What the Spinning Wheel Gave

“She woke, yes. But she had been dreaming for a hundred years, and dreams accumulate.”

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What troubled the physicians, later, was the content. Not the waking, the waking was physiologically unremarkable, all things considered. Pulse normalized within minutes.

Temperature returned. Colour came back to the cheeks in the manner of someone returning from a country that had agreed to release them.

The prince was there, looking somewhat overwhelmed by his own heroism, which is common in these cases. She sat up. She breathed. She looked at the ceiling of the chamber with an expression that seemed, to the attendants present, less like relief than like a woman completing a very long mental list.

The trouble began when she spoke. Not the first words, those were ordinary, a question about water, a request for the time. It was the subsequent conversation, particularly from the third day onward, that caused concern among the medical staff. She described the dream.

Not in the manner of a person recounting the confused imagery of ordinary sleep, but in the manner of a woman reporting from a place she had lived in and knew well; streets, buildings, residents, histories, a complete world running on different principles than the waking one, where she had apparently acquired considerable influence and possibly an administrative role.

She spoke of obligations she had left unresolved. Of people, of persons, she said carefully, who had been depending on the continuation of her presence.

The prince attempted reassurance. She looked at him with a patience that suggested reassurance was not the currency she required. “You understand,” she said,

“that a hundred years is a long time to be somewhere.” He said that she had been asleep.

She said that this was a distinction the place had not recognized, and nor had she.

The physicians recorded this under psychological adjustment following extended unconsciousness and noted it as expected and temporary. It was not temporary. She stopped eating with the appetite of the waking world.

She slept, when she slept, it was with an immediacy that alarmed the servants. And she spent her days by the window in a state that looked like waiting, the precise, informed waiting of someone expecting a specific arrival, her eyes fixed on a point in the middle distance where the real world ran out and whatever had claimed her for a century still, apparently, began.