Once upon a time
in a scratchy bramble bush outside the stone walls and behind an orchard there
played a two year-old girl who her parents called Rosey. Just two nights before Rosey was being held
by her mother ( a king and queen) and father, passed back and forth, when two
ariyas stood up and announced their wishes for Rosey, one being a long life,
the other being enduring health, and bestowed upon the girl these two
things. But the other lady, more like a wandered
traveler carrying beans, spices wrapped up in different colored faded yarn and a scratchy
brush patch of cardinal colored saffron, got up on the table drunk and walked
the perimeter of it in green pointed ballet shoes with silver saches at their
points. She professed that she would do
everything in her power to make it so Rosey would fall into a deep deep sleep
after getting drunk with a forty-two year old soothsayer after she pricked her
finger from a broken gold pin that he’d stolen and stuck from a ripped purple
piece of his violet velvet lapel. And
she screamed, the mother did, thinking of all this.
But
Rosey got into trouble in the mean time. She was always outside searching for her future and waiting for it to
happen and staying out too long in the rivers, dodging the crocodiles in the
moat, switching swords with her father’s best fencing partner, and going
unidentified often times as a boy, to dinner with her hair cropped short using scissors
stolen from the seamstress who’s posture made her look old and crippled from bending
over her spinning spool too long every day.
But
one day Rosey thought her dream was about to come true. She saw a man in the distance with black
sweaty hair, a matted short pony, and broken bottles clanging to the sides of
his saddle that he’d collected and strung their with cut shreds of tin and
thick green spinning spool. Rosey was
transfixed. She’d found her mate. She purred to him when he drew nearer asking
of her where she could find him some water. She ran inside the stone castle wall’s Dutch kitchen and brought him
spring water poured into a tin barrel meant for baking breads and stirring
batter. He drank thirstily. Having heard her tale told over and over to
her by her mother’s helper, Rosey saw that the man had a green bottle of
distilled red liquor that he’d laid out on the blanket in the corner, for where
he now slept. Wanting to speed up her
fate Rosey grabbed for the bottle of wine, tore the cork off with her front
broken tooth and drank heartily till she couldn’t swallow anymore. She saw the gold pin on his violet velvet
coat that held fifteen azalea petals long past their bloom and engaged her
finger in it till it bled and bled and bled. She felt herself drifting and she
grinned happily as she felt the gypsy’s fortune take over.
Ten
years later however Rosey slept in the far room at the end of the hall from her
parent’s bedroom where every morning they perpetually splashed her face with
cold water to try and wake her. They
tried other things too like boys. They
asked almost any man near the parameter of the castle to come and kiss their
daughter so that she’d wake up from her terrible sleep, yet no
soothsayers. There had to be another way
to get their daughter to stop snoring. She was driving everyone crazy. One day, however, Rose’s lady-in-waiting was ringing out an old rag when
she saw a young man tending to his pony by letting him drink from their ponds
small stream. The lady noticed the
bottles on the man’s horse and she took the bangle that he had stitched to his
front pocket as a sign that he was a gypsy’s son. The lady-in-waiting soon begged the man to
come up to the castle so that he could kiss the sleeping girl and wake her up
out of this trance which had had her parents pacing up and down the cracked
marble and ragged red rugged hall for years and years now. So he did. And he kissed her and sure enough Rosey woke up and saw the man of her
dreams but of course he was ten years older, forty-two. And he was perfect. He quickly dragged her out of bed and she
stumbled to feel her feet against the floor again because she hadn’t for so long
and then she whisked past her parents who were still pacing the hall and smiled
and waved as she fled down the stairs. Though her parents felt it was the most anti-climatic ending Rosey ran
away to a nomadic cave full of old and young and odd rural non-speaking, mute dwellers
of the Alborz and Zagroz mountains where she tirelessly told fortunes all the
day long to weary hungry travelers on foot with turbans on their heads, but
then spirit in their faiths when they left her home in the cheery, rosey cave
next to her husband the old soothsayer.
|
Loading...