Sholm Pearly

I have decided on a relaunch my Sleeping Beauty short story on Amazon. So I’ve been playing around with cover design and I’m pretty happy with the result.

I really enjoyed writing this story and rethinking the whole fairy tale in a SF world. Integrating and transforming the elements of the story was particularly fun, like the traditional fairies giving a quality each, the prickly roses, reinventing the witch, the prince, the birth of twins… and giving a back story to my princess that would make her more real and less innocent… I really hope you will have as much fun reading this story, and spotting the key symbols of the myth, as I did writing it.

Here is an excerpt for the curious:

Carraos had been inside for over two hours now. Doann’s heavy brass watch ticked the seconds away in maddening regularity. The junkyard king, wouldn’t be coming out anymore. But even though Doann and myself both knew that, we stayed there, waiting. We watched the jagged lines of the mechanical jungle imprint rust trails against the heavy clouds. 

Now, the jungle was mecha territory and breathed death.

Doann sat deeper in his car seat. Plastic creaked. He had his eyes on the horizon and his cheek pressed against the watch. He couldn’t hear the horrid thing. He was deaf. But it didn’t matter. He liked feeling the noise. He hated being deaf.

I’d been drumming my fingers against the dashboard for a while before I realised how annoying it was. My hand dropped to the side and went about braiding the fringes trailing my jacket. My eyes were glued to the narrow gate of the mecha jungle, as if Carraos would pop up any second. 

The jungle looked like thousands of abandoned bomb shells reaching into the sky. People said it used to be a city turned into a massive grave after a pandemic. It looked as if our ancestors had wanted to shoot down heaven with corpse-filled-bullets. 

They had failed.

And the shells had returned. 

Thick titanium walls stood erect around it all, further wrapped in deadly steel thorns the size of my fists. The barbs were electrified. They gave an eerie glow to the whitened bones scattered on the ground around the jungle.

“He was wrong,” Doann said.

And if you want to read more?

Here is the link to the amazon short story ebook