“Once upon a time, there was a beautiful princess named Katie.”
I groaned at the sound of the little girl’s voice, high and clear over the rush of takeoff. She had already scrambled over my lap to reach the window seat, stabbing me with Fairytale Barbie’s pin-straight plastic legs in the process, and pulled the window’s shade all the way up so that any small reprieve of shade was eliminated. So much for sleeping during the flight. She had also produced two small pillows from a purple backpack and sat on top of them, elevating herself so that she had a better view out the window.
I opened one eye experimentally, only to be greeted by the girl’s curious expression inches away from my face. I could smell the nauseatingly fruity scent of gummy bears on her breath. “Is your name Katie?” I asked politely, hoping she’d resume a reasonable distance.
“No. My name’s Alexandra Isabelle Felicity Sapphire.” She blinked once while saying this, long dark lashes over cerulean eyes.
“Really?”
“No. I wish, though. It’s Katie.”
“Oh,” I said, something nagging at the back of my mind. She stared at me expectantly, and I squirmed under her gaze. It was more invasive than it should have been, for a six- or seven-year-old. “What’s your Barbie’s name?”
“Barbie,” she said, giggling, and I made some kind of indistinguishable grunting noise which adequately displayed my emotions. Katie cocked her head to the side and suddenly sprang up from her seat, readjusting so that her tiny, freckled legs folded neatly underneath her. I was almost worried they’d snap like toothpicks under her weight, but she just cast me a brilliant smile and laughed, again—the noise was startlingly loud and uninhibited. “Aren’t you going to tell me your name, mister?”
“My—oh. My name’s Randy.”
She nodded knowingly, like this was as she had expected. “I know a Randy,” she admitted, “but he’s short and mean and he pulls my Barbies’ heads off— ‘cause he’s the dragon in the fairytale, you see—so I don’t like him very much. Do you know any Katies?”
Yes, my mind said, I know a Katie very, very well. But I clenched my jaw and pressed the little button that leans the airplane seat backwards, letting it go as far as it would, and replied, “No, I don’t.”
She scrutinized my expression. For a moment an irrational fear passed through me, that maybe—just maybe—this little princess could see the lie in my eyes. But then, why did I care if she called my bluff?
“Okay,” she said, finally, and sat back in her seat. She didn’t speak again, but pranced her Barbie across the tray table in front of her, having the doll erupt into elaborate leaps and twirls. I let my eyes close, yellow light still bleeding in through the open window. It painted the insides of my eyelids a distracting crimson.
I sighed—it had been a long week.
*
“Mr. Randy?”
I grunted. “Uhmf.”
“Mr. Randy, the lady’s got your Dr. Pepper.”
I grunted again, this time dismissively. “I didn’t order a Dr. Pepper.”
“I know,” said Katie patiently. I felt her prod me. “I ordered it for you.”
My eyes eased open, reluctant to waste even a moment of potential sleeping time; I had gotten so little rest the past few days. Everything was darker in the cabin now; it seemed like most people had pulled their windows' shades down because of the sunlight. I squinted.
I turned to the flight attendant, who was looking apologetic with the soda in her hand, and hastily wiped my mouth with the back of my hand. “I’m sorry, sir, she just said—you were asleep, and I thought maybe—I can go back and get you something else, if you like?” She sputtered the words like a frightened animal, eyes darting from Katie to me.
I looked at the drink—Dr. Pepper, Katie had said—and felt my mouth go a little dry. “Ah, no. It’s okay. You can leave it.”
She set the plastic cup down in the little indention in the tray table and quickly tossed some napkins onto Katie’s and my tray before proceeding down the aisle.
I stared into the dark liquid for a moment, watching as the bubbles rose from under the ice to the top, popping and fizzing. I felt as if they should have been some great metaphor for my life—or maybe that was just me being theatrical?—but the longer I stared at them, the less they seemed like enlightening signs from above, and the more they seemed like carbonation in a plastic cup of soda.
“Don’t you like Dr. Pepper, Mr. Randy?” Katie asked worriedly, Barbie frozen in the splits.
I bit my lip and took a sip, letting the overly-sweet taste wash around my mouth. “I do like Dr. Pepper,” I lied. She seemed to sense that something was wrong, because she kept staring at me, soft pink lips deepening into a frown.
“Why are you making that face, then?” she challenged.
“What face? I’m not making any face.”
“You are. It makes you look sad.”
