Americana Fairy Tale

by Lex Chase

  “I’m dead, I’m dead, I’m dead!” Taylor sobbed with his face buried in his hands.

  “We’re at the donut shop,” Ringo said and settled on top of Taylor’s head. “Uh…. People are staring.”

  Taylor hiccupped, and his nose squeaked with congestion. “Buh?” he muttered and sniffed again and failed at clearing his sinuses.

  He lowered his hands and scanned the surroundings. He met the attention of a middle-aged Latina standing next to the window. She was posed as if she was trying to get into her own car, parked next to the truck. Taylor blinked, and the woman stiffened. She mumbled something and hurried into her car.

  “We’re… alive?” Taylor croaked.

  From his vantage point, Taylor noticed the giant fiberglass cake donut standing upright on the roof. He tilted his head to read the sign. “Randy’s Donuts?” he asked himself. The shop appeared to pay homage to a bygone era of baked confections that still carried the nostalgia of current patrons. The color combo of terra cotta, beige, and the cheesy painted logos in vintage designs charmed Taylor. The walk-up window displayed racks of pastries from regular glazed to apple fritters. Signs stood in the windows and promoted tickets for the California Lottery, as well as an older, weather-beaten sign declaring Randy’s Donuts was a twenty-four-hour establishment.

  The meager parking lot lay out before him in the setting sun. Cars swooshed down the street on their evening commute. The darkening sky bore speckles of stars in the swaths of purple, blue, and then hazy orange over the horizon.

  “Night’s falling already…,” Taylor said.

  Save for the woman who had stared at him moments before, cars and customers came and went without stopping for any of them. It was like they didn’t exist at all. The hair stood up on Taylor’s neck for fear that this was another one of Idi’s tricks.

  He turned to the driver’s seat and found Corentin in a groaning heap against the driver side door. “Corentin?” he asked and reached out to poke him in the shoulder.

  Corentin shuddered violently, and his right hand fell lifeless onto the seat. The corkscrew remained impaled in his hand.

  “Corentin?” Taylor asked, and Corentin said nothing. He panicked. “Ringo!”

  “Gotcha covered,” Ringo said and took flight out of the truck. He fluttered in a lazy curlicue pattern to the employee entrance and slammed his housecat-sized body into the door. At best, it sounded like a heavy thump from a bowling ball. “Special delivery, need a signature!”

  Ringo collided into the door three more times, yelling anything from UPS to Candygram.

  The door swung open, and Ringo’s momentum made him sail into the bakery. Taylor heard Ringo yell a long note that grew softer the father away he drifted.

  “I smell a princess…,” said a woman’s raspy voice.

  Taylor stiffened as he heard the heavy footsteps hurry closer. His heart hammered as he wondered if Corentin had indeed betrayed him after all.

  The baker jogged into view, a broad-bodied, squat woman with a flour-dusted apron. Taylor didn’t know what to make of her but knew she wasn’t mundane. Perhaps a troll? She blinked her near-nonexistent black button eyes at the truck.

  Taylor limped out of the truck and pointed to the driver’s side. “We drove a long way, and he got hurt. Can you help us?”

  The woman waddled to the driver’s side door and popped it open. She smiled and pulled Corentin into her stocky arms with ease. She brushed Corentin’s shaggy hair from his eyes with a broad palm and cooed to him. “Oh, you sweet boy. You did it again, didn’t you?”

  Taylor wobbled for balance.

  The four-foot-tall woman looked up at him, then down to Corentin in her arms. “We need to get him inside,” she said and waddled back to the employee entrance. “Come, come.”

  As the woman toddled away, Taylor looked back over the expanse of the Los Angeles landscape. How does one take a header off the Golden Gate and end up in Los Angeles was anyone’s guess. In another hour it would be nightfall, and another day would be over. And another day gone until Corentin lost his memory again. Taylor stood in a moment of indecision of who to trust and if trusting the woman was a good idea. His trust in Corentin came in waves, from having complete faith to having it hang by a thread. Taylor clenched a fist. It was up to him and Ringo now. But his stomach bubbled with anxiety and guilt. He so desperately wanted to trust Corentin, and he wanted to believe everything was going to be okay.

