The Snoring Dragon
The Snoring Dragon
by Christine W. Murphy
The queen placed her crown beside her bed, weary from decking halls for children long since gone. She rested beside her well-grayed prince, who so many decades ago rescued her from her fierce dragon. Tonight, her prince’s nocturnal grumblings annoyed her more than ever did the beast’s.
Why had she sought so desperately to escape that dragon of her youth–her single state? Time had erased the memory.
The prince didn’t stir when her hands began their glide up and under his nightshirt to caress his back. When her nails dug into his side, he snorted and shifted his bulk. Steam rose from his nostrils to ring the canopy.
She strained to bring into focus the ghosts that appeared in the vapor. Names and faces of suitors who dared scale her castle walls. A blur of features and limbs–all that remain of a dozen rendezvous. The minstrel who played with skillful hands. The blacksmith with wife and child. Two knights, yes? How many squires? A gardener, a priest. A Jack, a Gawain. Red, pouting lips that burned her neck. Hard, eager sex that bruised her thighs. Sweet lies that filled her days.
Which Adonis should she have chosen? Which would not now rest beside her drunk with sleep, no longer eager to press his lips to hers? Those twelve past loves, separated by time and joined by herself, took form in one colossus in the air.
How could he compete, her snoring prince, with the phantasm that appeared over her bed? Her patchwork lover had not suffered four score years of toil and care, the fog of her faulty memory blunting his hard edges.
Her lover built of smoke and thought dissolved beside the stolid back of her earthly mate.
Even with memory failing, the queen remembered the stings and prickles endured in the garden of youth. Her prince was as good as any, she decided, as her fingers slid around his waist and reached to caress his chest. A braid of her hair, as gray as his, fell across his arm when she leaned to kiss his unshaved face. He snored on.
It came to her now, years too late–she might as well have married that dragon.