Soman Chainani - A World Without Princes

“See? Same old Agatha.” She slammed the trunk on Sophie’s borrowed clothes, slid it near the door, and kneeled to pet her bald, wrinkled cat. “So now you can be nice again.”

Reaper hissed.

“It’s me,” Agatha said, trying to pet him. “I haven’t changed a bit.”

Reaper scratched her and trundled away.

Agatha rubbed the fresh mark on her hand between others barely healed. She flopped onto her bed while Reaper curled up in a moldy green corner, as far away from her as he could.

She rolled over and hugged her pillow.

I’m happy.

She listened to rain slosh against the straw roof and spurt through a hole into her mother’s black cauldron.

Home sweet home.

Clink, clink, clink went the rain.

Sophie and me.

She stared at the blank, cracked wall. Clink, clink, clink … Like a sword in a sheath, rubbing against a belt buckle. Clink, clink, clink . Her chest started pounding, her blood burning like lava, and she knew it was happening again. Clink, clink, clink . The black of the cauldron became the black of his boots. The straw of the ceiling, the gold of his hair. The sky through the window, the blue in his eyes. In her arms, the pillow became tanned muscles and flesh—

“Some help, dear!” a voice trilled.

Agatha jolted awake, gripping her sweat-stained pillow. She lurched off the bed and opened the door to see her mother lugging two baskets, one teeming with stinky roots and leaves, the other with dead tadpoles, cockroaches, and lizards.

“What in the world—”

“So you can finally teach me some potions from school!” Callis chimed, eyes bulging, and plunked a basket in Agatha’s hands. “Not as many patients today. We have time to brew!”

“I told you I can’t do magic anymore,” Agatha snapped, closing the door behind them. “Our fingers don’t glow here.”

“Why won’t you tell me anything that happened?” her mother asked, picking her oily dome of black hair. “The least you could do is show me a wart potion.”

“Look, I put it all behind me.”

“Lizards are better fresh, dear. What can we make with those?”

“I forgot all that stuff—”

“They’ll go bad—”

“Stop!”

Her mother stiffened.

“Please,” Agatha begged. “I don’t want to talk about school.”

Gently Callis took the basket from her. “When you came home, I’d never been so happy.” She looked into her daughter’s eyes. “But part of me worries what you gave up.”

Agatha stared down at her black clump shoes as her mother towed the baskets into the kitchen. “You know how I feel about waste,” Callis sighed. “Let’s hope our bowels can handle a lizard stew.”

As Agatha chopped onions by torchlight, she listened to her mother hum off-key, like she did every night. Once upon a time, she had loved their graveyard haven, their lonely routines.

She put down the knife. “Mother, how do you know if you’ve found Ever After?”

“Hmmm?” said Callis, bony hands scraping a few roaches into the cauldron.

“The people in a fairy tale, I mean.”

“It should say so, dear.” Her mother nodded at an open storybook peeking from under Agatha’s bed.

Agatha looked down at its last page, a blond prince and raven-haired princess kissing at their wedding, framed by an enchanted castle …

THE END.

“But what if two people can’t see their storybook?” She gazed at the princess in her prince’s arms. “How do they know if they’re happy?”

“If they have to ask, they probably aren’t,” said her mother, jabbing a roach that wouldn’t drown.

Agatha’s eyes stayed on the prince a moment longer. She snapped the storybook shut and tossed it in the fire under the cauldron. “About time we got rid of these like everyone else.”

She resumed chopping in the corner, faster than before.

“Are you all right, dear?” Callis said, hearing sniffles.

Agatha dabbed at her eyes. “Onions.”

The rain had gone, but a harsh autumn wind raked across the cemetery, lit by two torches over the gates that clung to skipping flames. As she approached the grave, her calves locked and her heart banged in her ears, begging her to stay away. Sweat seeped down her back as she kneeled in the weeds and mud, her eyes closed. She had never looked. Never.

With a deep breath, Sophie opened her eyes. She could barely make out an eroded butterfly in the headstone above the words.

Two smaller gravestones, both unmarked, flanked her mother’s like wings. Fingers covered by white mittens, she picked moss out of the cracks in one, overgrown from the years of neglect. As she tore away the mold, her soiled mittens found deeper grooves in the rock, smooth and deliberate. There was something carved in the slab. She peered closer—

“Sophie?”

She turned to see Agatha approach in a tattered black coat, balancing a drippy candle on a saucer.

“My mother saw you from the window.”

Agatha crouched next to her and laid the flame in front of the graves. Sophie didn’t say anything for a long while.

“He thought it was her fault,” she said at last, gazing at the two unmarked headstones. “Two boys, both born dead. How else could he explain it?” She watched a blue butterfly flutter out of the darkness and nestle into the carving on her mother’s decayed gravestone.

“All the doctors said she couldn’t have more children. Even your mother.” Sophie paused and smiled faintly at the blue butterfly. “One day it happened. She was so sick no one thought it could last, but her belly still grew. The Miracle Child, the Elders called it. Father said he’d name him Filip.”

Sophie turned to Agatha. “Only you can’t call a girl Filip.”

Sophie paused, cheekbones hardening. “She loved me, no matter how weak I had left her. No matter how many times she watched him walk to her friend’s house and disappear inside.” Sophie fought the tears as long as she could. “Her friend, Agatha. Her best friend . How could he?” She cried bitterly into her dirty mittens.

Agatha looked down and didn’t say a word.

“I watched her die, Aggie. Broken and betrayed.” Sophie turned from the grave, red faced. “Now he’ll have everything he wanted.”

“You can’t stop him,” Agatha said, touching her.

Sophie recoiled. “And let him get away with it?”

“What choice do you have?”

“You think that wedding will happen?” Sophie spat. “Watch.”

“Sophie …”

“ He should be the one dead!” Sophie flushed with blood. “Him and his little princes! Then I’d be happy in this prison!”

Her face was so horrible that Agatha froze. For the first time since they returned, she glimpsed the deadly witch inside her friend, yearning to unleash.

Sophie saw the fear in Agatha’s eyes. “I’m s-s-s-sorry—” she stammered, turning away. “I—I don’t know what happened—” Her face melted to shame. The witch was gone.

“I miss her, Aggie,” Sophie whispered, trembling. “I know we have our happy ending. But I still miss my mother.”

Agatha hesitated, then touched her friend’s shoulder. Sophie gave in to her, and Agatha held her as she sobbed. “I wish I could see her again,” Sophie wept. “I’d do anything. Anything.”

The crooked tower clock tolled ten times down the hill, but loud, doleful creaks thickened between each one. In each other’s arms, the two girls watched the hunched silhouette of old Mr. Deauville as he wheeled a cart past the clock with the last of his closed-down shop. Every few paces he stopped, laboring under the weight of his forgotten storybooks, until his shadow disappeared around the corner and the creaks faded away.