Day 2: The Hundred Year-Old Girl

Prompt, chosen at random: "Tell a tale once, and then tell the same tale again, this time revealing what really happened." Thinking, as I often do, about beauty, women, blood, and penetration, I palled around with The Grimm Brothers.

The Hundred Year-Old Girl

His metal vest sparkles and his leather shines

kneeling over the perfect woman, newly so,

gleaming with permission and puberty.

The halls of the castle, infested with thorns,

creates a susurration of whispers. The young woman

cocooned in unconsciousness, she begs

to be unwrapped, peeled open, flower metaphors et al..

The ability to bounce light is a kind of wanting,

the wanting to be kissed, opened. Why, 

everyone should feel like a princess at least once,

to awaken, sought and chosen, from a hundred painless years.

*

The prince enters, weapon first, ready

to negotiate new terms of an old curse.

She is beautiful because she does not yet know

the suffering that is cardinal to beauty;

all she remembers is wandering the halls, beloved,

a silver hairbrush in one hand. Fifteen, the first penetration,

first blood, first prick, an old woman's trick. Outside,

his knights try to make a fire from the hedge of thorns

but the stuff won't burn. The man's lips are soft

but he is unshaven from travel, and it is his beard,

a thousand tiny thorns, that wakes her.

Briar Rose and her king, Briar Rose and her king,

a wedding that will cost vats of slave's sweat;

cost the meadows all their petals.

She will ride with him, among his men,

kneel for his parents, kneel for the crown,

she will kneel for her king, ready herself

with the help of six maidens for the next prick,

ready, this time, for the sting.