And the faces I see don’t belong to me. They belong to a thousand other girls reaching out toward a thousand spinning wheels or spindles or splinters. Other sleeping beauties, in other stories? I want to stop them, shout some kind of warning—stop, you boneheads!
One of them seems to hear me. She looks up at me with eyes that are an impossible shade of cerulean, her face framed by locks of literal gold, her finger hovering a centimeter above the spindle’s end. Her lips frame a single word: “Help.”
The world stops smearing.
I am still on my feet. Still slightly drunk. Still touching a throbbing finger to something sharp. But everything else is different: the spinning wheel before me is polished smooth with use, the bobbin wound with flaxen thread, the distaff gleaming wickedly. The water-stained plywood of the floor has been replaced by smooth flagstones, the rickety windows by narrow, glassless slits. A cool wind slinks through them, smelling of midnight and magic.
I look up, reeling, and meet those ridiculous eyes again. They belong to a girl so gorgeous she veers from the beautiful toward the unnerving. Nobody outside a fashion magazine has skin without pores or lips the color of actual rose petals. Nobody outside a Ren faire wears dresses with pleats and girdles and trailing sleeves.
“Oh!” she says, and even her voice is fucking musical. “From whence have you come?”
I want to assure her that none of this is real. That she and her tower are hallucinations produced by the last desperate misfires of my synapses. That her usage of whence was grammatically suspect at best, anachronistic at worst.
I manage a single wheezy, “Holy shit,” before my vision goes black.
* * *
I WAKE UP in bed. Not mine; mine is a twin mattress with faded Disney sheets that I grew out of years ago but don’t see the point in replacing. This bed is an absurd, canopied affair of white silk and soft down. It’s the sort of bed that only exists in period romances and fairy tales, because actual medieval beds were a lot smellier and lumpier; the sort of bed where a princess might sleep comfortably for a hundred years.
I part the canopy with one finger and find a room that matches the bed: dark stone and rich rugs, tapestries and carved-oak chests. I blink into the cheery morning light for several seconds, half expecting a songbird to alight on the windowsill and break into an upbeat chorus, before sinking calmly back against the pillows.
This is the point in your standard fantasy adventure where the heroine would give herself a good hard pinch to determine whether or not she’s dreaming. But I can hear the labored thump of my heart in my ears, feel the slightly hungover scratchiness of my eyeballs: I’m not sleeping. I’m not hallucinating. Unless the afterlife is even more profoundly wacky than most major religions have so far posited, I’m not dead. Which means—
I can’t seem to finish the thought. It sends a giddy, hysterical thrill up my spine and a nameless rush of something behind my ribcage.
My phone hums in my jean pocket. I fish it out to find roughly eight hundred texts from Charm. Most of them are variations of wtf wtf WTF where are you interspersed with threats upon my person (if this is some kind of sick joke I swear to jesus I will kill you before the grm does) and pleas for a response (hey your parents are calling me now and idk what to say so if you’re alive NOW’S THE TIME BITCH).
I start to type back an apology then pause, wondering about data rates between Ohio and wherever the hell I am and how exactly I have cell signal, before that wild hysteria bubbles over. I write sorry babe. got spider-verse-ed into a fairy tale.
As I hit send, I feel that unfamiliar rushing in my chest again, and it turns out it has a name, after all. Oh, hell. You’d think twenty-one years under a life sentence would be enough to squash all the hope out of me, but here I am, lying in a bed that doesn’t belong to me, filled with the desperate, foolish hope that maybe my story is about to change.
The phone buzzes in my palm: is this a joke to you
Followed by: i thought you were dead/abducted!!! what the HELL zin???
I’m tapping out a longer explanation when that impossible girl with the impossible hair sweeps aside the canopy and carols, “Oh, you’re awake! Thank goodness!”
I squint at her—this slender golden princess limned in dawn light, her cheeks flushed and her eyes shining—and slowly raise my phone, take her picture, and send it to Charm with the caption not joking.
“Are you well?” the princess asks earnestly. “Should I call for a healer?”
I ignore her, choosing instead to watch Charm’s little typing bubble appear and disappear several times. It’s worth mentioning at this juncture that Charm is profoundly, disastrously gay, and suffers from a diagnosable hero complex. Willowy princess-types with slender wrists and visible collarbones are essentially her kryptonite.
The bubble reappears. who is thjat
*that
I grin up at the princess, who now has two tiny lines marring her perfect brow. “What’s your name?” I ask.
She tilts her chin very slightly upward. “I am Princess Primrose of Perceforest. And who are you?” I detect a hint of haughtiness in that you, as if she barely restrained herself from adding peasant after it.
“Zinnia Gray of, uh, Ohio.” My eyes return to my phone. Princess Mothereffing Primrose, apparently, I type. dude, where did you get that spinning wheel??
pam’s corner closet & more. Pam’s is the nearest flea market to our old high school and an extremely unlikely place to purchase an accursed or enchanted object. It’s mostly just used vacuums and Beanie Babies perched on moldy piles of National Geographics.
“Lady Zinnia.” The princess’s voice is less musical when she’s annoyed. “If I could but beg your attention for a moment. I would very much like to know how you came to be in the tower with me last night.”
I slide the phone into my hoodie pocket and scooch upright in bed, legs crossed. “Is there coffee in this universe? No? Okay, just sit down.” From Primrose’s expression, I suspect she’s not accustomed to being invited to sit on her own bed by sickly, short-haired interdimensional travelers in unwashed jeans. “Please,” I add.
Primrose perches at the foot of the bed, her posture painfully upright.
“How about we start with you. What exactly were you doing in that tower room?” I’m seventy-five, maybe eighty percent sure I already know.
She draws a measured breath, and for the first time I catch a gleam of something raw beneath the porcelain-doll perfection of her face. “I—don’t know. It was my first-and-twentieth birthday yesterday.” Of course it was. “And I went to sleep very late. My dreams were strange, unsettled, full of a green light that called my name … And then I woke in a room I’d never seen before! Far from my bed, reaching for that strange object.”
“You mean the spinning wheel?”
Her pale face grows two shades paler, and the raw thing in her eyes swims closer to the surface: a desperate, lonely terror. “I thought it must be,” she breathes. “I’d never seen one ’til last evening.”
“Because, I assume, your father ordered them all destroyed?” Standard Perrault stuff, repeated by the Grimms a hundred years later and canonized by Disney in the ’50s.