After the Ever After
by Adam Breckenridge
She rarely slept anymore and had long ceased to be a beauty. Her name was mostly used in mockery now.
Her king was dead and the people had long forgotten she’d ever been a queen. Only the rats and the buzzards still honored her. That was fine by her. It was a pleasure to sit in her moldering garden and gather her subjects around her, assigning tasks that were beyond the scope of their dull, vacant gazes and waxing dreamily about her life before she slept, when animals were for eating. If she got distracted for too long in these daydreams the buzzards would eat the rats, who never stopped bowing before her even as their brothers and sisters went down the gullet. It was enough to move her to tears. The rats were the only ones who had ever shown such loyalty.
When she couldn’t sleep, which was most of the time, she’d wander the castle grounds instead. The ruins were still solid enough to hold her weight for now, but more and more she had visions of the ground giving way beneath her and then a short plunge that would last an eternity, kind of like a dream.
Somewhere in a forgotten corner of the castle, during one of her midnight ambles, she found a spinning wheel, the first she had seen in a long time. She touched the needle. She didn’t stop herself even when she became cognizant of just what it was she was about to do.
Nothing happened. It seemed sleep would have to come the hard way.
It was the dream she wanted. In all her years no one had ever once asked her if she had dreamed while she was asleep. She had, but the memories of those dreams were misty things she could never quite grip onto, except that they were beautiful. She knew that much at least, and every once in a while she would see something out of the corner of her eye or hear a voice that reminded her of that time, when she had lived another life in her rest, and the longing left in her after these contacts would leave her broken for days.
Her life ever since that awakening kiss had been a longing to return to that forgotten dream. Her waking past too felt dreamlike for the longing that had pervaded it, so many years wasted in wishing for something other than what was before her. She often found herself wondering what other lives she could have had, what other dreams she could have lived and whether they would have been better than the dream that had become her reality. She would often reflect on this question in particular while watching her buzzards eat her rats.
Adam Breckenridge is an Overseas Traveling Faculty member of the University of Maryland Global Campus where he travels the world teaching US military stationed overseas and is currently based in Japan. He has thirty-five story publications to his name and has most recently appeared in The Fantastic Other, Lucent Dreaming and Beneath Ceaseless Skies.