“Please, Dad?” the child asked her eyes wide and pleading. “ Just a story before I have to go to bed?”

The man smiled down at his daughter, his finger tracing a light, loving path from her forehead to the tip of her nose. "It’s late. Your mother will have my head on a platter.”

The girl scrunched her face up as if visualising the gruesome image before shaking her head. “No, she wouldn’t. Because then, who would she scold all the time?”

He laughed. “I’m sure she’d find a worthy substitute,” he said, his dark eyes dancing. “Let’s just say that Mommy would be very, very upset if she found out that I’d kept you up so late. I’d be in for the scolding of a life time.” Despite his grave tone, the twinkle in his eye indicated that he relished such a situation.

“What does that matter?” she demanded, chin raised in challenge. “You always look like you enjoy it when you fight with Mommy.”

A grin tugged at the corner of his mouth. “Probably because I always win.”

“You’re changing the subject!” she persisted. “You promised me a story yesterday. Please?”

He *had* promised, and a promise to his child was one he intended to keep. He shifted his position from the edge of her bed to a chair by it, and crossed his arms over his chest. “Alright, a story it is. Which story do you want to hear?”

Satisfied, she sat up against the headboard and settled the covers around her lap. “A good story.” She wrinkled her nose. “Not a gross one.”

“So that’s ‘no’ to ‘Peter Piper Puked His Peck of Pickled Peppers’?” She speared him with a look she must have learned from her mother and he hid his amusement with a solemn expression. “A ghost story?” At the mixture of alarm and childish fear that flitted across her face, he swiftly moved to reassure her by suggesting, “A space adventure?”

The threat of a horror story gone, she shook her head. "I want something… different. Something nice.”

It was his turn to look aghast. “You’re not going to make me tell you that one about the unicorn paradise again, are you?”

“No,” she said, and they shared a smile. They both remembered how he forced out each sentence about happy elves and fluffy pink clouds around a grimace, but he knew that if she asked him to, he’d tell her the story and add in double the amount of happy elves and fluffy pink clouds just for her. She fidgeted, restless. “ I want something happy. Something… something romantic.”

“Romantic?” he repeated.

“Romantic,” she affirmed. “ Something with a happy ending. *Not* like that story about what *really* happened to Goldilocks when the bears found her,” she said, throwing him a dark look.

“That was happy!” he protested, pretending to be wounded. “The bears were happy!” At another one of her warning looks - he wondered absently if she and her mother sat together and practised those - he smiled and ruffled her hair affectionately. “I can do happy. I’ll tell you the most romantic story you’ve ever heard. This one even has a magical slipper.” A smile flitted across his face. “Well, it wasn’t magical. But it has a happily ever after and a beautiful princess and everything. How does that sound?”

A smile lit up her features. “Perfect.”

“Good.” He settled back in the chair and crossed his arms behind his head. “This, sweetheart, is a story about a girl. A very beautiful, special girl who believed above all else in true love…”

“You’re pushing it!”

“I am not!”

“You are too! That’s the third time you’ve tried to spell your name!”

“Maybe it’s meant to be my name!”

At his retort, Ally McBeal narrowed her hazel eyes and glared over the Ouija board. “‘Jobil’ is meant to be your name?”

“Ally’s right,” Richard Fish chimed in. “It was obviously trying to spell something first. Billy’s pushing it.” Billy shot him a withering glare as Ally settled back in triumph. Richard’s status as the newest kid on their street had yet to claim him any respect from Billy.

“Thank you, Richard,” Ally smiled, reaching up to rearrange her tilting princess crown from its precarious position on her head. She reached into her bulging trick-or-treat bag and passed Richard a chocolate bar, who greedily stuffed it into his own full-to-bursting bag.

Billy glowered at him, sulkily tugging at the ties of his prince’s cape. “Bloodsucker,” he hissed at Richard.

Richard beamed (a frightening sight due to his stick-on vampire fangs) as if the moniker was a compliment. “Pretty boy,” he shot back.

“Will you two stop it?” Ally demanded. “Richard - no more chocolate. And Billy - I won’t let you be my boyfriend anymore.” Both boys quietened. “Now let’s start again.” She reached over to the notebook at her side and tore the top page off, crumpling it into a ball.

“Do we have to?” Billy grumbled.

