The Most Beautiful Corpse

By Andres Catter

 

Dusk

In blood orange sunset, vines crept like snakes

As Prince Phillip pushed through the thicket of thorns

Creating a scar in the greenery, through steaming bogs,

Darkening moors, past mossy stones

 

He came to a clearing at last.

Like a great tree,

a tower

had sprouted and pierced the sky,

Its bricks crusty with time, its height rivaled only by castles

Prince Phillip froze in fear and watched as night fell on the tower

 

He had journeyed so far on story alone

The story of Death’s Bride

the most beautiful corpse

The Sleeping Beauty

Legend claims she was a warrior,

cursed since birth to prick her finger on another warrior's blade

And before sunset on her sixteenth year, she fell into a

death-like sleep

Her only hope: to awaken by

True love’s kiss

 

King Stefan, unable to find his son a bride,

sent Phillip to find the Sleeping Beauty and marry her

Phillip now used his sword to pry the door from the tower’s tight grip

 

Stairs like crooked teeth protruded from the tower’s dark mouth

Phillip lit a torch and began to ascend

With each measured step, his courage shrank

He didn’t want this, to find this bride of death

A helpless damsel

Yet he pushed on, his father’s wrath more chilling than a dead bride

 

____________

 

He reached a dust-riddled door, adorned in spiders webs

He timidly pushed it open,

the chamber turned cold

The bed, a coffin, the curtain, a shroud

With a careful hand he set down the torch

Illuminating half this decrepit mausoleum

 

Toward the bed, his hand reached

for the pomegranate silk of the bed curtain

Grasping it, his pull revealed

This body in bed, this inhuman beauty

Not the bride of death, not a beautiful princess as promised

 

But the pale body

of a man

A beautiful corpse

His hair, a dark cloud of curls

His skin, milky and cold

His lips, lavender and held in mid-sentence

His eyes shut, as if praying

 

Phillip stepped back, no not a princess at all

Barely a dead prince

Then Phillip remembered the legend

True love’s kiss

Forbidden fruit for nobility such as Phillip

Men

 

But not dead men

He called out, “Awaken!” to no avail

Only True love's kiss

 

He crouched near the pallid form

Grabbing this cold, lifeless head, Phillip placed his lips

upon such sleeping beauty

In that kiss he felt cold then

Then, like waves on a shore, warmth returned

 

His pallor turned sunrise

 

When Phillip opened his eyes they met the

deepest ocean blue and blinking

Phillip pulled away from the kiss

“My sleeping beauty, what is your name?”

“Aurore, Prince Aurore,” he whispered back.

“I was alone for so long,” Aurore spoke softly

“So was I, Phillip confessed.

 

Aurore had been awake before

But never like this

Phillip gazed into piercing eyes

that gave him what he never had before:

Home.