I brought the cup to my lips again, about to take another sip, but set it down again. “It does make me a little sad, Katie. I used to know someone who liked Dr. Pepper very much, and I miss her.” Liar, I told myself. How can you miss someone you spend every day with? Someone you live with? But I found that the words seemed appropriate. Fitting. I did miss that woman, the one who downed three cans of Dr. Pepper a day. I wished I knew where she went, and who it was she had left in her place.
Again, the girl nodded understandingly. Her little fingers rose to her head, and she started twirling her hair. “My Daddy likes Dr. Pepper. I miss him, too.”
“Where are they, Katie? Your parents?”
She looked at her Barbie for a minute, then out the window. “Daddy’s back there, in his kingdom, the sunny one,” she said, pointing her thumb over her shoulder, behind her. “And Mommy’s up there, in her kingdom with the mountains, where the plane stops.” She pointed out the window, although all that was out there was a blanket of gentle white.
I frowned. “And you’re flying alone, all the way up to see Mommy?”
Her nod was hesitant, reserved. “I’ve done it before. Daddy doesn’t want to see her.”
I stared at Katie for a moment, feeling goose-bumps rise on my arms. “I’m sorry,” I said mechanically. But my mind was miles back, in the kitchen. She was in her pajamas—so beautiful, as always, her hair splayed across her shoulders and mascara smears dripping down to her cheekbones—but there were tears in her eyes. Tears that I had brought her. There was a vase of wilting flowers I had gotten her a week ago, next to a milk glass that was far too close to the edge; one wrong move and it would topple, crash, spill. She wouldn't notice, though. She'd keep on yelling, and pointing—long, gentle fingers, fingers that used to lace through my hair and trace the shape of my lips—pointing out the open door. I could see the stars outside, against a backdrop of black sky. They mocked me. They were an audience to my misery. “Get out now, Randall. I watch her lips move, but I don't want to hear the words. I'm not dealing with this right now. I don’t want to see you.”
I don’t want to see you.
Just like Katie’s Daddy didn’t want to see Katie’s Mommy.
Closing my eyes, I grabbed the plastic cup again and brought it to my lips violently, the rim crashing into my teeth as I gulped. Supposedly the soda had twenty-three secret flavors, but I couldn’t taste any of them—it tasted like regret, and something else too far in the back of my memories to be so easily placed. It had the bittersweet tang of something good that you had somehow let expire. I drank until it was gone, and then crumpled the plastic cup and stuffed it into the back pocket of the seat in front of me, exhaling jaggedly.
Katie looked at me with big, sad eyes that understood too well, and I wished I knew the magic words to give us both a happy ending. “Go back to sleep, Mr. Randy,” she instructed me gently, and pulled the window’s shade down halfway so that streaks of light still danced through, slicing the cabin into shards of snoring businessmen and old ladies going home.
*
The other Katie, my Katie, had wild strawberry hair and hazel-green eyes that smiled far more often than just when her lips turned up at the corners. In the dream she was running down the aisle, but her white dress had stains on it—big, ugly red stains like exploded ketchup packets—and she wasn’t smiling.
“Katie—“
“Mr. Randy? You do know a Katie, Mr. Randy. Why didn’t you tell me?”
I moaned at the altar and felt the scene spin, flipping me upside-down and depositing me onto the park bench where I’d proposed. Katie—my Katie, eyes wide and green and venomous—writhed on the bench, clutching her finger. I saw something glint in the darkness—the ring was shrinking, diamonds cutting into her skin like knives.
“Was it a pretty ring, Mr. Randy?” Katie said from the bench. The voice was different than what I knew—younger, higher, clearer. Still familiar, but not my Katie anymore. Now it wasn’t a park bench anymore; it was an airplane window seat, and Katie was shrinking, falling on top of two pillows and peering down at me anxiously and there wasn’t a ring or a white dress and—
—and the little girl was in my face. I gasped.
“Mr. Randy,” she said softly, “is Katie very important to you?”
I could only clench my fists. My eyes scanned the tray in front of me, but then I remembered that I had already drained the vile Dr. Pepper. I wanted more. I wanted to force a barrel of the stuff down my throat, so that my Katie didn’t disappear behind me and her bubbles didn’t pop.
The little girl had sandwiched her Barbie in the seat pocket in front of her—plastic arms up and reaching, an eerily pleasant smile plastered on unnaturally red lips, torso tilted slightly forward—so that the doll looked as she had just stuck the landing and was about to get the trophy. The pose looked wrong. Too perfect. Too happy.
Katie handed me a packet of peanuts. “The lady didn’t give you any because you were yelling in your sleep,” she informed me. “I think she’s kinda afraid of sleeping people.”
