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Dedication

For Ellen Datlow, good friend and editor through all the years and pages

1

OWEN SAT WITH A cup of coffee at the kitchen table and stared out the glass door that offered a view of his tiny backyard. It was surrounded at its boundary by tall fir trees, and, at its center, there was a bird feeder hanging on a shepherd’s crook, leaning easterly in the wind and wet mud. The sparrows swarmed what was left of the seed he’d put out two days earlier. While his visitors fluttered and pecked, his thoughts were of Sleeping Beauty, virulent thorns, and a turreted castle in the distance. She was dressed in azure robes, he noted, like the Virgin Mary, and her trailing golden hair had stars in it. In the background, there was a night sky with a crescent moon and stars of its own.

The scene Owen envisioned was painted on the wall of the children’s section at the local library where he was and had been the head and only librarian for the past ten years. The painting, nearly as old as the one-story stucco building that held it, had seen better days. In the last five years the picture had become “ill,” and it was said by those who tend to the upkeep of murals that the paint was in structural peril. He had a professional in to assess the damage, and the fellow told him what it would cost to restore it. Thousands more than the library budget. Its particular illness was a kind of paint separation that began with cracks and advanced into the curling away and dropping off of paint chips. Like a plague, the problem was spreading, creeping up Sleeping Beauty’s neck toward her serene face.