The 1002nd Night

Sleeping Beauty .Oelieved extinct these last seventy million years but, snapping at the hand of the captain who flopped it onto the deck of his trawler; buried under the small sharks and spiny dogfish that plumped and jeered the day's catch with toothy, worthless grins, it lay, living fossil fading from mauvy blue to dirty, steely gray. Yet to be portaged to a taxi on the dock and driver persuaded the creature hadn't begun to reek, though an equatorial December sun rained down on overworked iceman and taxidermist alike; not yet swaddled in formalin, no shroud fashioned of old news; nor laid in state for twenty thousand to view— a bony lungfish caught by a kiss, I was hauled in from sleep's unfathoming depths to another life, where the scales worked in gold on my farthingale marked me as other than his upright subjects walking on their fins, those too lowly to afford equipage or mount. My eyes adapted to lowest light over that century he claimed I had slept, I favored the ultramarine hours when the sheer weight of fine mist submerged the new artfully natural grounds. Trees stiffened to coral, palace sinking to seafloor in so grave a progress no crystal cracked, dark of the new moon deepening the grotto to an underwater cave where, cooler than surrounding ocean, rainfall seeped, nothing out of place but a handline the current suspended obliquely down the water column from a night­fisherman's pirogue and, sodden handkerchief lost overboard, a reward poster, its letters streaming, proposing, Look carefully at this fish. It may bring you good fortune. ...