A New American Dream - Deffered

    “Papa, can you tell us a story,” Little Dessie said as his grandfather, Zalmir Tyler, tucked his twin sister into bed.     Callie, not wanting to be left out in the least bit, chimed in with a “Yeah. Tell us a story, Grandpapa.”     “What would you like to hear tonight, my little ones,” Zel asked, even though he knew what how this was going to go down, if experience had taught him anything. The prior night he'd finished off Jane Eyre — of which Dessie saw himself as more a Jane than a Rochester; Callie, the other way around. Zel knew that soon he'd have to have The Talk with them. The week before it had been Wuthering Heights, and before that The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.     “Don't know,” Little Dessie said as he shook his head emphatically from side to side. “Make up something romantic.”     “Oh, for F-'s sake, Desmonde Hypereon Tyler,” Callie said in a voice that wasn't as venomous as she intended it to be. Her statement prompted Zel to think Apparently, my little angel does, in fact, have horns. “Can you attempt to be less girly the me. I wanna hear something with lots of adventure in it.”     “Well, Calliope Genevive,” Dessie said like he was talking to a difficult toddler and not his fifteen minutes older sister, “I was attempting to take your ever so feminine delicacies into consideration.”     Zel bit back a round of laughter at this little exchange between the ten-year-old twins. They so reminded him of their mother and uncle when they were that age. Zel knew if he didn't end this little spat quickly, he would have a crying little boy to deal with. “Have I told you The Tale of the Little Cinder Girl and the Little Fox Boy,” Zel said, cutting off Callie's smarting quip in the process.     “Nuh uh,” both children said as the prospect of a good story caused them to forget that they were fighting.     “Well:     “Sometimes, there was to be an aged Crone whom, with the lightest wave of her willow wand, could change any old orange pumpkin into a coach of purest silver and gold and adorned with mother of pearl. Once upon a time, there's no witch at all to come to our petite heroine aid. There was just her and her wits. You will soon find it out, that that is the case here.     “Other times there would be a footman calling in a fortnight after the grand ball. He'd have this dainty little slipper, made of diamond and silver, on his velvet cushion. Sometimes, it's a slipper of the softest moleskin he's got clutched in his gloved hands. You'll learn the truth behind that all too soon.      “At one time this tale began with the father's misalliance to a woman of means. There was a time when the stepmother was the ladder climber.     “You know, ma darlings, you children are the funniest of creatures. You're all so very, very egocentric. You all want to mythologize your births.      “Once upon a time, there was nothing, nothing at all. And then, with a bang, that sundered the heavens, here you are. A squalling thing with a cry like thunder. Your little balled up fists and pudgy bare feet splitting the air like lightening.     “Often, you all fail to realize, until far, far later, that, no, the world did not, de facto, begin with you. But, rather, it began, many, a many a yesteryear, with your forefathers; an sting of persons stretching, ad infinum, back into the far reaching sands of time.     "If one is to tell this tale, good and properly, one must start with our little cinder girl's parents. One must talk about the events of her father's beginnings. Then, relate the tale of her mother's origins. Then, and only then, can the tale be finished from there."     "There is so very much to tell. But, where to begin it all? Ah, yes. The father's tale. It begins, much like our Little Cinder Girl's, with his parents. In this case, it starts with his mother.     "You see, she wasn't the richest of people. Not by any streach of the imagination. In the beginning, there was just her; her and her two children. A little boy and a little girl. They would be dressed in little more than flour sack clothing and making a go at living in a mud brick hut with a barely-there roof.     "Once upon a time, they had had to go every morning out into the forest. The mother to gather herbs of tonics and medicine. The daughter, her youngest, to fetch the wood. And the son would chance hunting the king's land for food.     "It so happened, one particular day, that the girl had traviled a great distance in search of wood and have had come up empty decided to sit of a spell and think of a new means of attaining wood. No sooner had she taken roost of a old tree stump did a nearby tree fall behind her pinning her dress to the stump.     "Just as she was asking herself how to get free without ruining her dress out walked a little child caked in mud whom was quite strong. He moved the tree and then proceeded to help her industriously gather wood to take home.     "Once she was home, she sat the wood she as carrying down and turned to thank the strange boy for his help, but, he had vanished just a quickly as he had appeared. Naturally, the mother didn't believe the girl when she told her about this phantastical boy.     "A pattern soon sprang up wherein the girl would go for wood and the boy would help her bring it home and disappear when she turned around. As this continued the girl noticed that the boy became cleaner and the cleaner he became the more beautiful he became to her.     "Then, one day, the girl went to gather the wood and the boy did not show up. She waited a spell and when her companion didn't arrive she went about her task. She had drug the wood home and was just sitting down to take a break when the boy appeared.     “He gave her a flower and said--” Zel looked at the two sleeping children and smiled. He thought, for the umpteenth time that day, how much the two ten-years-old were like their mother and uncle. He went to kiss them on the forehead, and then shut off the lights. As he bent down to kiss Dessie, the boy whispered “Papa, what happed to the little boy?”     “Shush, little bird,” Zel whispered as he kissed the boy on the head. “Sleep, now.” He the shut off the lights and closed the door as he exited. He couldn't stop the flood of memories from washing over him. In his mind he went back to that long ago night when his whole world came tumbling down around him; when he didn't know that everything was going to turn out well. #     Zel was dead asleep. His soft, wheezy, breathing pierced the silence of the darkened house; the house he and Blaze and their twins, Emmiline and Fabian, called home. Zel's shock of not-quite-yet-shoulder-length hair was a muddled and tangled mess the color of fresh spun cinnamon and a crust of dried spittle had formed at the right side of his cherry red lips and continued, briefly, down his porcelain cheek where it met the downy whiteness of the pillowcase.     In his dream he is twenty years younger. He is nineteen once again and has just come from prom; the one he's slaved over for months and has ran himself beyond ragged to see done properly. The one he's just been put out of because he has had the nerve to let his best friend kiss him on the lips when said friend had been crowned Prom King.     He is now wrapped in the warm safety of his best friend's arms. Ian Winters is cooing in his ear that it doesn't matter what these backwater hicks think; that he is safe and that he is loved. Soon, they'd steal away down the highway to Angel Falls and leave the fucktards of Landing Point behind. That was always their plan. Upon graduation they'd leave the town they grew up in behind and start a life in Angel Falls, where Zel's estranged mother had been born; where his grandparents’ house still stood empty and welcoming arms held wide open.     They are seated in Ian's cole-black Camero, the one he's bought himself as a graduation present; the one he'd scrapped and saved for by working odd jobs every day for the past six years at his father's, Ianto, firm as a gopher every summer to pay for. The roaring of the falls, where they are parked is like a soothing lullaby to Zel. Zel turns around in Ian's brawny armed embrace, looks, through teary eyes that are ready to spill over with hot fresh tears, and says, in a voice just above a whisper, “You promise?”     “Nothing would make me happier than to get you way from these people. I just hope that when I do you can be happy and find that man that you're meant to spend the rest of your life with.” “    I have found him. Too bad you bat for team beaver.”     “Yeah, that is a shame. We'd have been great as a couple. But, that's never going to happen. You'll always be in my life, though, Mimi. You're the God Father of my children, after all.”     Zel couldn't help but smile at Ian's use of his nickname, the one he let only his mother, Athénaïs Gris-Tyler, and Ian call him. “Have you been holding out one me,” Zel cooed excitedly forgetting his woes, momentarily.     “You know I can't keep any secretes from you, not when you're the one whom changes my diapers,” Ian says. His laughter rises in the air like a shock of multi-colored balloons. "And no, I haven't found Mrs. Right yet."     “ That's good. Speaking of that, do you need a change now?”     “I do, actually. Only, I left my bag at home.”     “Well, then. Let's go home and get out of these monkey suits and get you nice and thickly diapered.”     “Ok,” Ian says as he puts the car in drive. Zel turned over onto his back, murmured Ian's name in his sleep and settled back into his world of slumber.