Once Upon a Time: New Fairy Tales Paperback

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, ? 153 ?

? 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 ? 154 ?

? 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