Once Upon a Time: New Fairy Tales Paperback

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 ? 155 ?

? 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.

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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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The Road of Needles


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Caitlín R. Kiernan





1.


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