Munch, munch. One peanut after another. They were too salty.
“You never answered my question, Mr. Randy.”
Munch. “Oh?” Munch.
“About the ring. You were talking about it in your sleep. Was it pretty?”
“Oh.” Munch, munch. I set the crinkled plastic bag down, still half full, and looked at the head-rest of the seat in front of me. “Yes, I thought it was pretty. So did she. My Katie, that is.”
The girl seemed the consider this, and then popped another peanut in her mouth. She chewed slowly and thoughtfully. “Right before Daddy signed the split-up papers, Mommy threw her ring into the pond outside our house.”
I felt something sharp and dark inside of me. “Oh,” I muttered again, inadequately.
“Has your Katie thrown her ring into a pond yet, Mr. Randy?”
“Uh, no. I don’t think so. We don’t have any ponds around our house.”
“But you’ve got sink drains, I bet. And trash cans.”
“We do,” I acknowledged. Outside the window, I watched as the plane was engulfed into a cloud of gray; for a couple of moments everything shook, and then we emerged back into the daylight. We did have trash cans. In fact, the trash can was where I had tossed one of our wedding pictures during our first big fight. It had cracked in the corner, but when we fished it out the next day, the glass hadn’t completely shattered.
Katie had insisted that we put it back on display on our nightstand. A badge of courage, she had called it. We survived another battle. She told me to look at the crack every morning when I woke up, and it would give me the strength to go on another day.
I tried to remember. That last morning, before the screaming, had I noticed it?
*
When the plane landed and everyone but Katie and I had exited the cabin, I asked the flight attendant if she could give me a can of Dr. Pepper instead of the little plastic cup, and I slipped it into my backpack.
Katie watched me and smiled. “Are you going to give the Dr. Pepper to the lady you miss?”
“I’m going to try, when I go back and see her.”
“That’s nice,” she approved. She clutched Barbie and climbed out of the window seat, into the aisle. “I grabbed one of Daddy’s ties from his closet to give to Mommy, in case she wants to see it again. It’s his favorite. A blue one. He always wears it.”
I tipped my head to the pilot and exited the plane onto the long, cool walkway that lead back to the terminal. Katie shouldered her purple backpack, and as we walked, I frowned. “You grabbed one of the ties he wears a lot? Won’t he notice that it’s gone?”
“I hope so. Maybe he’ll decide that he wants it back so bad, he has to come up to Mommy’s kingdom and get it himself.”
God, I thought, any man bitter enough not to fly with his daughter across the country because he doesn’t want to see his ex-wife would never come for a tie. But I just smiled and nodded, a bit sadly, saying, “I hope so too, Katie.” And then I followed her gaze around the crowd of waving and smiling people that congregated outside of baggage claim. The girl’s eyes lit up and settled somewhere off to the left, on a short woman with a pea-green sweater and rectangular glasses. She looked tired.
“Mr. Randy, that’s my Mommy,” she announced. “I’m going to go now, okay?” Without further warning, she darted in between people picking up baggage and melted into the throng waiting on the other side. I watched her as she flew, a flash of purple plastic and wispy yellow hair against a lot of denim.
Part of me wanted her to turn back. Tell me what to do next, how long to wait before going back, whether to call first or just show up on the doorstep. Should I bring her back a gift? Or would that seem like bribery?
A voice sounded over the loudspeaker, reminding us to report any suspicious looking characters or unclaimed suitcases. I probably qualified as a suspicious character right now, standing statuesque at the revolving luggage dispenser, frozen and empty-handed, staring off into the distance. But no one had reported my unusual behavior. Maybe they saw that I wasn’t hostile, I was just lost. Or maybe no one paid enough attention to the rest of the world anymore. Maybe no one had noticed.
I pulled out my cell phone. She was, of course, on speed dial, and she answered on the first ring. I could hear the tears in her voice.
“Once upon a time,” I whispered into the receiver, “there was a beautiful princess named Katie.”
Please, any suggestions or criticism would be welcomed. ^_^ This is for OverEasy's Once Upon A Time contest. Sorry for the length-- I couldn't find an appropriate place to break it in half. Also, any alternative title suggestions? Thanks for reading!
It looks I have quite a bit of competition in this contest 
I have discovered the reason why I love your writing so much! You put personality into the writing whenever it's in first person. Like, I can tell so much more about Randy by the way you wrote it. Because it's in first person. I just absolutely love that, and I thought that I would point it out for you. It just helps the story so much and for us to know more about Randy, even though we don't know that we are learning more about him. I just love it, darling. ^_^
