AllFreeNovel
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I’m shocked as shit, but I mean it.
“Tell me a story?”
Kid knows how to keep me on my toes, that’s for damn sure.
“Alright.” I re-tuck her blanket around her and rub her back as she snuggles in. “But you have to close your eyes, okay?”
“Okay.”
“Promise?”
She smiles and closes her eyes. “Promise.”
“Okay.” I sigh and try to dredge up a story, any story, that doesn’t involve violence or blood or families being ripped limb from metaphorical or literal limb. Something finally surfaces from my childhood—and I’m even more shocked when I realize it’s a memory of my own father telling me a bedtime story.
An actuallygoodmemory of my father.
Probably the only one I have.
“In a certain kingdom, in a certain country?—”
“What doesthatmean?”
I sigh. “It’s how they start stories in Russia.”
“Oh.”
I open my mouth to start the story again. “In a certain?—”
“But we’re not in Russia.”
Another sigh. I think I’ve signed up for far more than I bargained for. “Okay.Once upon a time,in a certain kingdom in a certain country, there lived and dwelt?—”
“What’s ‘dwelt’?”
Mental note: save the cleaning supplies and headache for the next prisoner I have to torment. Just make them try to tell Willow a bedtime story. They’ll spill within five minutes. “It means ‘to live in.’”
“But you already said that.”
“Well, it’s like the person is alive, and they live inside a house.”
“So why don’t you just say that?”
“Because that’s not how the story starts.”
“Your stories start weird.”
“Well, kid, here’s a plot twist: they end weird, too.”
Willow giggles. It’s that musical little sound that makes me smile rather than start cracking my knuckles in frustration.
“Once upon a time, in a certain kingdom in a certain country, alive and living inside a decently-priced cottage, was a princess.”
“Princesses don’t live in cottages.”
“They do if it’s tax season.”
Willow scrunches her face at me. “Huh?”
