Written By: Lisa Sofranko

Long, long ago in a small town called Bayonne, there was a princess who lived in a simple cottage painted yellow. The cottage was chipped at and stained with age yet it was not cheap in price. You pay a lot for nothing in this town. Bayonne is a small town where everyone knows each other’s past, present, and potential future. Princess Dana’s mother and father were paying a pretty penny for a house that looked like a broken rose bush.

Princess Dana lived in her sad yellow home with her mother, Queen Cassidy and her father, King Terrence. Cassidy was all about outer beauty and class. Dana always saw her mother as unfortunate because although her mother has no fat on her body and has never touched a cigarette or a drink in her life, Dana feels lucky enough to know that at least she’ll live before she dies. Terrence was all about dreams and religion.

Prince Clarence and his wealthy family have been friendly with Dana’s family since before she can remember. To her delight, they were planned to be betrothed since they were three years old. She knew she would never find anyone as handsome and understanding as her shy Prince Clarence.

It’s often heard that a Sunday ritual is known as attending church. Princess Dana’s Sunday ritual, instead, is to go to First Street Park and pick the freshest and ripest strawberries from the trees and take them to home in a basket. The King and Queen pay no mind to the strawberries, insisting that they can’t be healthy for a royal family to enjoy when they came off of a rotted tree. However, when Princess Dana sinks her pearly white teeth into them and she tastes bliss. She stares down at them in her wooden basket and she can almost hear them screeching to be eaten. She picks one up, the largest and most beautiful one she can spot. She peels away the leafy green at the end of it, and eats it. Only this time, it tastes a little different, a little bitter, so bitter that it was sweet.

That Sunday night, she lies in her oversized pink ruffle bed. As she’s about to close her eyes and sink into sleep, she feels him touch her shoulder. For some reason she is unafraid of this stranger.

“I come to you in night, to prove my love in sleep; I want to be here when you wake up from your dreams and nightmares.”

She soaks in her stranger’s words. She can not see his face and she does not recognize his voice. She closes her big green emerald eyes and falls asleep. She dreamt about her shadow man who was watching over her. He spoke softly, with his head down, and his shoulders hunched over. He looked smaller than she predicted he actually was. When she awoke, he was not there. She knew she didn’t make it all up; she knew he was real.

Monday morning was always a routine ice skating practice for Dana.

Her mother tells her, “Come now, hurry up. The ice waits for no girl’s slow speed.”

“Yes, Mother,” Dana responds obediently.

Dana reaches for her water bottle from her cabinet in her perfectly spotless kitchen. Inside she finds two silk roses with no note. Could they possibly be for her? From him?

She runs off to the Bayonne High School Ice Skating Rink. She laces each one of her pure looking white skates with a beautifully dangerous blade at the sole of her foot, and gets on the ice. She does twirls and spins and graceful gliding. She visions her shadowed lover dancing with her on the cold ice. This has happened, this thing they call desire, and in some way she is relieved because she doesn’t have to live with it anymore, the fear. She and her imaginary shadow dance across the ice weightlessly. She was as weightless as him at this point, because that’s how he’s making her feel. For just one second as she dances, she can feel his hands actually clinging to her own. Then, in anxiousness, in excitement, in relief, she opens her dreamy eyes to see him and there is no one. No one until she spots Prince Clarence sitting in the bleachers watching her with eyes so intense that her chest heaves a bit. She feels as if looking at him makes her unfaithful to her guardian of the night. She skates off of her icy dance floor, and decides to quit for the day.

Prince Clarence has dense curls and soft full lips and bright eyes like a woodland beast and a body of lithe muscle and mostly she could see he was gentle, he was gentle like a boy though he could lift her in his arms. Immediately, she knew what her shadowed lover had that towered above her arranged Prince; he had more mystery and assured her to feel safe in the dark, which not many princesses can do with all of those stories about tall towers and fire breathing dragons. She knows deep down that those heroes became corpses, not grooms.

As soon as night fell on her, she took her strawberry snack and rushed into her big pink bed, and could feel herself enjoying her lover’s gaze.

She said to his outline, “You have returned; I knew you would.”

“I’ve always been here in the darkness, I just never made it known.”

She placed her hand lightly on her soft rosy cheek, “My protector, would it be too much to ask for me to see your face?”

“That is far too high of a request, Princess. It is not about the sight, it is about the heart.”

She crinkled her face into regret, “I have something to confess. I am already promised to marry another, and I thought I could love him but then you happened to me and it seems I no longer can.”

