Published 'Sierra Heaven' 1998
The beautiful princess had never seen the sea in real life although she did take great delight in its image of relentless power - and, indeed, she traced drawings of the oceans upon tracing-paper, the flimsiest tracing-paper it was possible to obtain without its integrity as tracing-paper being compromised. On the other hand, she had seen the sea in her dreams many times and its waves were crumpled tissue, its ships pencil points, and the wind that blew was her own sweet breath of passion.
One day, when she reached the earliest age of child-bearing, her father the King informed her about the marriage he had arranged for her - arranged even before she had been conceived as the child who eventually turned out to be the Princess - to a Prince, a handsome Prince; one not only, by all accounts of gossip, hornier than most, but also one who happened to live beside a foggy sea, and a foggy sea to live beside was better than no sea at all.
This news was pleasing to one of such strong sex as the Princess, boding well in as much as her undercurrents would be fathomed and her yearnings quenched by a Prince, one with lead in his pencil. Yet she suddenly feared that any prince thus worth his salt would first instruct doctors to examine his bride-to-be, hence discovering that her own tidal breakwater had been breached in dreams and her seed-beds thus despoiled - that the contract between the Prince and the Princess would therefore be deemed null and void even before the Prince had the chance to plumb the depths of her desires.
Indeed, her integrity, she knew, would be found in tatters, but what made everything so futile in hindsight was the fact that dreams for her had, in any event, never lived up to expectations, simply involving untraceable deep-sea fishing trawlers that sailed too close to the wind or crewless ships that merely passed in the night.
