Sleeping Beauty

Prophesy

Long, long ago, when queens reigned in soap boxes and fairy tales hid in closets, there lived an ambitious young senator and his rich surgically-enhanced wife. Everybody thought they made the perfect couple, even the tabloids said so, and their prospects were the very best, but there was one sour grape in their vinyard. For many years they had wanted to have a child but, despite strict adherence to lunar charts and experimentation with many different sources of nutrition, their union was barren and they were very unhappy.

But then one day, having spent many thousands of dollars on in-vitro fertilization, the doctor announced that the senator's wife was at last pregnant. The next nine months were joyful indeed, and on the very happiest day of all a beautiful young baby girl was delivered. They named her Rose.

To celebrate the birth of their daughter, the senator and his wife arranged a dinner party and invited five of their six strongest political allies. The sixth, still bitter from his recent costly Californian divorce, was a bit of a party-pooper and now also awkwardly single. Besides, he would have made the number of diners thirteen - an unlucky number, especially since the Dresden china dinner service had only twelve settings.

The dinner proved to be a sumptuous feast; the six senators, the five wives and the one husband all agreed that it was the most splendid such event they had ever attended. Little Rose slept peacefully through the entire evening, and at one point her father was moved to proclaim tearfully, `For the sake of my dear sweet princess, I vow to strive to make this great country of ours perfect.' Joining in the spirit, one by one the other five senators leapt to their feet declaring `I will fight crime!' or `I'll improve healthcare!' or `More welfare!', and so on, though really they all thought their country was pretty fantastic already and money best spent on golf-courses.

Just then, in a foul temper and drunk to boot, the seventh and uninvited senator barged into the dining room trailing angry security guards. Spying the sleeping babe he growled, `On her seventeenth birthday she'll prick herself on a needle and fall dead.' The diners all thought this unlikely, not to say in very bad taste, and were relieved to see the intruder slump to the floor unconscious.

`She who lives by the needle dies by the needle, eh?' chuckled the senator-for-Miami in a rather surreal attempt to lighten the mood.

It failed.

Fate

Rose blossomed into a beautiful girl, so much so that not even her nose required cosmetic emendment, but a far from virtuous one. At age nine she smoked her first Camel, by fourteen the lock on the liquor cabinet no longer deterred her, and by the time of her seventeenth birthday she'd done enough drugs to know the Pink Champagne was not a French rosé.

Her seventeenth birthday fell, unfortunately, on the same day as the presidential election. What with her father being one of the candidates, and the clear favourite at that, her parents were too busy gloating to remember her birthday, and certainly too preoccupied to recall the ominous but long-forgotten prophesy. Uninterested in votes, Rose sneaked away unnoticed.

Her friend Billy had the only excitement she craved. `Hey, babe!' he said when she dropped to her knees beside him.

`Want some,' she said, and smiled as he waved vaguely, permissively, at his kit. Rose had never injected before, but had seen it done often enough and knew what to do. Quickly she prepared a dose and, after tying the rubber tube about her arm to expose the veins, she flushed the liquid ecstasy into her blood. She moaned as the world began to spin.

That was her last night of freedom - she was made a prisoner by her father's presidency. When she was diagnosed as HIV positive, when she developed AIDS, when she cut her wrists not once but twice, the White House staff hushed it up. She had no one to talk to and no hope of a cure. They forced her to eat but still she wasted away. Hidden cameras watched, and hidden microphones listened, as her life faded.

They refused to let her die, and when death was inevitable they cut off her head and froze it.

The next hundred years were boring, but the handsome doctor who woke her was pretty wild and they lived happily ever after.