“And as the dragon’s very first tear dripped onto his pillowy nest, Frieda closed her eyes and smiled. She’d taught him how to cry, and at last, she knew everything was going to be okay.”
Leonard closed the book, its spine cracked and frayed from a hundred reads. His daughter’s toothpaste breath dampened the crook of his aching arm as he rose from the rocker, crossing through a nightlight starfield to her bed.
“Sweet dreams, Emmeline,” he whispered with a kiss on her temple, as a tear of his own threatened to fall. She looked more like her mother every day.
Clicking off the reading lamp and tiptoeing into the hall, he wondered how long the Sandman would elude him alone in his bed that night, both grateful for and envious of his daughter’s resilience.
“The End.”
Carl lowered the printout of his latest story to find a roomful of damp eyes. Ms. Johnson dabbed her nose with a tissue and jotted notes in her gradebook as he shuffled back to his desk. The midterm project had kept him up until midnight, and he’d almost missed the bus from the three extra snoozes that morning.
It wasn’t like him to procrastinate on his schoolwork, but the world had been askew for a month now. His father had moved out, gone to shack up with his longtime secretary, letting all the color drain from the broken foundation of their once-happy home. Between suffering his mother’s pendulous temper and pacifying his little sister’s teary bewilderment, the new “man of the house” had little energy left for self-care, much less study.
He’d found Dana the night before, her cheeks wet and ruddy, coiled in her bedroom closet. As he wiped away her tears, she’d asked, “Are you going to leave us, too?” Her words reignited his furnace. Perhaps he couldn’t change what had happened, but the future was a blank page. The story was his to write.
He’d make it a good one.
A thousand eyes were upon him, a rolling sea of black gowns and tasseled caps, eager faces, shiny in the late spring sun. Picking out his friends from the crowd, Carl wondered how many of them would still be a part of his life in a year … in ten years … in twenty.
Beyond his classmates, his beaming sister Dana waved from the bleachers beside their mother. He was thankful their father hadn’t come to pick open the scabs that hadn’t fully healed on any of their hearts.
The mic squealed as he cleared his throat. “So, as we embark on our futures, each of us the author of our lives, decide what story you would like to tell—God-willing—many years hence. Ask yourself, as I did: What story will make me the hero? And then start writing.”
Marlene and Carl had only been out twice before, but already the world seemed more colorful whenever she was around. More importantly, she’d recently passed the Dana Test, having won his sister’s approval with her gift of a handpainted ceramic figurine of a unicorn—Dana’s favorite mythological beast.
She swirled the straw in her cup and took a long pull of the vanilla milkshake with a smile on her lips. “I still can’t believe I’m dating a valedictorian.”
“I’m just a regular guy.” Carl shrugged. “You, on the other hand, are destined for greatness. I can’t believe I’m dating the world’s next Beate Kuhn.”
“Flatterer.” Marlene squinted as she lowered her sunglasses, her ash-blond hair luminous in the late summer afternoon. “You do realize I only had a 2.5 GPA, right?”
“They don’t have numbers for how brilliant you are.” Carl held out his hand. Marlene’s fingertips were cool from the shake, but warmed his core when they touched his. “I’m grateful every day that our storylines crossed.”
Gary and Anton had spared no expense on Carl and Marlene’s surprise tenth anniversary party, shrouding the features of their oceanside bungalow patio in hundreds of rolls of heavy duty aluminum foil. Anton had conceded that it wasn’t technically tin, but insisted it got the point across. As the sun touched the Pacific, every surface was indistinguishable from gold, jeweled with mist from the crashing brine below.
“Man, Carl really lucked out with you, didn’t he?” Gary topped up Marlene’s champagne.
“No argument here,” said Carl. “It was blind luck I was stuck picking up Dana at the community center the day Marlene’s car wouldn’t start. The jumper cables are still framed in my garage.”
“Sometimes I wonder,” said Marlene. “If I hadn’t filled in for Tammy’s pottery class that day, would our stories have diverged completely? Or would fate have brought us together some other way?”
“Think of it like this.” Carl wrapped his arm around Marlene’s shoulder. “If we hadn’t met, that precious little girl back home wouldn’t have been born. I wouldn’t want to live in that world. Would you?”
“You’re right.” Marlene leaned into Carl’s embrace. “I don’t think the universe would stand for such a thing. Plot armor, I suppose?”
Friends, family, and townspeople had filled every pew for Marlene’s funeral service on a gray autumn morning. Afterwards, at the celebration of life, Gary and Anton pulled Carl aside into the greenhouse outside Marlene’s ceramics studio, sharing sips from a fifth of bourbon. Ferns spilled from hanging planters the artist had crafted, while flowers stretched from their pots on the countertop, as if searching for her. Their usual vivid hues were dull to Carl’s eyes. His foundation had been broken all over again.
“I don’t know how the universe could stand for this, either,” said Gary, raising the bourbon to his lips. “She was the best of women.”
“We’re all better for having known her,” added Anton, taking a deep pull from the bottle.
Carl and Marlene had named their daughter Flora after her mother’s gifted touch with her leafed babies. Back in the sprawling studio, Flora bounced on her granddad’s hip. Too young to comprehend the loss she would one day know, the toddler peered around the room, agitated—like the flowers, searching for the woman who would be there no more.
You will know your mother, he vowed. He would learn everything he could about gardening and preserve his wife’s beloved greenhouse in her memory. One day, it would belong to their little girl.
“Read me a story, Daddy!” The memory of Marlene’s funeral transformed into a rosy blur as Flora bounded into her room and jumped on Carl’s lap, nestling into his arms. Her freshly bathed cheeks were as pink as her strawberry pajamas.
“Did you brush your teeth?” He leaned his nose close to her mouth for the minty evidence. When Flora obliged with an exaggerated hiss of breath, Carl recoiled, coughing and spluttering to Flora’s squealing laughter.
“Daddy! It doesn’t stink!”
“Okay, okay.” He kissed the top of her head. “So, what’s it going to be tonight? Wait, let me guess.” He tapped his finger against his lips. “The Dragon Who Didn’t Know How to Cry?”
“How did you know?”
He smiled at his daughter, who looked more like Marlene each day.
“Just lucky, I guess.”
Author’s Note
Since this story has an unconventional construction, here is a quick synopsis:
Frieda is a character in a children’s book …
That Leonard is reading to Emmeline …
Who are themselves characters in a story that Carl wrote …
Which Carl read for his creative writing class …
The day after his sister inspired him to write his own life story …
Which is the theme of his valedictorian speech …
Which he shares with his date Marlene over a milkshake …
The details of said date being shared with friends at their ten-year anniversary party …
Which Carl and his friends reminisce over at Marlene’s funeral …
The memory of which is interrupted by Flora’s insistence on being read a story …
Which, we are to infer, Carl has published at some point.I call it a “nested” story.
—Jon Casper