His real name was Harold, a fine, dignified name suited to his position in the court. He suffered none to call him Harry or Hal to preserve this sense of decorum. Even though he had just turned one and twenty, he was a solemn, thoughtful man, who preferred the quiet dignity of his library to the noisy frivolity of court. Others mistook his serious demeanor for melancholy and his solitude for aloofness. Even his mother, the queen, slyly referred to him within her circle as Prince Charming, a name so utterly inappropriate that, of course, it became affixed to him forever — just not to his face.

            One day Prince Harold was taking a solitary walk in the forest surrounding the castle. With him, he carried a bit of charcoal and a roll of parchment because he often happened upon scenes in nature that he liked to sketch and keep as a memory forever. There was a certain perfection in this preservation of a moment. In his sketches, the fickle moon would always stay in a curving crescent hung with the stars, the restless hawk remain perched on a high branch, its head cocked to one side, listening, its eyes glittering in the sun.

            Lost in his thoughts, Harold also momentarily lost his way in the deep woods, but up ahead he saw a glow of green through the trees that indicated a clearing. He headed for it, thinking he could better get his bearings again there. Parting the last of the thick branches blocking his way, he entered a lovely green glade. In the center of it, though, was something most curious. On a platform of gleaming ebony wood lay a young maiden of about Harold’s age, with the blackest hair, the whitest skin and the reddest lips he had ever seen. So fresh was her appearance that at first he thought she must be sleeping in this odd outdoor chamber. But the closer he approached, he realized that this was no sleep but the last one.

            In her hands, a bouquet of red roses had been placed, overpowering in the perfume of their decay. Pulling out his parchment, he quickly sketched the dead beauty, from the tips of her doeskin slippers to the bright red ribbons braided into her lustrous black hair. He wished he were a sculptor so that he could capture the perfect curves of her form, the roundness of her cheek, in marble forever. For he knew this momentary perfection would not last, except in his sketch. This maid, so recently stricken, could not maintain this appearance of living death much longer. Like her roses, soon she, too, would begin to decay, and the thought of that terrible fate troubled Harold.

            But for now, he wanted to thank the lifeless maid for sharing the perfection of her beauty with him so that he might immortalize her in his sketch. As a prince of the realm, he did not like to admit how much the fair sex frightened him. He had never dared draw this close to any living maids, with their fluttering eyelashes and their pretty lips always in motion, uttering a stream of witty words for which he had no response. This maid’s eyes were decorously closed, passing no looks of judgment upon him. Her mouth was closed, too, in respectful silence that could not mock him. So he knelt down on one knee in reverence and took one last look at her beautiful face, white and still as stone. Then, in reverence, as he would venerate the shrine of a saint, he solemnly kissed her perfect red lips.

Susan J. Hudson is a former journalist who now does communications for the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her short fiction has been published in Sky Island Journal, Hoxie Gorge Review, Gramercy Review, The Argyle Literary Magazine, Half and One, and The Write Launch. An excerpt from her historical novel-in-progress has been published by History Through Fiction.