Author's Note: Here is my contribution to B's Blink Week. I'm glad I was able to get this out – my computer crashed last week and I lost all my files. I just got my laptop back yesterday afternoon and it took me all this time to get my word back up and the computer all set. Hopefully I'll be able to return to some of my fiction.
Anywho, onto the story. I just wanted to say that it's done in a different style. I tried to intersperse two different takes on the short story and make it fit one whole theme. I hope you guys enjoy.
Disclaimer: Kid Blink is a character from the Disney musical, Newsies. He is used without permission but with no intent to profit. Woot.
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Happy Ever After
I began to believe the fairy tales:
You know, how we're all out there looking for our magical missing half.
- Michael Bergin
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Once upon a time, in a land far, far away, a beautiful and happy child was born to a very wealthy King and his Queen. His hair was as fair as golden sunlight and his eyes were as bright and blue as the mid-morning sky. It was his smile, though, that made this child a delight to all that knew him. Until…
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I was born the only child to a drunk and the only woman in the world that would have him. Mama told me that they were married early on – and I'd like to think that she wouldn't lie to me – but I never saw a ring on her finger. Maybe Pa couldn't afford a ring for her. Or maybe I was just born a goddamn bastard.
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It all happened so fast and all were taken by surprise. Just past the good prince's seventh birthday, a malicious fairy came to bless the child on his special day. She had been spurned on his christening and vowed to make up for it then. With a wave of her wand, she pointed the stick at the smiling child just as a blast of power shot forth. There was a loud crack that split through the air, the Queen screamed and the prince fell. The Queen stood in horror as the King picked his son up and cradled him in his arms. Blood dripped down below his closed left eye and continued to trickle until it met with his small chin and dropped onto the floor of the palace. With shaking hands, the King lifted the eyelid gently. His son's precious blue eye had been stolen.
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I was a good looking kid, I must say. I had my Mama's fair hair and blue eyes; Pa was a darker man than she was and it was his complexion, sometimes, that made me afraid of him. That, or his heavy fist.
I was seven years old when the 'accident' happened. I don't remember much about it except that it must have been my fault, somehow. There was a smart remark, a loud scream and just pain. The pain didn't last too long – it was too severe for me to survive it then, I guess.
There was blood, too. I think it was then that I knew that something was really wrong. Pa had hit me before – whenever I was out of line or whenever Mama wasn't around to stay his hand or except the blows in my stead – but they had never before been accompanied by so much blood. And the fact that I could only see the blood drip down onto the dirty floor with my right eye… well, that's when I knew something was wrong.
Mama screamed and kept screaming until Pa's hand, bloodied already, found her cheek. She shut up instinctively and, despite the panic that was threatening to overtake me at my newfound blindness, I felt better as she wrapped her arms around me. She held me tight and through the night.
When I got up the next morning, sure that the 'accident' – Pa refused to discuss what happened, and only referred to my bum eye as an 'accident' – was only a dream. It wasn't, of course, and the vision from that eye never returned. I was half blind from that moment on.
I was incomplete.
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The Queen fell at the horrific sight. The fairy remained, and reveled in the surprised and terrified expressions that the King and his subjects wore. With a wicked smile, she swore that he would forever be incomplete and on every seventh year, he would fall further away from the perfection that the King desired of his only child.
So, for his seventh birthday, the young prince received three gifts: a disability, a silk eye-patch and a room in a locked away tower. The Queen, shortly after her son's curse, passed away from grief, unable to watch as her son fell away from her, piece by piece every seven years. The King, in response to his wife's death, did not deal well with the change and sent his son away to be cared for. A simple room far away from the castle would, from then on, be his home until the curse was broken.
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Mama died soon after. I'm sure that was an 'accident' too. It was so hard for me, getting used to only seeing out of one eye, that much of that time following my 'accident' is a blur. I tried to smile for Mama's sake but she would start to cry anytime she saw my lopsided grin, partially hidden by the cloth strip she tied around my face to cover my left eye. It was a bit of her slip, I knew, that she had cut for my use and it made me feel stronger knowing that Mama could part with the soft cloth just for me.
