The step mother, known as the evil step mother, raised a piña colada into the brown tavern smoke. “Three cheers for the Champion and my treacherous step daughter,” she cried.
Late evening sun crashed the windows white. But the frames were dark, like old burns in the surface of the wall, bruisings at the periphery of light.
“But you are the evil step mother,” a patron said. He raised a glass to follow, though, and gave three silent cheers. It would bring bad luck to ignore the toast. Slowly, the normal clank and carouse of the place rose again. “You said you were a character in a story. There was a Princess, a Champion, a few complicating devices, such as monsters of the elements.”
“How would you like to be a character in such a story?” the step mother said. “Let’s try it: You could be the Patron, some random drunk in some random tavern in some random city blah blah blah. You, the Patron, enter in out of the rain or from a distant town or time or genre. You seek company. You want to hear human voices. You want to be among.”
“And that’s as well why you’re here, to listen and call. To be amidst,” the Patron said, sipping a glass of wine.
“The Patron, growing tired, leaves,” said the step mother. “He’s ignored. The woman ignores him and to be ignored is the Patron’s greatest self-disgust and travesty.”
“Is that why you trapped your step daughter, then? Because she ignored you? Or, no, because she might have grown to ignore you, grown beyond you. Outside of you.”
The step mother ordered another colada. She sensed battle brewing. She considered that the Patron might be more dangerous than she’d first perceived.
“The Patron,” she said, “fell from the bed of a wagon. Before falling he cursed the poverty he’d been born into. He blamed his father. He blamed the gods. The wagon trundled on. He shouted. He called for the wagon to stop, for the father to rein in the mules or the donkey. ‘I’ve fallen. I’m here. Weep weep,’ weeps the Patron, left behind, uncared for.”
“You fear your step daughter showing you rather than you showing her the future, then. You resent a life of wasted devotion and love to a creature who thought you a mystery, a cloud, maybe even a hindrance, or, worse, a nuisance. And so, of course, the Champion assisted in her escape.
“He fought the elements for her hand and body; maybe the monsters of the elements nearly killed him, but he fought through, sucked in the pain, committed to dilemma and potential farce, risking cliche. Of course she tricked the Champion into believing that there was ever a spell, that there was ever a tower, ever a story in the first place to be written.”
The step mother smiled, a sapling crease at the corner of her mouth. “And so, the Patron came to the bar, once upon a time, and, once upon a time, he believed but lost that belief. Married, but no longer. His story over, or another about to begin. And so he is much like the step mother, here and now, drinking piña coladas in smoke and darkness and sepia.”
“Another then,” the Patron said, raising his glass. “Another then. For you and for me.”
“And another toast,” the step mother said. “For we are conditional, formulaic fictions.”
