Sleeping Beauty’s Screams
Author: Linsey (OriginallyJaded@aol.com)
Rating: R
Distribution: You want, you got it. Just ask nicely.
Disclaimer: I own absolutely nothing, not even the computer this was written on.
Summary: Liz’s thoughts post-graduation.
Dedication: To Stacie who read the entire story over IM and provided some very insightful ideas that later became lines. You’re a bloody genius even at 2am in the morning.
Author’s Note: see bottom…
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Your mother used to read you fairytales, not Grimm’s but Disney, so you could not only see the words but watch the movies too. She had read somewhere about the visual being important, probably in Spock, but you don’t know and you doubt you ever will, not now. Besides the movies kept you occupied while she helped out in the café, you did fine on your own.
By the time you were three you had memorized the Golden Book version of Sleeping Beauty, and would “read” it to customers when they sat at the bar. They thought you were incredibly advanced by the way you would trace along the line as you spoke the words. You thought it was a great game, a secret that they didn’t know. It made you feel important.
When you were five your mom tried to retire the book along with the old favorites of Cinderella and Snow White, but you cried. You loved looking at the pictures of the princes on white horses, the beautiful princesses and their dresses, and the magic transformations. You weren’t ready to wave goodbye to the books that contained your three favorite words: Happily Ever After. Your mother gave in, and they remained buried in your bookshelf for several more years.
As you got older, you traded pictures of magic for microscopes and science, pretty dresses for practical desert clothes, but you never relinquished the princes and the happy endings. They merely took on different forms. Your prince became the football hero, and you were too smart to need saving, you high school princess of the new millennium. You made your own life, your own decisions, and luckily they just happened to coincide with your parents. If you ever felt restless, you ignored it. If the pressure ever seemed too much, you just shrugged off. You didn’t need to party and joke, you needed to work to earn money for your education. You were too driven to act like the average teen. You had too much to gain.
And then one day the unthinkable happened. Something unpredicted, not part of the plan. You were shot, and the boy you thought of only as your shy lab partner healed you, flying in out of nowhere to save the girl who didn’t need saving, making you feel delicate, beautiful, feminine. All the things you thought you weren’t. Suddenly you believed in magic again, a new kind of magic, an alien magic. Suddenly you once again had a secret, and it made you feel important, special, different.
The boy made you feel different too, showed this whole new world you hadn’t known existed. This world where you felt alive, on the edge, awake. You were no longer Liz Parker, but someone different, someone more. You were a queen to a real king, which beat being a princess any day. You became part of a unit, a team, and it was worth the emotional turmoil from your parents, the loss of perfection at school, the danger.
Too bad no one explained that you could be surrounded and alone all at the same time, but that knowledge would not come till later. First you would have to give up your king for the greater good, lose your best friend to death, and almost lose yourself in doubt. But you triumphed, caught the villainess, saved the day, and while you best friend could never be returned to you, you had your king again. Happily Ever After.
For you, he was all that the fairytales taught you to want: sensitive, handsome, sweet, and if he had a little trouble with that faith issue, you forgave him because it had been for the greater good. You had always been one to focus on the greater good, the future, which was why you helped him search for his son, his dreams. Yours were not important anymore because you had to think for the group, for him, for the safety of all that you had embraced.
You fought for the dream, went to jail for the dream, told lies to your parents because they would not understand, could not understand that you had found your King so young. They spoke of caution, reason and youth lost, while you thought of nights spent traveling in search and enemies vanquished. You didn’t listen, were sent away because you didn’t listen and yet you returned only to help save the day in secret again with your king at your side. Happily Ever After.
There was no question in your mind when he asked you to leave with him. No doubt in your heart when he told you he loved you. It was too dangerous to stay, too dangerous to stand and fight, and you were all going together, the unit again. You were not important anymore because everyone’s freedom, everyone’s life was at stake. So you climbed into that rusted out van, and turned you back on those old hollow dreams as you drove out of Roswell. You were traveling with your new dreams, your new family, and your king, and it should have been enough. It was for all the princesses in the fairytales.
When did the new dreams start to crumble, and the old ones start to haunt? When did your king’s armor start to rust like the van that was your white horse? Why didn’t you ever stop to wonder what happened after the Happily Ever After?