I don't really know how she died. I went to bed that night and only remember that, some point, Mama and Pa had a real loud argument. She had said that something – I ain't too sure what – was Pa's fault and then there was a loud smack, followed by a thump. It sounded like a normal fight between Mama and Pa so I slipped back into sleep.
She was dead when I woke up. Pa said he found her, cold, in bed that next morning. He didn't seem sad at all.
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There he stayed those next seven years and, as his fourteenth birthday drew closer, the tension surrounding him grew thicker. His one good eye, not covered by the worn patch, shone just as bright, and his hair, though matted, was just as fair. And, despite the nervousness that affected the prince, his smile was just as wide. And, when his fourteenth birthday past and nothing happened, the smile grew even wider. Somehow, in those seven years, the curse had ended. It had began and finished with the loss of his eye. The evil fairy's lust for revenge had been satiated and she claimed no more from the child. The prince rejoiced.
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For seven years, after Mama died, it was just Pa and me. I look back on that time now and I wonder why I didn't leave sooner. My name was forgotten almost at once. He liked to refer to me as 'Boy' and 'Kid'. In fact, I got the nickname that I go by now from him. During the direst of his drunken binges – they only got worse after Mama died – he found it amusing to remove my cloth and command me to blink. "C'mon, Kid, blink!" My eye had been destroyed in the accident and the lid, torn. It was a bloody mess and I had no control over the function. He would bark "Blink!" and I could not. Then he would laugh and I would tear my cloth out of his hand and hurriedly tie it back around my head, covering my eye.
I didn't really see my father much during that time. I stayed locked in my tiny room, only daring to step out to wash up and eat. On his good days, he let me eat his left-over dinner. On the bad, I stole from the garbage. I was an orphan with a living father, a street rat with a home. When I became a newsie, it was almost as if it was a job I'd been training for since I was seven years old.
I spent much of my time imagining that my life was a fraud. That I really was the son of a great King and his Queen and that, one day, they would come looking for me and I would be rescued by this man who masqueraded as my father. And I would watch as 'accident' upon 'accident' happened to him.
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The King returned for his son that next night; the servant assigned to care for the prince had traveled to the castle with the news that nothing had befallen the young adult. The pair – father and son – embraced and the prince was brought back home. And there he lived, happy ever after.
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I guess, in a way, sometime ago I began to believe in the fairy tales my Mama used to tell me about. You know, how we're all out there trying to find that part of us that could be fantastical. Could be happy.
Those seven years that followed Mama's death were horrible. I try not to think of them now but, sometimes, the memories come rushing back. The beatings, the accusations, the guilt. The nights I was cold and hungry, the times when he left and didn't return for weeks at a time – and, when he would return, the states he would be in and the 'accidents' that would happen.
And it was then, when my fourteenth birthday came and past and Pa had been gone for over a month, that I finally left. I had waited for him but, when the rent was due and he had still not returned, I took that cloth strip Mama made me, the clothes on my back and any money that Pa had left hidden in the house and I left. The cloth didn't last much longer; it had been cut for a seven year old boy and I was now twice that age and twice that size. I was given an eye patch by a shop owner that was disgusted at the sight of my dead eye. I've used that brown patch ever since.
It's been two years since I left my father's apartment and, though the taunts of "Kid…blink!" still ring through my mind, I miss the life I left behind. But I've made my way on my own and that's just the way I like it now. I guess I still believe that a Kingly father could whisk me away from this harsh life on the street, or that, by some miracle, my Mama could come back to me. The fairy tales still live on within me.
So I try to make my good eye a bit brighter, and I keep my hair as clean and fair that I can. And I smile a bit wider.
Maybe one day my story will have a 'happy ever after' ending.