  Everything was not okay. None of this was okay. Taylor knew he was tricking himself with stirrings of feelings that couldn’t be true. Corentin must have known in some way and made a note of it in his journal. Now he was playing into it to get Taylor off guard.

  As much as Taylor resolved to trust his gut, he didn’t trust himself at all.

  “Come, come,” the baker commanded Taylor over the whoosh of traffic.

  Taylor swallowed. He hurried after the woman.

  After closing the door behind him, Taylor turned and saw Corentin had been laid out on a metal worktable. The freshly cut donuts ready for the fryer had been shoved aside in a mangled blob at Corentin’s head, and the floured table stained his clothes. The woman dragged a stepstool over to him, and Taylor looked for a place to stay out of the way. The shop was cramped, and the brick floors were slippery with a dusting of baking mix. Taylor backed into a corner but halted before he smacked into a bubbling fryer cooking cinnamon buns. He looked at Corentin and the woman and then to the fryer, and then tried to find a new place to stay out of the way.

  “Can you flip those for me, dear?” the woman asked while she observed Corentin’s impaled hand. She whistled. “You were determined this time, my boy….”

  “Flip them?” Taylor asked and looked for a spatula or tongs.

  “Yes, dear,” the woman said, smoothing Corentin’s hair from his face. “With the rods there on the left. It’s a two-handed job. Be careful not to get splashed by the oil. It’ll take your skin clean off.”

  Taylor bit his lip and turned back to the fryer. “Okay, rods… rods…,” he muttered and found the thin, flat rods hanging from a bar on the left. Taking them in hand, he summoned his courage and gave it a shot. He tentatively poked a floating cinnamon bun, and it bobbled in the oil. Taylor jerked back and then took another breath. He poked again with one rod and flipped with the other. He smiled once he figured out the motion and flipped the others. “This is so absurd,” he mumbled under his breath. “Frying donuts while Corentin’s having surgery….”

  “Okay, angel, big breath,” Taylor heard the woman behind him say.

  Taylor spun around, rods in hand, right at the moment the woman ripped the corkscrew from Corentin’s palm with a pair of pliers. Corentin and Taylor screamed a long note in unison, and the woman pressed on Corentin’s hand.

  “Ohgodohgodohgod,” Ringo said from some hidden location.

  Taylor scanned the ceiling of the bakery. “Ringo? Where are you?”

  “Over here,” Ringo said as he squeezed out from his hiding place between the Hawaiian Punch cooler and the fountain drink dispenser. He kept his hands pressed to his mouth. “Is he okay? Is he okay?” Ringo asked, muffled by his hands.

  Corentin sat up on the prep table as the woman kept her hands wrapped around his. “I will be…,” he said in a gravelly rasp.

  The woman smiled at Corentin with her wide mouth. “You’re a good boy,” she said, rubbing at his arm.

  Taylor didn’t buy it for one second. He stormed forward and was at the table in four steps. “What the fuck was that all about?” he demanded. “Did you think it was funny to drive us headfirst to our deaths? Did you think freaking stabbing yourself with the most bizarre choice of implement would win sympathy?” He slapped his hands to Corentin’s jacket and yanked him close. The woman stumbled back from the force. Taylor snarled in Corentin’s face. “You are skating on such thin ice, it may as well be soggy toilet paper.”

  “Taylor, you really need to ge—” Corentin managed to say before he shoved
Taylor out of the way with a sweep of the arm. Taylor yelped and slammed back into the ovens as Corentin jumped off the table and dashed for the employee restroom.

  Taylor caught himself from crashing to the dirty floor. He scowled in the direction of the restroom and grumbled, “Fucker,” as if it made him feel better. He jumped with the sound of Corentin’s violent and prolonged retching.

  The woman merely turned back to the cinnamon buns, ignoring the horrifying sound. “That’s what you get for using such a large dose of dark magic, sweetheart,” she yelled over her shoulder. She pulled the buns from the fryer, whistling a happy tune about mining dwarves to herself.

  Ringo glanced at Taylor, and Taylor waved Ringo over. Ringo obeyed and settled on Taylor’s shoulder. Taylor once again tried to find a place to stay out of the way in the cramped bakery.

  The woman seemed to ignore him as she busied herself with wiping down the prep table. She shook her head at the bunched-up ball of fresh-cut donuts and sighed. “That’s my boy…,” she muttered, then snapped her fingers. The mass of jumbled donuts slid across the table like a pulled cloth and lay in neat rows like they were never ruined.

