The Sleeper and the Spindle

by Neil Gaiman

It’s the distance that makes a gift magical, so the dwarfs believed.

It would be the end of her life, she decided, if life was a time of choices. In a week from now, she would have no choices. She would reign over her people. She would have children. Perhaps she would die in childbirth, perhaps she would die as an old woman, or in battle. But the path to her death, heartbeat by heartbeat, would be inevitable.

“What’s happening?” said the smallest of the dwarfs. “Sleep!” said the sot by the window. “Plague!” said a finely dressed woman. “Doom!” exclaimed a tinker, his saucepans rattling as he spoke. “Doom is coming!”

“How can sleep be a plague?”

They had names, the dwarfs, but human beings were not permitted to know what they were, such things being sacred. The queen had a name, but nowadays people only ever called her Your Majesty. Names are in short supply in this telling.

All the sleeping fish had been netted and carried out of the water. There were no more rabbits, no more doves.

Sleeping people are not fast. They stumble, they stagger; they move like children wading through rivers of treacle, like old people whose feet are weighed down by thick, wet mud.

Names. Names. The old woman squinted, then she shook her head. She was herself, and the name she had been born with had been eaten by time and lack of use.

The queen felt something stirring in her heart. She remembered her stepmother, then. Her stepmother had liked to be adored. Learning how to be strong, to feel her own emotions and not another’s, had been hard; but once you learned the trick of it, you did not

forget. And she did not wish to rule continents.

There are choices, she thought, when she had sat long enough. There are always choices.

They walked to the east, all four of them, away from the sunset and the lands they knew, and into the night.