When Sleeping Beauty wakes up
she is almost fifty years old.
Time to start planning her retirement cottage.

By recalculating the fairy-tale premise in real-world terms, Kumin punctures the romance of “Sleeping Beauty” with the arithmetic of aging. A century of enchanted sleep becomes, in human life, a leap from youth to late middle age—an abrupt arrival into the practical concerns of the body, time, and economic planning. The joke about a “retirement cottage” underscores how narratives that idealize female passivity (waiting to be awakened) can erase women’s lived time and agency. The lines also gesture toward modern anxieties about lost years and the pressure to be “on schedule,” turning a myth of rescue into a wry meditation on what it costs to postpone living.