Continuing the ancient SU tradition of storytelling for Halloween month, I offer this one, first published in Lore 2, in 1995. And no, it isn’t about writing and/or writers. Happy Halloween…
***
How mother screamed when she met you. She’s never been able to tell me why. I wondered how you did that.
She told me so many other things when I was a kid. She said a special man would come for me one day. He would take care of me, protect me. I’d never be alone in the wilderness, she said, and I’d never need anything again.
Knights in shining armor. Heroes, fairy tale princes. You saw my old room, all the unicorn and princess statuettes. God, if you knew how many times I saw Sleeping Beauty.
No one else would ever do, I deserved the best, she said, and I believed her. Creeps in school called me a stuck up bitch. Guess I was. Had to date when I went to college or else hear all those lesbo jokes. It wasn’t like I wasn’t attractive.
Thank you. You always know how to say just the right thing.
But those guys, they couldn’t keep their hands off of me. Every date was like a war. Nothing like what my mom said it would be like. No romance, no beauty. Just sweaty hands, bad breath, too much cologne.
She kept telling me to wait. There was a time when I began to have my doubts. I got angry. That was when I lost my virginity. No more unicorns for me. An English major. God, I think I was his first, too. It was disgusting.
I swore I was never going to do it again.
You’re laughing at me.
Yes, you are.
I’m sorry. Don’t go yet.
It’s cold.
Thanks.
You know, I’ve been dreaming about my father tucking me in like that since I was little. I can’t remember his face when I’m awake, but I know it’s his in the dream. Round face like the moon floating over me while his hands, big but gentle steam shovels, lift me up and set me down into bed and then make sure the covers are tight all around me, so I’m nice and cozy.
Mom never talked about him much. Not the real stuff. Just how they met after the war, how he was always the perfect gentleman and treated her like a lady. I used to sneak into her bedroom and look at their photo albums for hours, those old black and white shots of them in a park, in a row boat, in front of the Statue of Liberty. I wanted to know so many things about him, but mom didn’t answer straight, or sometimes she just didn’t answer. For the longest time I liked to think he was a war hero. Like John Wayne, busy killing the bad soldiers and wild people and making the world safe for the rest of us.
For a long time I didn’t really believe he was dead, just away at war.
She never told me how he died. My uncle, one time he came over from California, talked to me about how my father used to run numbers, pick up money from the holes, sometimes drive for the big time hoods. He thinks my father got caught up in a gang war.
I don’t know if he was good or bad. I don’t think he was a knight in shining armor.
She did tell me I almost died a little while after his funeral. She said a miracle saved me. I was only year old, something like that. Fever.
What?
Right. Just don’t ask me to pronounce it.
I guess it was too much, him dying and then almost losing me. Plus whatever really went on between them, and us being so damn poor without Dad.
Good thing Dad’s insurance paid off the house. That, you know, sort of let mom keep herself together. I have good memories from that house, from us being together. I think we were like two princesses in a castle, waiting for the king and the prince to come back.
Look. See those lines of light shifting on the ceiling? Yeah, that’s how I used to know mom was back from work during the winter. It got dark early and the beams from that wreck she drove cut through my blinds when she went up the driveway. I used to just lay there in bed waiting for the lines of light to move. That’s how I knew I wasn’t going to be alone anymore.
Damn, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to cry. I know how you hate it. Please, don’t go. It’s just that with mom, the way she fell apart after she saw you, and with you — well…I won’t have anybody to talk to.
Yes, that’s true. We never really talked. Didn’t seem like we needed to. You always knew what to say and ask, where to take me, what to do, how to do it. You had all the answers, you were always in perfect control. You were the one I was waiting for, the perfect gentleman.
The sex was so beautiful, clean, perfect. Not like dumb animals humping for a National Geographic documentary, but like the touch a unicorn gives to the maiden. Even when I brought you to meet mom, and she screamed and fell down and I went down after her, crying like a maniac, in total panic, you just stood there with that little smile of yours. Like you knew exactly what was going on, why, and what would happen next.
Yes, I know that, now.
But when it happened all I could think of was, why is mom doing this to me? Here I bring the man of both of our dreams, handsome, sophisticated, worldly. Money was never a problem when we went out so I thought you’d be able to take care of both of us. You had it all. And there she was acting like a mad woman.
How do you do that?
Make me believe that everything will be all right. Even now. After everything, after you got what you wanted and —
What?
Oh. I thought glamour was the name of a fashion magazine.
Isn’t it funny how, when a relationship ends, all this deep stuff comes out?
I know you have to go. But please let me see it one more time. Please?
You said I’d never see either of you again, gone forever from this world, and it’s so hard, you know, like, I’m not the one who made the deal and this is all a big shock for me, even with your glamour and —
Thank you.
It’s so ugly, isn’t it? Like a little fish, or a frog. Are you sure you can keep it alive? Doesn’t it need a womb?
How will you make it grow?
Is it a boy or a girl?
Do you have to take my baby?
Yes, I know it’s yours as well as mine. Yours by deed, yours by deal. Two to my one, your rights outnumber mine. A miracle come to collect the first born of the child he saved as payment to save that child. Funny, I never read about that one in a fairy tale. It was always the mother and father that paid.
Right. Mom didn’t have any more more kids. You knew she wasn’t going to.
But what about me. Can’t you and I make a deal?
I’m too old to go with you? Okay, but if I had another child. Can’t you take that one and let me keep our baby? You were so perfect, it’s the only thing I’d have left of you.
Ruined for other men? Yes, you have, but for one night I can sleep with another man so you can have your pay.
Oh.
I see.
Perhaps you could have been gentler when you took it out of me, then. Or waited for me to deliver —
Of course. Yes, taking it to term and then having you take it away would have been harder, I imagine. Thank you.
I’m so cold.
Yes, thanks, that feels much better.
How can you make me feel so warm now, so good, when I know I’ll never see you or the baby again? How can you take the edge off loneliness?
Oh.
That’s right, that’s what you do.
Then I’ll just lay here while you leave. I’ll watch the bands of light on the ceiling. Maybe they’ll get brighter and shift over some day.
No. You’re right. I don’t really think so either.
But, you know how it is. Those old dreams don’t die so easily.
end