The Sleeping Girl

Abstract

21 SKYE ANICCA The Sleeping Girl Fairy Tale Review Award in Prose Selected by Kathryn Davis  Of “The Sleeping Girl,” esteemed final judge Kathryn Davis writes: Most stories you walk into; you think you’re walking into this story but this story walks into you. This story has been happening for a very long time, the engine driving it operating for hours or weeks, maybe even years—the “length of a horizon.” Like in one of Isak Dinesen’s marvelous tales: you think you know where you’re going and then the story propels you out the other side of it and you actually think you’ve landed in the familiar world, dumbstruck. The marvel of this story is the perversity of its vision. Where does the familiar world lie, the world where to sleep is to be tucked in safe? How does the world lie to us? What do we have to have stolen from us, what do we have to steal, to earn that tucked-in sleep? In “The Sleeping Girl” time is the element from which morality beckons. You’d better read this story more than once. You’d better read it at least three times. Even so, you’re never getting out of it. 22 The Sleeping Girl But the Countess herself is indifferent to her own weird authority, as if she were dreaming it. In her dream, she would like to be human; but she does not know if that is possible. —Angela Carter, “The Lady of the House of Love” Those whom fortune favors Find good luck even in their sleep. —Giambattista Basile, “Sun, Moon, and Talia” he girl hadn’t moved in at least fifteen hours, but Myra attempted to organize her thoughts away from worry. She remembered that in her twenties, endless sleep had seemed appropriate. Myra had not yet seen the girl’s face. She’d been shown to the sea-grass hut late last night by a man who vanished into the brackish darkness as if he’d never been. Myra’s restless night, which marked her first week abroad, had been bounded by the steady cadence of the ocean and the clues to her roommate ’s identity: light brown hair captured in a messy ponytail and the top of a pink T-shirt, otherwise covered by a light sheet. Despite the worries that flitted opportunistically around her mind—Diabetic shock? Murder victim arranged prettily?—Myra had no trouble imagining why a traveling girl might wish to sleep the length of a horizon. On the beach the following morning, Myra didn’t swim. Though the water was the aqua of a postcard, she had heard too much about riptides and man-o-wars, floats of transparent jellyfish with electric blue tendrils. (At the hostel near the airport, a smooth-chested surfer had brandished his legs, welted with stings the size of hard-boiled eggs.) Of course, there were a zillion ways to be wounded; Myra had considered that traveling did little to affect her odds. Nonetheless, she avoided the water, instead walking the length of the white sand beach that stretched from the “eco-resort” she had chosen as home for the next few days. The resort was basic—several clusters of windowless structures, a few open grass palapas for shade, a fish ’n’ chips restaurant with long wooden tables t 23 where strangers were forced to eat together. With the exception of the sleeping girl, Myra had seen no other tourists. A vendor followed behind her along the shore, laboriously pushing his cart through the sand. Coco! Agua de Coca! Coca Cola! he chanted as he walked, though Myra was alone on the beach in the heat of the day. Out of embarrassment, she bought a coconut. She watched as its hard shell cracked under the force of the man’s machete. A second knife sliced the supple white meat inside. The vendor held up half a squeezed lime and an unmarked bottle of red sauce. Myra shrugged, preoccupied with the knife that might have been rusty, and certainly wasn’t clean. Her thoughts strayed where they would: How easy it would have been for the vendor to slice...