Once Upon a Time: New Fairy Tales Paperback (18 page)

malice or pained outrage, but rather they happen, shaped by the

whims of history and coincidence, like when there are drug users

dying in the hospital, dying of despair and dissolution, and when

there are newborns in need of vaccinations, and when there are not

enough reusable syringes because they rust and get lost and are being phased out anyway, and there are too few of the disposable ones to

even talk about—things like that, the sort of things that happen in

fairy tales because in real life they would be entirely too sad.

And the witch: she is in her forties and Kalmyk, the descendant

of those who were once banished but returned later, slightly more

frost-bitten, more cynical; the nurse wears flat shoes and has small annoying corns on the balls of her feet, and her breasts that grew heavy with age sag against her gray-buttoned coat; you would mistake her

for a kindergarten teacher if you saw her in one of the dusty, sleepy streets, or walking through the parks, or craning her neck to see the face of the bronze Lenin. She looks so tired and yet placid, her dark hair misting over with gray. This is before the Buddha and before the Temple, and even before the curse—before she even knows she is a

witch.

Her job is in the pediatric ward, and she loves it—she loves babies

and the swirl of their hair at the very tops of their heads, black or blond, the red cheeks, dimpled fists and bent legs. She doesn’t even mind when they cry. She hushes them, gently, like a mother would—

with every prick of the needle their gurgling escalates to high-pitch

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• Ekaterina Sedia •

cries which soon die, until the next one starts. She moves from crib to crib to crib, followed by the undulation of wailing. It’s for their own good, she tells herself. Disposable syringes are impossible to

boil, but she soaks them in alcohol between her rounds.

The floor in the hospital is blue linoleum, covered in cracks like

spiderwebs, or maybe it’s just the pattern. She was never interested enough to look closer. The walls are yellow subway tile, glossy and

pale. There are no visitors allowed in the children’s ward, lest they bring some infection with them and get all the children sick. It is

only the scrubbed nurses and the doctors, and the quiet humming

of the electric plate they use to boil non-disposable syringes. It is lukewarm now.

The vaccinations do not take—or take altogether too well,

depending on your perspective: children develop symptoms and

ulcers. At first, everyone thinks that the vaccines are defective—that instead of attenuated smallpox, scarlet fever, mumps they contain

live viruses. It is the stuff of nightmares, because who wants to tell the parents? And then it gets worse. The Kalmyk nurse is fired for

negligence, even though she is neither the only nurse nor the most

negligent one; but such is the nature of a curse—it needs a scapegoat.

Well, two: the curser and the cursed, the witch and the child, the

criminal and the victim. And who is to say who gets it worse? But

having one of each makes it easier to keep track: the rest of the nurses continue with their work, albeit with some extra training and the

humanitarian syringes sent from overseas by the solicitous George

Bush, and the rest of the children die. There is only one left by the time the scandal and the newspaper exposés fall away like dead skin; there is only one girl.

And what about the girl? Indeed, there isn’t much to say about the

Sleeping Beauty while she is conforming to her moniker—before or

after, when she is awake, maybe. Before: she was one of the children, crying weaker, her limbs growing thinner, losing their caterpillar-like segmentation of baby fat and becoming tapered candles, waxen,

melting until there was nothing but a fragile bone wick in the center,

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• Sleeping Beauty of Elista •

barely hidden. Her eyes grew dark as her face receded away, and

her mouth filled with thrush, white fungal threads covering the red

inflamed tissue underneath.

But she didn’t die. Instead she slipped into a coma, and the doctors debated what to do. They decided against life support—because why

extend the suffering of something too small to even understand what

suffering was and there was a nobility in it—but she breathed on her own. They disconnected the glucose drip, and the thrush subsided,

but the girl didn’t die. She continued to breathe, sleep, and—very

slowly—grow.

Her parents took her home when she was two. The hospital didn’t

want to keep her, and the doctors had grown uncomfortable with her

failure to die despite any source of nourishment—it was as if sleep

itself sustained her; and she wasn’t a bad child—quiet, never fussy, never hungry. Almost pretty. She slept at home, on her older sister’s cot, under the billowing of white cheesecloth curtains in the summer and heavy, silver-shot darkness in winter. They changed her clothes

only as she grew out of them, because they never got soiled.

She turned sixteen in 2005, the year the Buddhist Temple was

built. They don’t tell you that, but she was the reason why the Dalai Lama came to Elista in the first place. The Sleeping Beauty of Elista—

the only survivor out of the twenty-seven infamous pediatric AIDS

patients—was a secret, but rumors travel. He came to see her when

she was a mere child, but by the time the temple he had requested

was finished, she had grown too long for her sister’s cot. As soon as the temple was ready, her parents carried the cot with the sleeping

girl on it to the hidden room, made especially for her, at the temple’s center.

She sleeps in the temple from then on. Her sleep is a peculiar thing: like the curse, it spreads through the town; others do not sleep like she does, but they are stricken by a particular malaise—timelessness of sorts, the blunting of affect and feeling. It grows and it radiates through the country, where the outrage dims to smirking discontent

and fear—to wary mistrust, as things continue to decay and fall into

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• Ekaterina Sedia •

disrepair. Tractors rust. Inflation is a part of this too, I’m sure, and it is difficult not to look to the miraculous sleeping girl as some sort of salvation—and one has to wonder why didn’t the Dalai Lama ever

come back to see her again, or to visit the temple built for him.