  Taylor blinked, and the woman resumed placing them on a tray. “Um, excuse me…. Ma’am?”

  “I’m Darlene, Princess Hatfield, no one calls me ma’am,” she said and trundled by Taylor with the tray on her shoulder.

  Taylor sputtered and fumbled for words. “You know me?” he asked, and it came out in a nervous squeak.

  Darlene kicked over another stepstool to the fryer and hopped up the steps. Taking the tongs in hand, she gently placed the donuts one by one in the bubbling oil. “Who doesn’t know you and your brother?” Darlene said, not looking up. “The Hatfield Oddity stretches far and wide.”

  Ringo and Taylor looked at each other, then back to Darlene. “What the hell is that?” Taylor asked.

  Darlene hopped off the stool and put aside the empty tray. She looked up at Taylor and smiled with her unusually wide mouth. “You’re boys.”

  Taylor lifted a finger in confusion. “But we’re not the only ones.”

  Darlene turned to the cooling cinnamon buns on another table. She scooted her stepstool over and then grabbed a bag of confectioners’ sugar. She paused as the sound of Corentin vomiting echoed through the small space. She shook her head. “That boy,” she said and then nodded to Taylor. “Can you get me that block of butter from the cooler?”

  Taylor didn’t know what else to do but pitch in. He turned and looked for anything that seemed to be a cooler. He startled when it was right in front of him. He opened the heavy metal door and peeked inside. The chill misted over his sweaty skin. “Butter… butter….”

  “On the right,” Darlene called.

  Taylor found the five-pound block and scooped it up under his arm. He returned to Darlene’s side. He watched as she effortlessly dumped the block into an industrial mixer.

  “No, you’re not the only ones,” Darlene said, and Taylor backtracked mentally to what she meant. “The entire Hatfield clan is all princesses. Enchants call it the Hatfield Oddity.”

  Taylor pulled Ringo off his shoulder and narrowed his eyes. “Did you know about this?”

  Ringo wilted in Taylor’s grasp. “Honeysuckle and I were told not to talk about it.”

  “Why would my parents do that?” Taylor said in a low tone.

  “It’s really complicated,” Ringo said sadly.

  “What’s so complicated about it?” Taylor asked, his irritation rising.

  “It’s straight politics, dear,” Darlene said. “The Hatfield Oddity is a scandalous topic. No one wants to talk about it.”

  “How…?” Taylor said. He still didn’t understand. “How is that scandalous?” His irritation was replaced by befuddlement.

  Ringo gazed at Taylor with a meek expression. “Well, you know…. Princesses hooking up with princesses… like… you know….” Ringo said, and his wings shivered with the sound of Corentin vomiting again. “Dude, is he okay?” he asked, tilting his head toward the bathroom.

  “He’s fine,” Darlene said as she shut off the mixer. She tested the consistency of the butter with her spoon. “Just has to get the poison out.”

  Taylor had too much information coming at him at once. His family being nothing but princesses and Corentin expelling the contents of everything he ate in his lifetime in the bathroom. “Like… like… like a same-title couple… thing?” Taylor asked Ringo.

  “Not unlike today’s same-sex couples,” Darlene said as she poured the confectioners’ sugar into the mixing bowl.

  “But they’re not the same sex,” Taylor said with a frown.

  “Mother Storyteller created prince and princess, not prince and princeless,” Darlene said. “Many, many Enchants are adamantly opposed to it. Your family line before you were even born has been going against Mother Storyteller.”

  Taylor let Ringo slip through his fingers, and Ringo beat his wings twice to stay aloft. Taylor’s mind drew a blank on what to make of the concept. He had never known such a thing existed. He thought he had enough problems with his preference for men and his inability to not only have his first kiss, but his first orgasm. “How does that make sense? I mean…. They’re straight.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Ringo said. “Only princes and princesses are supposed to be together.”

  Despite finding the whole thing absurd, Taylor snorted a single laugh. “So, me being Curseless is really something small in the scheme of things.”

  “Oh no,” Darlene said and pointed a finger, getting Taylor’s attention. “Being Curseless is still worse.”