You lost Maria in New Orleans. She couldn’t take the pressure, the life within those metal walls, she would rather sing on a street corner where her name and face were a blur to those who hurried by. She loved you all but she could not stay. So she left Michael, she left you her remaining best friend, embraced the pressing humidity and waved goodbye as the van pulled away from the curb. Through the glass and the weather, the world appeared a little melted, and her smile was the last one you ever saw.
Kyle started to crackle green soon after. The close confines of your traveling home with the enforced proximity to Max the trigger was too much for him. He made you let him out on the side of the highway in the desert outside Tulsa. It was damp, and the night air raised goose bumps on your arms. He pulled you out of the van with him and asked if you wanted to come too, go wherever, go away, start anew, but you told him no. For a moment you saw your high school prince again, your high school friend, but you had your king, you had made your choice, you had to stay with the group. Besides you loved Max, didn’t you? He was your husband and you were his queen. Kyle only waved as you drove away, and you tried to ignore the feeling of restlessness, the worry that life was falling apart. You chanted Happily Ever After and tried to forget that the end was still to be written.
Isabel disappeared near Boston. You woke up one morning and she was gone, only a note to say goodbye. You tried to act surprised with the others, but you had seen the panic in her eyes, the claustrophobia, the dread. You had recognized it, but refused to name it as your own. Instead you took a deep breath of the cold fall air and reminded yourself this was the life you had chosen, this was your fairytale. You didn’t bother looking out the window as you crossed state lines and moved further away from another member of your family. You didn’t want to see the leaves falling away dead. You stared at your hands instead and fiddled with your wedding ring.
Michael tried, he really did, but in the end he walked away too. Literally. Right in the middle of pumping gas for the van that only survived because of the alien magic that used to so enthrall you. You had felt him studying you through the window, and when you glanced his way he mouthed one word. After. You thought he was making fun of you so you jerked your eyes away, and when you looked again he was gone, leaving only a trail of footprints in the snow. Only later did you realize he was trying to tell you the truth, to make you see that he was only one more after, no happily ever about it.
So now you stand in the gift shop of the hospital, pretending to read greeting cards while your husband performs miracles, performs magic, does his kingly duties. You try to ignore the people coming and going with their smiles of relief, their tears of sadness. You try to disappear behind the flower display, using their smell to cover the sterile scent of death and medicine. You feel a jerking on your pants leg and look down to find a little girl of five standing beside you. She is trying to find a book for her sister, who is sick, won’t you help her. You try to ignore the fact that with her brown hair and eyes she could be yours. You are not going to have children, you are not going to raise them in a van, raise them in the life you lead. Instead you lead her over to the bookshelf, and crouch at her side as she flips through titles. You stare at the wall, trying to ignore the scent of her baby shampoo, and jerk in surprise as she flashes a book in front of your face. It’s Sleeping Beauty, the Golden Book version not the Grimm’s, and suddenly you are assailed by memories again. Suddenly you remember the first time you had a secret. That secret was misleading, it made you think the importance wouldn’t fade.
You are gripped by the overwhelming urge to scream, to cry out, to find a way to contact Walt Disney even though you know he’s dead. It’s just that you have to ask him, have to know that if a dream is a wish your heart makes, what does that classify the nightmare that is your life as. And while you’re at it, maybe you can ask him to clarify if Max was the kiss that woke you from the spell, or the prick of the spindle that put you under.
The little girl asks you if it is the right book, wants to make sure it ends well because her sister is very sick and she does not want her to cry anymore. You force your lips into some semblance of a smile and try to speak, but the words will not come. Happily Ever After has finally abandoned you too, without a smile, a wave, a note or a word, and you could not even watch out the window to whisper goodbye.
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“Fairy tales [are] …our strengths and frailties portrayed in separate roles, each playing a part in our evolutionary growth, until after the struggles and obstacles -- the unfolding of the story -- we finally find the prince or princess, our higher self, and marry to live happily ever after . . . until we turn the page to the next story.”
~ Renee Hall
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Author’s Note: The Grimm Brothers were not the first to immortalize Sleeping Beauty on paper, that honor falls to a much lesser known writer named Giambattista Basile. The version we’re most familiar with and from which Disney based their version belongs to Charles Perrault. “A dream is a wish your heart makes” is actually a line from Cinderella I believe, but I felt okay using it because Liz does indeed make reference to that story also being one of her favorites.