What are you waiting for?
It was the end of her nine-to-five shift and Miriam was just about finished cleaning up for the night. The small coffee shop was empty except for her boyfriend, Lance, standing by the door and the small boy sitting at the table in the corner just out of the window. Another employee had brought a hot chocolate to him earlier, but it had remained untouched. The boy continued staring at her through his red-brown eyes even when she approached to take away his cold hot chocolate.
“Please,” his voice echoed through her head as he grabbed her wrist and held onto it with a death grip. “Don’t go. We’ve been looking for you.”
Miriam’s heart started to echo its beats off of his voice. “Who needs me?” she said. The coffee shop started melting off the walls of a stone dungeon.
The boy smiled and spoke out loud: “The inmates of the 13th asylum.”
Miriam tried pulling her wrist from his grasp, but his grip remained steadfast and her wrist was cracking from the opposite pull. The boy continued to stare at her, the red in his eyes bleeding through the white until they were completely dark red. His pupils slit and his teeth sharpened, but he continued smiling and unblinkingly staring.
“Who are you?” she screamed. Her mind was racing too fast to comprehend as scenes of the past came rushing back of black fae, three pixies, a dragon… She shook her head and pulled again. Her skin ripped like fabric and the seams around her wrist strained between the boy and her.
“You’ve been sleeping too long and your prince has yet to come. He took you from your bed and brought you to his home, but you were still asleep. Your prince has yet to come.”
Miriam pulled and detached her hand from the boy’s grasp with a loud pop. Without thinking, she ran backwards towards the wall. Away from the boy for a moment and able to think, she saw now that her dungeon was a tower and the only way to the door was upward. The boy was running after her, so with a final wiggle of her fingers to assure herself they were working, she jumped up to a jutted rock and started to climb. He was now growing small wings and hopping as he ran in order to pick up wind and start to fly. His skin was getting more charcoal gray and his limbs elongated and fingers and toes turned to claws. She pulled herself up above his head, but her climb was becoming more and more difficult as her gym shoes became slippers and her jeans turned into a gown. Her hair started to get longer and it stuck to the sweat on her face.
The boy stopped struggling below and lay curled in the center of the floor, waiting for his wings to grow. He cleared his voice in a raspy cough that shook the walls of the tower, and when he spoke again, his voice was clear and low.
“Princess Rosalind was a very young girl, and one day she was given the gift of death should she prick her finger. Her parents sent her to the 13th asylum in order to keep her out of harms way, but the girl fell asleep and was never to wake up until her prince came. Buried alive she awaited that day until the knight came. He wasn’t a prince, but he woke her up and broke her curse and took her away. But she needs to stay in the asylum until she wakes up or the inmates will have nothing to do to pass their time. She was so pretty.”
Miriam continued to climb, but her wrist was starting to tear even further revealing stuffing from her wrist. A small stream of blood trickled down her arm, but she ignored it and continued pulling herself up, kicking off her shoes deliberately in the process.
“She was their little doll,” the dragon said as it flapped its premature wings with a little hop. “She had to continue sleeping until they needed her again.”
Finally, Miriam reached the stone door. At the bottom of the door was a small flap used for getting food down to her, but the rest of the door was smooth metal. She pushed the small door outward and hung onto the edge of the large door. Her arms were aching and she could barely hold on, but she risked it and swung herself over so she was completely hanging perpendicular to the door. She moved her sweating hands further through the flap and tried to get a better grip by jamming her arms through the small door. She felt someone tie a rope around on of her wrists and give her a little more slack.
“Just let go,” she heard a man say. The dragon roared as if on cue and rose towards her perch. Without thinking, she pushed herself out of the small door and held onto the rope.
The door swung open just long enough for a glittery ball of fire to hit the dragon square in the chest plate. Stunned, it flew backwards to the other wall of the cave, just long enough for the rope Miriam was on to be pulled up and out and the door to be shut. The dragon hit the door right after it closed, the smash of metal reverberating through the halls.
“Is this all that is hurt?” Lance asked pointing to her wrist. Miriam nodded, breathless.
“So you really don’t remember,” he said pulling out a needle and glittering pink thread. “On your birthday you were cursed: if you ever pricked your finger you would die. Your parents took great pains to shed you from anything that could prick your finger, but the only effective answer they could find was to lock you away in a tower with no windows and a door at the ceiling.”
“That must’ve been it,” Miriam said regaining her speech. Finding it hard to watch him sew her wrist together, she looked around her. They were the only two people in the coffee shop, but now they were both sitting on the floor. The only car in the parking lot was theirs and the light outside was diminishing. The little shop was just as she had left it and perfectly clean, including the cup of cold hot chocolate sitting on the table.
Her boyfriend tied a knot and cut the thread with a knife. “However, the fae are mischievous folk and the dark fae didn’t really want to kill you, she just wanted you all for herself. Now that your parents were not watching you, she put you into a deep sleep and declared that, should a prince wake you, your curse would be broken. She watched over you in the tower and built a castle that she called the 13th asylum. Apparently, other fae lived there, but no one knows what happened to them. Well, I was a knight of your father and not a prince, but your father wanted you back with the curse broken, so he asked me to save you from the dark fae. Apparently, her deal was very specific, as she was just insisting that a knight could not save you, only royal blood. But the curse is broken; I just don’t know how to stop this from happening again.”
“Well,” Miriam said getting up, “we’ll just have to redefine what a prince is.”
He smiled at her and lent her his arm. Taking it gladly, she locked up the little shop and they drove home for the night.
