I was always falling asleep on dates then, suffering from a specific kind of narcolepsy. I’d wake to their kisses, like Sleeping Beauty, they liked to say, but Sleeping Beauty slept through the kiss, and the sex, and the birthing, only waking when one of her babies sucked the poisoned needle out of her finger. She didn’t have any say. She married the prince who’d fondled her sleeping body.
Is that so, they’d say, but they never really cared.
I’d close my eyes again, while they kissed me, and finally, after they’d gone, I’d escape back into sleep.
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Cathy Ulrich’s dream date includes a break for a nap. Her work has recently been published in Maudlin House, Spelk Fiction and Spry Literary Journal.