They talk about practical miracles in Elista—their Buddhism

tinged with the terrible shadow of Christianity and its fairy tales—

they talk about how some miracles are meant as object lessons, and

maybe the Sleeping Beauty is one of those. Maybe the dead children

were a lesson too, maybe they were meant to remind us about proper

sterilization techniques, although the price seems altogether too

high for such a trivial lesson. Maybe there is something deeper in

it, too. But no one can agree what the sleeping girl is meant to teach us. In fact, no one seems to agree about her either. Some say she

is Kalmyk, and others insist she is Russian, the descendant of the

settlers of Stepnoy—the ones for whose benefits the Kalmyk nurse’s

ancestors had been exiled to Siberia. There may or may not be some

symbolism there, or historic justice, or whatever you want to call it.

No one can ask her parents since they had passed away, and her older sister moved to some better city, possibly less decaying, leaving her cot behind. And now the Sleeping Beauty belongs to the town and

the temple, floating uprooted and possibly dreaming.

The witch visits her occasionally, and it is assumed that she is there to ask for forgiveness. The more mythically minded citizens of Elista whisper when they see the nurse (the witch) walking through the

park, in her flat nurse shoes, with her thick compression hose and

gray coat. Her back is bent now, and people whisper about who she

is. She doesn’t have the advantage of the usual witch’s disappearance after the curse has been cast and takes over the story; she is left to linger along with it, but with not much else to do, her historical

function completed, but to crane her neck and try and discern the

inanimate features of the two largest statues: the Lenin is older than the Buddha, and no less enigmatic. Neither offers her solace.

And who knows when the Sleeping Beauty will wake? (There has

to be an after, so we know that she will.) There are signs now—she

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• Sleeping Beauty of Elista •

is stirring in her sleep and mumbling occasionally, in the soft gurgle of infants because she never learned another language. So it must

be close, the citizens whisper, and disagree about what will happen

then. Will she rise and walk across the land, growing gigantic,

traveling from Elista to Moscow to Novosibirsk in three steps? Will

she multiply herself like a true Buddha, with twin streams of water

and fire shooting out of her eyes? Will she teach at the temple?

Or will the mere act of her waking shake the curse away, and the

world itself, asleep since 1989, will sit up abruptly, wondering at what had become of it?

The signs are clear now, and the Sleeping Beauty’s eyes are opening, and there is a terrible light behind them; the witch walks into the

temple and stands, waiting, her knotted hand resting lightly on the

edge of the cot, as if gently shaking the crib to wake a sleeping infant.

••

Ekaterina Sedia
resides in the Pinelands of New Jersey. Her critically-acclaimed and award-nominated novels,
The Secret History of

Moscow, The Alchemy of Stone, The House of Discarded Dreams,
and
Heart of Iron,
were published by Prime Books. Her short stories have sold to
Analog, Baen’s Universe, Subterranean,
and
Clarkesworld,
as well as numerous anthologies, including
Haunted Legends
and
Magic
in the Mirrorstone.
She is also the editor of the anthologies
Paper
Cities
(World Fantasy Award winner),
Running with the Pack,
and
Bewere the Night,
as well as
Bloody Fabulous
and
Wilful Impropriety.

Her short-story collection,
Moscow But Dreaming,
was released in December 2012. Visit her at www.ekaterinasedia.com.

••

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•

Fairy tales have informed a great deal of my fiction, both my

novels and my short fiction. They’re a wellspring I return to again

and again, and sometimes my exploration of them is very overt—as

with “The Road of Needles”—and sometimes it’s only subtext. All

the various incarnations of the “Little Red Riding Hood” tale, those are the ones that have most fascinated me, and so they’re the ones

I’ve gone to again and again. But I’d never done the story as science fiction, and, offhand, I couldn’t recall anyone else who had, either. So, when it occurred to me, “The Road of Needles” was born.

Caitlín R. Kiernan

•

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•

CaitlÍn R. Kiernan

Nix Severn shuts her eyes and takes a very deep breath of the

newly minted air filling Isotainer Four, and she cannot help

but note the irony at work. This luxury born of mishap. Certainly,

no one on earth has breathed air even half this clean in more than

two millennia. The Romans, the Greeks, the ancient Chinese, they

all set in motion a fouling of the skies that an Industrial Revolution and the two centuries thereafter would hone into a science of

indifference. An art of neglect and denial. Not even the meticulously manufactured atmo of Mars is so pure as each mouthful of the air

Nix now breathes. The nitrogen, oxygen—four fingers N , a thumb

2

of 0 —and the so on and so on traces, etcetera, all of it transforming 2

the rise and fall of her chest into a celebration. Oh, happy day for the pulmonary epithelia bathed in this pristine blend. She shuts her eyes and tries to think. But the air has made her giddy. Not drunk,

but certainly giddy. It would be easy to drift down to sleep, leaning against the bole of a
Dicksonia antarctica,
sheltered from the misting rainfall by the umbrella of the tree fern’s fronds, of this tree and all the others that have sprouted and filled the isotainer in the space of less than seventeen hours. She could be a proper Rip Van Winkle,

as the
Blackbird
drifts farther and farther off the lunar-Martian rail line. She could do that fabled narcoleptic one better, pop a few of the phenothiazine capsules in the left hip pouch of her red jumpsuit and

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• The Road of Needles •

never wake up again. The forest would close in around her, and she