Brier-Rose
A very long time ago, there was this royal couple, who said to each other every day, “Oh, if only we had a child!” But, alas, they never had one.
Then it happened one day while the queen was sitting in her bath, that a frog crept out of the water onto the ground and said to her, "We’re all tired of hearing you guys whining, so after a normal gestation period, you’ll finally have a daughter."
What the frog said did happen, and the queen spent the next nine months pregnant and in therapy trying to convince herself that hallucinations were normal in the first trimester. She then gave birth to a baby girl who was so beautiful (because aren’t all babies just the cutest things?) that the king could not contain himself for joy. “Now that we know our child’s gender for certain, let’s throw a baby shower! And because more people means more gifts, we’ll invite all our friends, relatives, and lots of other people we may or may not know! We’ll invite the wise women too, but since thirteen’s such an unlucky number, let’s just ask twelve of them.”
The baby shower was one hoppin’ party, and at the end, the wise women, who apparently had never heard of ToysRUs, presented the baby with magical gifts. The first one gave her virtue, the second beauty, the third wealth, and so on with everything that anyone except babies cares about.
The eleventh one had just given her gift when the unlucky thirteenth woman, sensing that everyone was thoroughly bored by now, suddenly swept in. Understandably, she was quite unhappy about being left out, and had thought long and hard about an appropriate punishment. "When the princess is fifteen, she shall p***k herself on a spindle and fall over dead."
Everyone was rightfully scared, but then the twelfth wise woman, who always liked to be at the end of the line, stepped forward. “I can’t undo the curse,” she explained, “because of all this space-time continuum mumbo-jumbo, but I can tweak it a bit. Instead of dying, the princess shall merely be overcome with such exhaustion she’ll sleep for one hundred years.”
The king, following directions from the chapter in Parenting for Dummies entitled “What to do when your child faces impending doom”, decreed that all the spindles in the kingdom should be burned (because we all know that no one could just go and make another one).
The princess, named Brier-Rose by parents who had an oxymoron complex, grew up to be über-teen, loved by even the cook, who didn’t like anyone. Part of her perfection was a lack of curiosity which didn’t crop up until she was fifteen, when she decided it was high-time she explored her own home. She found a high tower, and after climbing the winding stairs to the top, came upon an old woman busily spinning flax.
"Good day, old woman," said the princess, who at least did not lack politeness. "What are you doing there?"
"I am spinning," said the old woman, nodding her head, not seeming the least surprised by the girl’s lack of domestic intelligence.
"What is that thing that is so merrily bouncing about?" asked the girl, and, forgetting that it’s common courtesy to ask before grabbing things that aren’t yours, took hold of the spindle.
She had no sooner touched the spindle when the magic curse was fulfilled, and she pricked herself in the finger. She then became so tired that she just had to go to sleep, and fell backswords onto a bed which just happened to be lying around in the tower. This lack of energy spread throughout the entire castle. Everyone from the king and queen to the flies on the wall fell asleep were they stood. The maid stopped plucking her hen and dozed off, and the cook decided it would be a better idea to take a catnap then smack the kitchen boy upside the head. Even the fires conveniently went out so that the palace didn’t burn down around their ears. Everything was still.
All around the castle, briers grew strong and thick. They covered everything until finally the palace vanished from view. A legend circulated throughout the land about the beautiful sleeping Brier-Rose. The stories also told that from time to time princes came, wanting to force their way through the hedge into the castle. However, as this was apparently an endangered breed of briers, this angered the environmentalists, who proceeded to toss the princes bodily into the thick of the thorns, where they died miserably.
Many long, long years later, yet another prince who had nothing better to do but court death came to the country. Curious about the thorny foliage, he asked an old man about them. “Back in my day, there was this princess whose parents were foolish enough to not teach her not to touch pointy things, so she pricked her finger and caused herself and everybody else in there to fall asleep. Stupid hooligan teenagers. Probably got the idea from that FaceSpace place…”
But the prince, whose head had been quite puffed up by his own not-so-skillful parents, said, "I am not afraid of thorns or environmentalists. I will go there and see the beautiful Brier-Rose."
However much the good old man tried to dissuade him, the prince was too stubborn to realize he didn’t know everything.
This just happened to be the hundredth year of forced lethargy on the castle, and the briers were miraculously turning into rose bushes. Unlike the briers, these were simple garden-variety roses, so they didn’t really care who tried to get through them. The prince walked quickly through the flowers, not even bothering to take time to smell the roses or pick some for the poor girl who had seen nothing but the back of her eyelids for a hundred years.
All around the courtyard and inside the castle, he saw dozens of sleeping people and animals. The king and queen snoozed on their thrones, a maid was slumped in a chair with a hen in her lap, and a cook was collapsed on the floor next to a little boy. He walked on deeper into the palace, not seeming to mind that he was trespassing, and noticed it was so quiet that he could hear his own breath. Finally, after a long search, he came to the tower and opened the door to the little room where Brier-Rose was sleeping.
Seeing her laying there so beautifully, he decided that it would be okay to give her a kiss. Conveniently, when he touched her with the kiss, Brier-Rose opened her eyes, awoke, and looked at him kindly, not in the least worried that a strange guy was looming over her.
They went downstairs together, and the king awoke, and the queen, and all the royal attendants, and they looked at one another in amazement. The flies on the walls crept about again, and all the other animals began to roam about. The fire in the kitchen rose up, broke into flames, and cooked the food, which oddly hadn’t spoiled after one hundred years. The cook smacked the kitchen boy, causing him to cry, and the maid finished plucking the hen.
Then, deeming everything that had just happened unimportant and forgetting all about it, even though they might have wrote a best seller on curing insomnia, Brier-Rose and the unnamed prince got married and lived “happily” until they died.
