Two: Bradley Ender
976 Words
Chapter Two
Bradley Ender
There were lots of things about my life that had never made sense. Waking up in New York with no memory at my past, the job I worked at now as a bartender…. dreams of a woman who I’d never seen before.
I had thought that the strangest thing was the little girl named Titania showing up claiming to be my daughter. No, it had gotten stranger even after that. Now, we were at a storage shed in Brooklyn that I was supposed to have owned. Which looked like something out of Aladdin and had a dead woman in there.
The kid claimed she was cursed but she looked really dead to me. None of it made sense and I should have left. But any chance of that was gone, as a big, circle made of lightening and light parted in the room.
Out stepped a girl wearing men’s boxers and a Twilight t-shirt. She had blond hair, cat eyeglasses, and a glowing, silver staff in her hand. It looked like something that Gandalf would own.
“What the f**k?” I exclaimed, ignoring the fact that there was a little girl in my presence.
Titania gave me a sharp look. “DAD!”
That made me stop. This girl believed I was her long-lost father, and I believed I was drunk somewhere in New York City. Or possibly that I’d been roofied or something. “Sorry, sorry,” I apologized. “But that’s not something you see every day!”
“Bradley!” the woman squealed.
“Er, who are you?”
“I’m your sister. Louisa.” She smiled. “I know you don’t remember me, but you don’t have to worry about that. If you come home with Titania and me, we can get your memories back. Everything will make sense then.”
That made me a little more curious. For the past five years, I hadn’t known any of my backstory. Try as I might, whenever I searched my memory there was nothing but a blank. Nothing, except for a woman who haunted my dreams at night.
“Will she be there?” I asked.
Louisa raised an eyebrow. “Who?”
“The woman,” I said, “the woman who has haunted my dreams for the past five years, the woman who…. who I think is my soul mate.”
Knowing danced in Louisa’s eyes. “Adelaide. Yes. For you, she’ll come back.”
That caught my attention. Come back? Where had she gone? And what had happened that had torn the two of us apart?
There was a coughing sound, and I glanced down at Titania. “Aren’t you forgetting something?” she pointed to the faerie Queen in the glass coffin. Then she looked back at Louisa. “Auntie, we’ve got to get Titania home so that we can make things right again.”
“Oh right,” said Louisa.
She walked over to the faerie Queen, looking at the glass coffin.
“Sorry,” I said. “Doesn’t this stuff freak you out?”
Louisa looked over at me. Then shrugged. “I grew up with it. I’m used to this sort of thing. You did too, you simply don’t remember it.” She walked over to the glass coffin where the faerie Queen slept.
“Do we just lift her into the glowing, light thing?”
“It’s a portal,” Louisa corrected. “No. I won’t need your help. All I need is this.” She gestured to her silver; glowing staff that would have made even Gandalf envious. Louisa tapped it three times.
The glass coffin raised off of the ground, and floated over to the portal all on it’s own accord. I watched, stunned. “What the bloody hell?”
She smiled at me. “It will all make sense soon, I promise.”
“Aunt Lou, don’t lie to him. What’s it you always say?” Little Titania said.
“Oh. Right.” She looked down at her niece. “Nothing ever makes sense around here, we just try to make it less messy.”
“Right,” Titania repeated. “Come on, Daddy. Let’s go home.”
She grabbed my hand, and before I could stop her I was marched directly through a portal with Louisa following behind us. When we stepped through it, I found myself in a child’s pink room that looked like something out of a Disney catalogue.
“You made it back!” A voice exclaimed.
I turned to see a tall, ebony skinned girl with green eyes and curly hair looking at us. Her ears, I noticed, were pointed like an elves. And she had wings! Faeries wings!
“Of course I did,” said Louisa. She walked towards the green-eyed girl, wrapped her arms around her waist, and pulled her into a kiss. They were in love. The kind of love that came from being with someone for a long time. I envied that. I’d never had it.
At least, not that I could remember.
“Alright, so is this the part where I go ask the caterpillar who I am?”
Louisa pulled away from the embrace of her partner and glanced over at me with a smile. “Something like that. Follow me, dear brother. We’re going to get your memories back.”
“Come on, Daddy!” Titania insisted, and she grabbed my hand again as though it were the most natural thing in the world.
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