Bore by Fruits of Lore

She awoke from another dreamless night but didn’t feel rested. For sixteen years, she had lain in a coma, waiting for a prince to awaken her. In that time, she had dreamed an entirely full and fulfilling life. She had dreamed up two children, Annabelle and Langston. They were perfect and did wonders with mathematics. And her husband, Piers, was lovely, handsome, and caring. They lived near the beach and spent their evenings with the sunset.

Carol had never wanted it to end.

But she was ripped from her dreamworld and thrusted into a reality harder than any she could’ve known. She awoke to Herbert kissing her, not her perfect Piers. Glass glittered around her as if she bathed in a star-field. Herbert had shattered her coffin that protected her where the dwarfs could not. Shattered it to get to her, to kiss her and tear her from what she’d come to know a love. And he had proposed marriage, only to find out years down the road that he was, after all, infertile. But that didn’t stop Herbert, much as she begged. Life was terrible for Carol.

She longed for her evenings with Piers.

She missed her children.

So she returned to the dwelling of the dwarfs. There had been seven but only four lived there, with one ailing in heath. Of the four, one was new to Carol. She’d never thought of the dwarf’s cottage as being organic in population growth, but as a place where men went to deceive themselves into believing their species would die out.

Carol asked the new one his name and he said it was Langston. This shocked Carol but she quickly overcame it.

She asked Langston to convey with the others on the whereabouts of the wicked queen who had caused her perfect slumber. As Langston went from one invalid dwarf to the next, Carol investigated the cottage. It had grown into a thicket of webs and blanketing dust. She feared for her allergies.

But she then spied something remarkably luscious. Beneath a diamond-glass dome was a pristine apple. Carol adjusted her angle and saw that it was flawed with but one bite, as many beautiful things are.

She removed the dome and picked up the apple. She knew that magic had to be at its core in order to stay hearty after more than two decades.

Upon touching it, she felt her desires grow so rapidly that she nearly fainted. Langston entered and shrieked at the sight. Carol’s white hue colored upon being discovered in such a precarious and potentially embarrassing situation. Langston asked Carol her intentions and was saddened to learn that she wanted to enter into her dreams once more.

As they spoke, the two able-bodied dwarfs that Carol recognized from a lifetime ago entered and started screaming at the sight. Langston tried to hush them but their long-ago-duties were as strong as Carol’s urgings and they wanted nothing more than to protect her. Carol fled, holding the tarnished apple, with the three dwarfs behind her. Langston aided them at their behest but he truly wished Carol to safety.

In the wood, Carol was lost, clutching the apple against her chest as if it were a second heart. She craved it but thought she might also need the glass coffin’s bedding, wherever it might have been left. She reasoned that her dreams might fully return to her if she was dozing in the same place, as if dreams operated like ghosts who haunt destinations of past despair.

In stumbling through the wood, Carol came upon another unexpectation: two well-manicured tombstones. One had Wysella printed upon it. Carol remembered that was the wicked queen’s true name.

The other tombstone said Annabelle.

Carol was in shock as the date of Annabelle’s birth was within the same year as her death, like a story that started and ended much too soon. Carol dropped the apple and fell to her knees at the grave sight. The three dwarfs arrived, two with labored breathing and Langston between them, acting as a double-crutch. Carol turned and asked if she had really been dreaming.

Langston stepped forward and tried explaining it as he’d been told.

When Carol had fallen into her slumber long ago, the dwarfs didn’t know what to do except bury the queen, who had died of happenstance in the wood. But one dwarf had grown curious about the feminine disposition and took advantage of Carol. The dwarf was executed by the others, but the seeds had been planted, the damage done.

Langston was born first and then Annabelle, but the surviving dwarfs didn’t know how to care for a woman in the stages of infancy. They were but meager men, and bachelors at that. Annabelle didn’t survive, mainly through unintentioned neglect.

Carol openly sobbed upon what she had entertained during her untimely slumber as she now knew her dreams were the saplings of trees that had lived and died in the real world.

The two older dwarfs said they had kept the apple so that no other maidens might stumble upon it and become victims of circumstance, of the male temperament. Carol only nodded and no longer wished to return to her dreamworld.

She looked at Langston. He offered to help her up and she accepted, just as a loving son might care for a broken mother. They left the small sight of Wysella’s and Annabelle’s bones.

The apple Carol dropped knocked seeds into the earth. In time, a mighty tree flourished as nourished by the corpses below and the magic within. Apples bore by the tree were avoided by forest creatures but one young lady happened upon them under light of the jackal moon. Her name was Suzanne of the Whyte family. And she was rumored to be the fairest in the land, which is probably what subconsciously drove her to the fruits of a vane queen’s wicked grave.

Once upon a time, Suzanne took one unguarded bite.

The end.

Word Count: 998