The Accidental Siren

5.3 Fairytale Part One: The Girl

01 EXT. HAPPY WOODS - DAY  01

It's a pretty day. A young, attractive GIRL walks happily through the forest carrying a basket filled to the rim with food and a kitten. She pauses to pluck a yellow daisy from the ground and continues her trip.

THE GIRL sits by herself in a patch of flowers and talks to her little cat.

“Good morning Dorothy! Isn't it a beautiful day? Maybe the most beautiful day I've ever seen!”

I stopped Mara. She was perfect, but I asked her to stop and I gave her direction. “Try it like this,” I said, or, “Put your hand here.”

“Dorothy, you look so sad. Your fur is all messed up, your paws are all muddy, and you must be so hungry.”

Dorothy really was as ratty as my screenplay suggested; possibly the ugliest cat I’ve ever seen. The shelter had rescued the kitten after a skirmish with a pissed-off Pinscher. She had one and a half ears, three and a half paws, and her coat was a patchwork quilt of grey fur and flesh where hair would never grow. I called her “Franken-kitty” the day we got her; Mara scowled and named her Dorothy.

Luckily, the cat’s revolting appearance only added to the production value of our film... like the guy with no legs in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.

“Pet her head,” I suggested. “Listen, as if the cat is actually talking. Here, let me push back your hair...”

Dad was there, standing atop The Great Divide with binoculars at his eye and the checklist in his pocket like a gun in a holster. We were safe.

“I'm sorry I was rude. You actually look nice. We've just been havin' a bad week, haven't we?” Mara laid in the grass and brushed the kitten's crumpled whiskers against her nose.

I dismounted my camera, placed it on the ground, and aimed it at her face. A bushel of purple flowers framed her cheek. Flecks of forest dust hung like microscopic angels, grateful to inhabit the air that Mara breathed.

“I wonder how father is feeling. He's been so worried lately.”

“Do it again,” I said. The kitten purred.

“I wonder how father is--”

“More intensity. Show real concern.”

“I wonder how father is... He's been so... so worried lately.”

“Again,” I said. “Whisper it this time.”

“I wonder how father is... He's been so worried lately...”

Every moment with Mara was a battle to suppress my desire in a thankless pursuit of “different”; different than Whit, different than Ms. Grisham, different than the ferrets and that priest and my father's lingering gaze. With every urge resisted--every hair unhinged or temple un-kissed--the pressure beat more desperately against my limbs. My joints throbbed like metal pipes in winter and my body became a powder keg of pent-up pubescence.

I lost six pounds in the month of June; another three in the first week of July. Mom offered to take me to the Holland mall for new jeans, but I risked her feelings and asked to shop with Mara instead.

There were other changes that confirmed my father's prophesy about birds and bees. Blonde fuzz began blossoming in patches like steel-wool, my voice was trapped in awkward no-man's land, my balls began to drop, and the mounting pressure hammered my emotions until I accidentally stumbled upon the release valve in the shower. Mara had been bathing in the room between mine and theirs. As I listened to innocent patter of water against flesh, my beloved imagination worked its magic and swelled my pituitary from the size of a grape to an apple.