There was no response after that. The silence broke every bone in her body. She could still feel his arm securely wrapped around her waist, and thought maybe her news had killed him, his spirit at least. She cradled into a ball of sadness and hummed herself to sleep, asleep in the arms of a perfect stranger who was no longer speaking to her.

Tuesday morning at noon the harsh thought of her mystery love banged into her skull. What have I done? How could I have turned my back on true dangerous matters of the heart for a promise I was too young to understand? Suddenly at that moment, she felt her heart crack from a whole into small shatters of nothing. She could feel it. She swears she could. Queen Cassidy saw the panic in her daughter’s body and took strong hold of her wrist. She was saying things to her, she was saying things loud, but Dana couldn’t hear her. All she could hear was her heart exploding into smithereens as his might have down last night right next to her. She stood there, afraid, reassured by her mother’s grasp, also terrified by it. She threw herself out of her mother’s hold and ran as fast as someone in her condition can. She ran right to Bayonne Medical Center. She didn’t sit in the waiting room, she didn’t talk to any secretaries, she collapsed on the floor, in the middle of a too white hall, and slowly felt herself dying. Her world turned black, her new favorite color, and he came to her then. He told her

“Wake up, my love,” he says as he touches her hair as someone would touch old lace or a spiderweb. “Wake up or my nights will be so lonely, I need you.”

She had to pull though for him, for his well being. She had to hear his deep short sentences that he has prepared for her lullaby at night. Her crystal green eyes open quickly, trying to catch a glimpse of him, and his shadow is gone, and she stares into the eyes of Prince Clarence with a look of worry on his face. So silly how he just arrived and her shadow man was there in her death or struggle away from it, she thought.

She returned home with a heart so full now that she knew he would save her from her parent’s plans, save her from her picking fruit alone, and save her from any dangers that happen when light turns dark. Her mother has expressed her concern, her father has expressed his embarrassment, and Prince Clarence has said nothing but his wrinkled forehead held worry in between the crevices.

She bit into her strawberry, barely taking the time to enjoy it because she was in so much of a rush to get to her bed, and she threw on her long silk nightgown that was stitched with gold and cream colored thread. She shook out her long auburn hair and placed herself gently onto her bed. In a hazy view, she saw her shadow lover crawl into bed next to her. She spoke first.

“The desire is too strong for me now, I feel hungry. My stomach feels like an empty hand making a fist to feel full but there’s nothing in the fist but fingers.”

He places his fingers onto her lips to keep her quiet. She gazes into where she assumes his eyes are burning. He replaces his sweaty, aching fingers with his lips. Dana’s whole world becomes painted, stopped in place and run by black art. Within this painted moment, her whole body sings and dances and beat its drums. He slowly moves his hidden face from hers and rests his head on his side of her pillow. They fall asleep with their fingers intertwined with one another’s. Their faces are facing each other, the face of an angel parallel to the face of a shadow, an imagination, a God of the night.

A glum and rainy Wednesday morning is what Princess Dana wakes up to. No soul beside her and no fingers filling the spaces in her own hand. She simply can’t wait for the sun to set.

She retreats to her living room and finds her mother dusting off the glass table in the center of their beige carpet.

“I hope you’re feeling better, dear, you caused quite a commotion yesterday with your ‘fatal breaking heart,’” her mother sneered at her. She continues on, “Now that you’ve gotten everyone’s attention on you, all I can see is a mess of unwashed golden hair. I’ve made an appointment for you with Alyssa, leave now and return to me with more maturity and better hair.” Her mother rushes into the kitchen, and doesn’t accept any response from her daughter.

Princess Dana begins walking to her appointment. He thinks my hair is beautiful. He thinks every part of me should be safe.

She walks into Alters Hair Salon and takes her usual seat. Alyssa already got the call from Queen Cassidy, and knows what she expects to see on Princess Dana’s head. As she is washing, drying, cutting, brushing, she makes conversation with the silent princess.

“So, Sweetie, have anyone special in your life yet?”

“Actually, yes. Yes, I do,” Dana responded with an elegant look of power in her eyes.

“You wouldn’t be talking about Prince Clarence, now, would you?” Alyssa asks with a big smile that seems to be waiting for the answer ‘who else?’

Dana looks at her hair in the mirror, pulled back, sprayed and glued in place, not wild and free like it is at night. She looks at her hairdresser, and smiles slyly, “I don’t know his name, and I haven’t seen his face, but I have held his hand and our palms have become one, and I have kissed his lips and tasted every ocean of America’s passion in them.” Dana walks out of the salon immediately after that; she is confident that Alyssa won’t report her comments to her mother, I mean, what is she supposed to say? I’m sorry to hear that your daughter’s brains are leaking out of her ears?

