroughly destroyed. There is a rip in it from the hem all the way up to her hip, and the bottom of the silvery material is badly frayed- threads snagged and loosening. The satin rose that should be at the shoulder has been torn off. Her legs are spattered with mud. She rubs at them dissatisfied, grimacing as she does so. The first thing she is going to do when she gets home is have a long hot bath she decides.
For just a moment she allows herself to think about him. She conjures up his image- his thick shock of black hair, his odd lopsided smile, the startling pale green of his eyes (she had never seen truly green eyes before tonight), the shape of his hands (muscular, long fingered, the veins standing out clearly) and the way they felt on her shoulders and at her waist. She relives ecstatically the moment when he laughed, at some stupid remark she had made, throwing his head back, grinning widely. She wonders if he will think of her at all tomorrow, and decides it is unlikely.
She picks up her shoe from where she had placed it on the ground beside her and gazes at it dejectedly. It was a beautiful, gaudy thing- Silver, with a dizzyingly high heel, studded all across the toe with crystals. It catches the light from the street lamp a few yards away a sparkles. It is now a sad remnant of its former glory however. Just like the rest of her dazzling costume. The heels has torn almost completely away from the body of the shoe and hangs limply and sadly. Somewhere during the course of the evening she lost the other shoe, and so now sits bare foot, wriggling her toes for warmth.
The dream is over, now she must return to drudgery, to being ordinary.
Her cab left long since, she has no wearable shoes. She wonders vaguely how she is going to get home.
Beauty and the Beast.
She has never been one to ask to questions. When her mother died she never asked where she had gone, she never asked why. She did not ask a single question when their wealth grew exponentially, nor when they suddenly became penniless once more.
He arrives home very late at night. She is not asleep. She has been cleaning the house. Her sisters have been in bed for hours, but not her. There is too much work to do. She stops as soon as she hears his key in the lock, looking up eagerly from where she is kneeling in the kitchen, scrubbing at the floor. She hears the light click on in the hall.
He looks tired. His face has more lines in it than she remembers. His hair is greyer, it hangs in shaggy hanks across his face. He looks thin and shrunken with age. His black overcoat swamps him. There are dark, purple, bruise like shadows under his eyes. She is sure he has been ill. This is what she sees first. This is what she looks for.
It is only after she has anxiously searched her fathers face, reading every detail, that she notices what he is carrying. Roses. Pale white roses. A great frothy mountain of them. Every one perfect. Each petal like velvet, utterly unblemished by any spot of brown of decay. Each stem long and smooth and dark green. They smell like honey, and like meadows in summer, and like rich old spice. They are white, and pure and clean. Roses, in the middle of December. It feels like a miracle.
Her father puts them gently into her arms, without words, with only a tired smile. She takes the weight of them gladly. Lifting the blossoms, and burying her face in them. The petals brush softly against her cheek, the smell envelopes her like music. She feel one pure moment of unrestrained, uncorrupted joy. The joy she felt in the garden as a small child. She offers up a silent prayer.
She looks up at her father with tears of gratitude starting in her eyes. He remembered, he remembered to bring her the only thing she has ever wanted or asked for. The sheer surprise of it is overwhelming.
The light shifts. A dark shadow falls across the floor, there are thick black stripes across the yellow lamp light- the fittings of the window. It looks, just for a moment, like prison bars.
She does not ask where the flowers came from.