Dabbling in Drabbles

Happily Ever Afters

She won't tell anyone, but she has an old storybook hidden under her pillow. The pages are worn from excessive reading, the once shining pictures smudged from hands being run over them, and the cover dented and scraped and stepped on.

It's her most prized possession.

Her mother gave it to her. Bought it at the little bookstore across the street from the hospital one day, and gave it to her, sweeping her bright red locks from her forehead as she smiled, "For my ever so lovely little princess."

She remembered, the first story she ever read out of the book was Beauty and the Beast. At the time, it was just a fairytale, a story she giggled and swooned over, then forget the next moment until the next time she'd open the book. In later years, though, after her mother's passing, she began looking at the story in a new light. How the princess' mother was gone, her father poor and trying to make ends meat, the hard times, the people making fun, the prince that came in the end…

She clung to that story. If she could just hold out, hold out through the harder times, keep things positive and bright, then maybe, just maybe, she could get her happily ever after. The perfect ending, the perfect prince, the perfect life.

But life went on uneventfully, and no prince came. She would delude herself into thinking he did for a while, giggle and flutter her eyelashes, but in the end it would die. Everything died.

Still, though, every night she would open up that book, flip through the wrinkled pages, and smile. She wouldn't give up hope. No matter what anyone said, her day would come.

Her day would come.