RELEASE DATE: 01 January 2020
Rose got her happily ever after, complete with castle, prince and ornate banquets every night. But after four centuries, Rose can state definitively: happy endings suck.
No concerts, no plays, no children or visits with friends… Not one single change in four hundred years.
That ends, now. Before Rose destroys her castle in a fit of pique.
A fractured fairytale about the dangers of wishing for Happily Ever After.
Happily Ever After
“I hate fairy tale endings!” Rose threw the child’s coloring book into the fireplace designated for burning princess memorabilia. She stooped to pick up a sheet of stickers and waved them in her husband’s face. “Look at her! Look at her! Does that look like me at all? Do I have blond hair? What kind of Nordic whore do they think I am?”
She threw the stickers back into the crackling fire and grabbed a torch from the sconce on the wall. “I. Am. Sick. Of. Happy. Endings.”
“What happy ending?” Gavin asked, relaxing back in his chair at the head of the table with a cup of coffee and a newspaper ten months out of date.
“The one we’re supposed to have! The one that left us here!” She let loose with a stream of invectives she wouldn’t have dreamed of using a few centuries ago. Time had been a bad influence on her.
“I want to die!”
She flopped into her own ornate chair next to her husband and stared at the banquet in front of them—the same banquet they’d been eating for the last four centuries. Or was it five? She’d lost count somewhere along the line.
“You can’t die,” said Gavin in a mild tone. “Dying isn’t living happily ever after.”
“I hate happily ever after.”
“We haven’t happily-ever-aftered in quite some time.” He looked over his mug at her with a raised eyebrow.
Rose blushed. They’d been quite happy, for a few years. But there were no children in happily ever after. No visits to friends. No improvements on the castle. No wrinkles. No lines. No death. “It wouldn’t have been so bad if we’d aged,” she continued more mildly. “That’s what normal people do. They get wrinkles and they die and sob over each other’s graves.”
“Old age isn’t happily ever after either.” He flipped the page. “Oh, look, we missed another concert.”
She glared daggers at him. “Concerts aren’t happily ever after, dear,” she replied sarcastically. “Neither are cell phones, hot running water, or cars.”
Frustrated that Gavin wouldn’t take the bait, Rose stormed off to her room. She sat down at her writing desk and took up her pen, just as she’d done every night for the past few decades. To every known bookseller and movie maker, she wrote the same plea:
Kill Beauty at the end of the movie.
Wouldn’t it be dramatic and sweet if she died saving her beloved? Preferably before her beloved became that guy she couldn’t stand because they didn’t have anything in common but a stupid flower and some wishful thinking.
The only daughter of the widower schoolmaster was meant to be an old maid, dispensing charity and maybe entering a convent before she died. She was not meant to marry some forgotten prince of a kingdom no one had ever heard of. Deep in the bone, Rose knew it was the truth.
She looked out the window at the spiky vista of pine trees and high mountains, and considered how many people she would willingly kill to go see a beach. Swimming! Sand! Surfers! Visitors told her about such things— but nowhere in happily ever after did any author ever mention the second honeymoon, or family vacations.
Dark clouds rolled over the pass and a young woman hiked into view, accompanied by the now-familiar outline of a laptop case.
“Visitor!” Rose screamed, rushing downstairs to wait for the inevitable knock. “Gavin! Get dressed! We have a visitor!”