Nightmare

 

The dog disappeared.  

Although it was after midnight, I wanted to look for him. I asked my mother to come with me. She said no; I pestered her until she agreed. 

Even with the streetlights to guide us, the neighborhood felt eerily dark, and devoid of life. But this was suburbia. I told myself I had nothing to worry about.

 

My mother chose our route. At first we just walked along the sidewalk, like normal people.  Eventually, however, she started leading us across lawns, into backyards. When she opened the backdoor into a strange bungalow, I protested, “We shouldn’t be doing this.” 

 

She laughed at me. “You’re the one who wanted to take a walk.” 

 

Not knowing what else to do, I followed her into the house. We moved through the unlit rooms, exiting via the front door, unseen. But my relief soon flared into horror, because my mother now insisted on passing through house after house. Each bungalow seemed emptier than the last, until finally, inevitably, we came across a woman sitting on her couch. She greeted us with a welcoming smile. “The way you came in is now locked,” she said. “I'll show you another way out.”

 

She brought us into the kitchen. With a flourish she opened the oven door. "I'm afraid there's no other choice," she said. "You'll simply have to crawl through it."

New Month, New Project

    Megan woke with a start, her breathing ragged.

She reached over and ran her thumb over the smooth green stone on the bedside table. “I am here,” she whispered. “I am safe.”

Her heart rate slowly returning to normal, she took a sip of water from the cup next to the stone. Outside a dog was barking—probably the Hoovers’ Irish Setter, and probably what had woken her. With her aunt and uncle out of town, Megan would be alive to every sound in and around the empty house. As always at this time of night, she yearned for her tiny apartment, free of dark corners and spooky sounds. Her friends called it a shoebox, but they would never understand why Megan needed to see the front door from every corner of her home.

Now, though, she needed to sleep.

Megan lay back down and, closing her eyes, started reciting the alphabet backwards. The soft click of a door—or what she thought was the soft click of a door—made her fly up again.

You’re being ridiculous, she scolded herself. Her aunt and uncle’s house sat in a quiet, middle-class Minnesota suburb where nothing ever happened, except the occasional bike theft. The only burglary she knew of was the time Jim Clendenny broke into his grandma’s house to steal $10 for weed. He’d said he was sorry, and that was the end of it. The next-door neighbor was even a cop, for god’s sake.

Andy.

He was definitely home—she’d seen him a few hours ago, sitting on his mother’s back porch with his sister, the two of them chatting in low voices. She’d nearly gone out to say hello, but afraid to intrude, had decided against it. She and Andy already had plans to take an ice tea break tomorrow morning, while he painted the garage and she weeded her aunt’s flower beds. Megan had even made her aunt’s special ice tea recipe in anticipation of it.

She was trying to remember if there were any lemons in the refrigerator when she the sound of footsteps in the hallway shocked her into stillness. She hadn’t imagined it, or dreamt it, or simply feared it. Someone was in the house.

Whimpering to herself, Megan started to scramble out of bed, but she’d left it too late. A silhouette stood in the doorway of her bedroom.

“Megan Cooper,” a male voice said. “How nice to meet you.”

Blindsided

 

It was a lovely evening—typical Southern California weather. Busy with an inventory take, Rick couldn’t come over, so we talked for a while on the telephone. “I need to run to the art store,” I told him. “I should have gone earlier but I got caught up in a drawing.”

“Can’t you go tomorrow? It’s getting late.”

“It’s not even 7:00!” I reminded him. “The store is open for another two hours. I’ll be back well before bedtime. And Vince is hours away.”

“You should still be careful, though.”

“I will be. Now get back to work. You need to set a good example for your staff.”

“I don’t see why I should start now,” he answered, a classic Rick response that left me giggling. At the art store the clerk and I rued a discontinued line of much-loved brushes, and then I drove to a nearby grocery store for some laundry detergent and coffee beans. Just before I started the car to head back home I glanced at my watch: 8:45 p.m. Plenty of time for Daisy’s pre-bedtime walk. Now that Vince was in another part of the state, I had no reason to be afraid.

I pulled into the parking lot underneath my apartment building, musing at the little tricks life could play on us. Funny how it was my mother who had unwittingly engineered my present happiness: a cool apartment, a lovely neighborhood, and the boyfriend I never knew I wanted. I parked in my spot and got out of the car, chuckling to myself. I would have to point that out to her during our next phone call.

“What’s so funny?” someone demanded from behind me.

Startled, I turned around.

Vince stood just inches from me.

I started to ask him what he was doing there, or maybe to scream. But he lifted his arm, and the world went black.

Wake Up

 

I wait until you are

sleeping

let the heat from this being

sear the skin of

denial

if I burn down their treason

turn ash into reason

only then will I see their

lie

January's End

 

when I am the snow without 

the season

made to believe in the riddle 

not the reason

Breaking Point

 I woke up not in heaven, but in another hospital room. It took me a few minutes to get my bearings. 

When I did I saw Michael sitting in the chair next to me. He looked like absolute hell, but at least he was sober. 

“Wolff,” he said. “Welcome back.”

“Why am I not dead?”

“Because I woke up and found you before you had a chance to die. So here you are.”

A long, horrible pause passed. 

 “I’m sorry," I said.

Michael gave me a weird smile. “For what? Not dying, or trying to kill yourself six inches away from where I was sleeping?”

“...I don’t know.”

“Well, we’ll have words about it later, but it will have to wait because I have other places to be.”  Michael stood up, his car keys jingling in his hand. “Your mother is on her way. Our family is a major donor to this hospital so they're letting you go home with her.”  He narrowed his eyes. “Don’t make me regret that.”

Confused, I returned, “Where are you going?”

“Rehab. See you around, Wolff.”

In that moment I understood that he was not only going to rehab, but that he was also leaving me. As I watched him walk out of the door I never hated anyone more in my life.

The Happy Ending -- New Prologue

 

Prologue

 

I know a thing or two about fairy tales.

Not the Disney kind. The kind that gives children nightmares.

When I was a kid, a family friend gave me a recording of Rumpelstiltskin for Christmas. Either they had never listened to it, or they had a sick idea of fun, because nothing about that recording was suitable for children. The memory of Rumpelstiltskin’s scream as the queen got his name right still makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.

That kind of fairy tale.

Look up the definition and the first one will say a fairy tale is a magical story set in an idealized world, filled with happiness. But the sting comes in the second definition: a fabricated story, especially one intended to deceive.

It’s a paradox, and one I’ve lived. I was the little girl orphaned young, sent off to live with the wicked relative. The teenager who fell in love with a dimpled prince, only for forces of darkness to separate us. The woman who realized I had read the moral of the story wrong from the start, and battled evil for my own survival. 

I experienced the magic, and confronted the lie, in search of my happy ending. 

Because even in the Disney fairy tales, happy endings aren’t simply granted—they’re earned.

This is how I earned mine.