Princess Dana returns to her chipped away yellow home. Her mother is pleased with her hair, not so much with her display yesterday, but at least now she looks like a normal princess should. She sees the sun has gone down completely now, she eats her deliciously dangerous red strawberry and heads to her room. Lies down her head with the pain at the ends of her hair, and reaches forward to her lamp and turns it off. Then he appears. Immediately he undoes her hair, and pulls her closer to him, she can’t get close enough. He gently kisses her cheek as if it was a butterfly’s wing and slides his index and middle finger over her two open eyes to close them.

He whispers to her, “Goodnight, Bride.” They both drift to sleep as one, safe in the dark.

Princess Dana wakes up and is not completely alone in her bed. She finds a note on his side of the pillow. It reads: “When the sunsets, go to the train tracks by the A&P and on the forty second railroad track there will be a gift for you from me.” It is signed by ‘Your night watcher.’

As she is waiting patiently for the sun to sweetly retire and be chased away by stars, she sees her father speaking to Father Paul, a priest that the family has known for years. King Terrence usually only meets with him at the house when he’s worried about something. Father Paul is a wizard, he can tell you almost anything, and perhaps she should speak with him in good time on how to get out of her once longed for marriage with Prince Clarence.

The sun has set; Princess Dana throws on her dark red overcoat and heads downtown to the train tracks as instructed. She walked on each disheveled wooden piece of straight track until she reached the forty second one, she saw a small crimson velvet box and she picked it up and gasped as she opened it. Just then as she attempts to take a step up of glee, her boot gets caught on the hem of her dress and she falls. Where was her shadowed lover to catch her? On the ground she stayed and opened the small mysterious box to find a heavy bulky but beautiful diamond ring, a heavy bulky beautiful diamond engagement ring. She whispers up into the moon, “I do.”

She walks on cloud as she goes home, enters her yellow distressed home and finds her parents, prince Clarence, his parents as well, and Father Paul sitting at her round polished kitchen table. She has no time for this. She goes to reach for a strawberry from her basket when King Terrence whips it from her grasp.

“Not tonight, Darling, please. Just go to bed and we will explain everything in the morning.”

Such stranger behavior, she thought, but wasn’t going to argue. All she wanted to do was see her hidden future husband and tell him what he’s done to her insides. The glorious things he’s done for her heart. She settled into sleep in her pitch black bedroom, but no one came for her that night. It was a dark that twisted and turned, clanked and rattled and smashed around her. The shine of her ring was the only thing keeping her sane enough to finally fall into an uncomfortable and lonely sleep. She felt a bit faint; a bit unlike she’s felt the pervious days of the week.

The next morning, she found Prince Clarence asleep on her velvet covered couch.

“I didn’t come to you last night because the strawberries have been making you act strange, sweetheart. I wanted to but your mother and father forbade it. It seems like the only time you ever talk to me anymore is during the night. You’re always calling me strange names associated with darkness, it scares me a little,” he says while keeping his gaze on her the entire time.

“I’ve eaten these same strawberries for years and years now, what makes you say that they’re making me change?”

He explained to her how he went to talk to the flowers and they told him the evil men who want to destroy fairy’s homes have spray painted X’s on the trees which have poisoned the fruit and put only blackness into the very core of them, and if eaten enough, they can have the same effect on the people who eat them. She protested at first, saying that there is a man she loves who comes to her at night. The faceless man who loves her and holds her and protects her while she sleeps.

“That man is you?”

“Yes, Dana, it’s been me, there are times that you haven’t seen me, there are times you’ve mistook my words, there have been times you’ve forgotten all the things we’ve done throughout the day because you were so obsessed with night.”

Dana didn’t question him. She felt the same security and the same flames with him now that she has with the faceless him. She knows she could keep her shadowed lover, her Prince of Darkness, and her Clarence, her Prince of Smiles, because they were one. She got in touch with her danger and showed him his all by the taste of a bitter mind altering strawberry laced with shadowy spray paint. She lifted herself onto her toes and put her lips to his and tasted everything the same she did the last time she kissed him, only this time it has a little something extra, a little sunshine and rainbow.

In four months she would wear white and get married in bright celebration and when night falls she will be with her shadowed lover and know what he looks like and remember his voice and taste everything she’s ever wanted at any time, day or night, and swallow back the slight hint of strawberry forever stuck in her throat. They will live happily ever after.