  Taylor crossed his arms and slumped onto a prep table. “Terrific.”

  The sound of the toilet flushing was the best sound Taylor had heard all day. Corentin staggered out of the bathroom and immediately sat on one of Darlene’s stepstools.

  “Better?” Darlene asked across the workspace while tending to the mixer.

  “Y-yeah,” Corentin said, wiping his face with a paper towel.

  Darlene adjusted her grip around her spatula like a javelin and sent it sailing across the small space to clock Corentin in the head with the rubber tip. Corentin flinched as the fresh-made glaze splattered into his hair. Taylor and Ringo both slapped their hands over their mouths. Taylor didn’t know whether to laugh or be horrified.

  “Now, Henri Corentin Devereaux, tell me why you would drag your sorry huntsman carcass into my bakery with a Hatfield Princess?” Darlene asked. It appeared her good nature had vanished into anger.

  Corentin held up his hands in surrender. “Hold on, hold on, calm down,” he said, begging. Taylor was baffled by Corentin cowering before the small woman. This was the same man who, without blinking, had explained how to skin pixies.

  “You have five seconds to start talking, or you’re going in an oven,” Darlene said, slapping her hands to the prep table. Taylor jumped, and Ringo hid behind his back.

  “You are not going to put me in an oven,” Corentin said, massaging his temples. “I won’t fit.”

  “I just bought a new wood chipper. Makes meat pies that taste like butter. Wanna see?”

  Taylor stiffened, and Ringo clung tighter to the back of Taylor’s shirt. Ringo whispered urgently, “We gotta go, we gotta go, we gotta go now.”

  Corentin seemed to sense Taylor’s fear and hooked a thumb at Darlene. “She’s just trying to scare you,” he said with a smirk.

  “Don’t start with me, Bacon Bit,” Darlene said and started dipping the cinnamon buns into the glaze.

  Ringo was the first to snort as he broke into belly laughs. “Bacon Bit?”

  “It’s a thing,” Corentin said. Taylor met Corentin’s gaze, and by the way Corentin looked at him, Taylor was going to lose it too. “Don’t,” Corentin warned him.

  It was all Taylor needed before he too broke knee-slapping laugher. He bent over, trying to catch his breath, and looked helplessly at Corentin. It was such a small thing, but Taylor spit giggl
es again with how it hit him in the much-needed spot of tension relief. He honked for air, and he could hear Corentin telling him to breathe.

  Slowly Taylor came around and relaxed. He took a breath and knew he was red in the face. He blotted his eyes with his shirt. “Oh shit. I needed that,” he sighed.

  “Now, someone better start talking before the evening rush,” Darlene said and tapped the rack of freshly glazed cinnamon buns.

  “All I know is Corentin promised us donuts,” Ringo said. Silently, all eyes turned to him. Ringo shrugged.

  Darlene turned her attention to Corentin. “Oh, did you?”

  “Sort of,” Corentin said in a seeming dismissive tone. “We need help.”

  “Well, I assume so. You only show up half dead when you need something,” Darlene said and jumped when her kitchen timer beeped. “Oh, dammit, the fryer.” She hopped off her stool and scooted it over to the fryer.

  This time Taylor took the lead. “My brother’s in danger,” he said. “He’s being held captive by a witch, and the witch has cursed us to be trapped on a road trip that’s going nowhere. I need to get to him before the witch kills him.” Taylor didn’t realize how shaky his plea came out until he was tearing up.

  Darlene stood over the fryer, watching Taylor as the donuts burned. Corentin said nothing, watching Taylor as well.

  “Please…. Please…,” Taylor croaked as his lip trembled. The stress of admitting it hit him in a rush of emotion. “I need to save him from the wi—”

  “The Witchking,” Darlene said sternly.

  “Yes,” Corentin said. There seemed to be sadness in his expression.

  The donuts continued to burn. “You’re too late,” she said in a quiet murmur.

  “What do you mean, too late?” Taylor’s heart thumped. “What do you mean, too late?” His anger grew with each word. “You have to help us. Corentin said you’d help us. Corentin promised.”

  “Corentin promised you nothing!” Darlene roared, and the bakery rattled with her fury. “Huntsmen don’t make promises. They are incapable of making promises. Don’t you ever assume, little princess, he can deliver on any oath.”