"Mama, will you tell me a story?" the little girl asked.
Her mother smiled, running her fingers along the tops of the books on the bookshelf. "Of course, Nina-bina, what would you like to hear tonight?"
"Not one of those stories," Nina cried, jumping up and down, black curls bobbing on her head. "A new story. With castles and monsters and knights…"
Susan wondered for a moment, her hand still resting on the bookshelf. She supposed she could cheat and memorize one of the stories before her while Nina brushed her teeth. A new story. What about a very old one? A story she hadn't thought about for so very long…
"Okay, sweetie. But you have to go get ready for bed first."
Nina ran giggling away, leaving her mother to reminisce. Castles and monsters and knights… Had she been so eager to live a fairy tale when she had been Nina's age? To read them, sure; to act them out, of course. She could remember Peter running around with a tree branch as a sword and a blanket for a cloak. That was a long time ago, back when none of them really understood what danger was.
She had wandered out into the front hall. A great wooden wardrobe stood by the front door; it had been left to her in the will of an old man who had been almost like a grandfather to her and her siblings. She remembered him listening to all their stories and telling them a few of his own.
The door opened with the same creak it had when she had been a child. Now, however, it held raincoats and rubber boots rather than old musty furs. She remembered once as a young woman curling up on the floor of the wardrobe, door carefully closed to a mere hair's-breadth of light, head resting against the back. Let me in. That had been after it had all ended leaving a hole in her heart under the black blazer. No more adventures.
Her hands were wrinkled now as she pushed the coats around. She had seen them that way before; she had lived out an entire life with her brothers and sister.
Remember those silly games we used to play. It had been so easy to ignore the memories, to push them aside when he had told them they would never come back. She gave up; there was no room for them in the world of fairy tales. Easy to turn away, act like it was a dream and nothing more - harder to say such bitter words to Peter when he tried to speak to her of Narnia, and harder still when there was nothing left to say.
Susan noticed the pine tree embroidered onto a woolen sweater and quickly closed the wardrobe door.
A new story. That was what it had been for them. A chance for an adventure. To play kings and queens over a happy empire. To be heroes in their own time and to return and save their kingdom when other hopes had gone away. Just like a fairy tale.
Later that night she tucked Nina into bed, smoothing the covers down as her daughter waited for her bedtime story.
"Once there were four children whose names were Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy…" An old story, perhaps, yet it still seemed so new.