Tuesday night book club ended much the same as any other week. The women read and discussed Leslie Meier’s latest whodunit, “Irish Parade,” which dealt with a reporter trying to uncover the truth about a case in which her office rival was charged with the murder of a corrections officer. Well, everyone read the book aside from Irene Beaumont, who cribbed her notes from Wikipedia, despite having been caught and called out on it on several occasions. Afterwards, someone posed the question:

“If you could wake up to one wish, what would it be?”

Cynthia Granger wanted clarity of mind in order to be closer to God. Sarah Clemmens desired a meaningful life, one lived in service to others, especially those in emotional need. Delores Babcock wanted to be more intimate in her relationships and less afraid of life. Brenda Trotter wanted to know, without the shadow of a doubt, what her purpose was in the world, because she felt rudderless for so very long now. When it was Geneviève’s turn to answer, she shrugged off the question, offering some lame excuse, because she wasn’t comfortable explaining that she was actively working on fulfilling her wish.

What she desired more than anything else in the world, was a fairytale romance, and she was determined to get it by hook or by crook.

Geneviève decided to attend a mixer one night, without alerting her friends and family in case it went horribly wrong, and, to her astonishment, she met a man who ticked all the boxes on her potential suitor checklist. So, she implemented a plan to stretch the wooing period in an elaborate game of chase, dodged his attempts at popping the question until she was sure that he had fallen in love with her madly, truly, deeply, withheld sex throughout the entire courting and engagement process, and the list went on.

When they were finally wed, Geneviève realized her wish had come true. She moved into his palatial estate, which he shared with his six older brothers, who had either gone missing or were all dead; her husband’s servants were all either animated household items that would burst into song spontaneously, or woodland creatures gifted with human speech; she had to leave a trail of breadcrumbs whenever she left the house alone in order to find her way home again; she had access to every room in the mansion, except one, which was always locked and possessed no keyhole or doorknob or other mechanism in which to open it; and the biggest clue was that her mother-in-law dabbled in some sort of ancient arcane religion, and was always involved in some project or other that always almost accidentally killed Geneviève.

It didn’t get more fairytale than that.

Text and Audio ©2021 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys