Sleeping Beauty

This is the whole tale, the same ten pages it runs in Pillowbook on the phone. Not a word is cut, and nothing asks you to sign up. The first three pages carry the paintings they were given; the rest of the plates are in the app, where the book is read one page to a screen.

Reading time is about five minutes at an unhurried pace, one page every thirty seconds or so. The curse is spoken and the castle sleeps. No violence, and everyone wakes.

The one in rose had still not given her gift. She came forward and said she could not undo it, because you cannot, but she could see to the terms. Nobody inside the sleep would grow a day older. Nobody would wake alone: they would all go down together and all come up together. And the sleep would end. She was quite firm about that last part.

After that the king had every spindle in the kingdom collected and burned them in the courtyard in one enormous heap. The princess grew up with copper hair that went red in the sun, and a rose-and-cream gown she liked because it had no train to tread on. She knew every corridor. She could name the cook's four dogs from the back. She was the sort of person who opens a door simply because she has not opened it before.

On her fifteenth birthday, at the top of the north tower, she found a stair she was almost certain had not been there in the spring. It went up and round twice, and at the top there was a small warm room with a window the size of a book, and an old woman sitting in it, turning a wheel.

"What is that?" said the princess, meaning the thin bright thing going round. The old woman said it was a spindle, and did she want to try. The princess did want to try. She reached out, and the point of it caught her finger — hardly at all, less than a needle — and she said "oh", and sat down on the stool, and was asleep before her shoulder reached the wall.

The rest of the castle went down where it stood. The cook fell asleep with the spoon still in the pot. The four dogs went over sideways in front of the hearth, one after another, like something being folded. The fire stopped burning and simply glowed. The fountain in the courtyard slowed and slowed and then stood still with the water bent over in the air.

The briar came up that autumn along the whole of the outer wall, and after that it came up every year and never once went back. It grew over the gate and the windows and at last the roofs, until the castle was a green hill with a shape under it. People in the valley said there was a house in there.

A hundred years is a long time in a valley and no time at all inside a sleep. At the end of it the briar flowered top to bottom and opened like a curtain, and the small grey woman came up the path and tapped once on the door. The whole castle woke at once, in the middle of whatever it had been saying, and they had breakfast in the courtyard, and laid a place for her at the end of the table.

The end.