Ally fixed him with a stern look she had seen her mom use on her dad. “Yes! This is very important, Billy. Weren’t you even listening to that story Mrs Winters told us?” At the lack of reply, she continued onwards. “A long time ago in Greece, the Gods got angry at us for trying to be perfect, like them. And they struck us down the middle with lightning into halves.” A blissful smile crossed her eight-year-old face. “All we need is to find our other half, and we’ll be complete.”

“Do you think that’s true?” Richard asked, a look of deep scepticism creasing his forehead.

“Every princess has a prince,” Ally pointed out, at which Billy perked up noticeably. “And I’m going to find mine.”

Billy’s face darkened at Ally’s snubbing of his affections. It seemed that as Ally’s ‘boyfriend’ and best friend of three years he felt his candidacy for the position of Ally’s true love should not be overlooked. “Okay, so what if this guy lived a billion, trillion years ago and now he’s dead? Then what?”

Ally rolled her eyes. “It doesn’t happen that way. Everyone has their other half. Even Richard.”

Richard, despite his dislike of Billy and his automatic desire to therefore do everything contrary to him, looked less than convinced. “But what if you just walk past him in the streets and don’t notice? And what if he’s really weird-looking, like Billy?”

Billy’s protests were cut off by Ally’s patient sigh. “It doesn’t happen that way, Richard. I’ll know. And you’ll know, too. You just have to listen carefully, I guess.” Neither of the boys noticed that Ally chose to ignore the second of Richard’s questions. “Now let’s try it again.”

Obediently, the boys followed Ally’s lead and placed their fingertips on the Ouija board’s indicator. Ally closed her eyes and asked aloud, “Who is my other half?”

They waited in silence. And then slowly, it began to move. Ally recorded each letter in her notebook until the indicator came to a rest. Her eyes fell to the page and she gently caressed the name with her fingertips. “John Cage,” she whispered her tone reverent. “My other half!”

The sounds of the Winter Carnival, the laughter, noises and smells, swirled unnoticed around the petite figure standing outside the star-spangled tent, so involved was she in her heated conversation. “Come on, Billy!” she pleaded. “It’ll only take a few minutes.”

Her boyfriend shook his head stubbornly. “I said no! There’s no way I’m going to waste two bucks so some dumb fake can make stuff up about my future!”

“That is so unfair,” she ground out between gritted teeth, an intimidating figure even at eleven. “I went with you to watch ‘Space Mutants Return’!”

Billy’s jaw set stubbornly. “That was different.”

Exasperated, Ally threw up her hands in defeat and turned to the boy beside Billy. “Fine. Richard?” Richard feigned deafness, and she shook her head in disgust. “Fine. Have it your way.” She turned on her heel to enter the tent, but Billy tugged on her arm, turning her back.

“Where shall I meet you afterwards?” he asked.

She chose to ignore the contrite expression on her face. “I’m going home,” she said shortly. Her tone was harsher than she intended and she mentally kicked herself as Billy’s expression grew hurt and he withdrew his hand. She reached out to pat his arm reassuringly. “My dad’s coming home for Christmas dinner. But I’ll see you tomorrow?”

Billy smiled and nodded, and she turned to walk into the tent. Ducking her head under the silken flaps, she almost gagged at the assault upon her senses as she entered into what appeared to be a cloud of thick, purple smoke. Batting at the smoke, she tried not to inhale too much of the cloying, sickly-sweet smell of incense, squinting through rapidly tearing eyes.

A hand shot out of the smoke and before she could shriek she found herself seated across the table from a wide-set woman with heavily made-up eyes and a drawn-on beauty spot, a crystal ball between them. “So, what do you want from Madame Destina?” the woman drawled, her voice deeper and huskier than Ally had expected.

She blinked in confusion. “ Just your normal destiny stuff, I guess,” she ventured, her voice small. “ But nothing bad, if that’s okay,” she added as an after-thought, remembering the story Richard told her. Some guy had been so distracted by his forecast of death he had walked into the path of an incoming fire engine. Madame Destina did not respond to her request, leaving Ally to chew her nails uncomfortably in the silence. She began mumbling slowly under her breath and Ally leaned forward to catch her words. “I see a name,” the woman murmured, passing her hands around her crystal ball. “A name integral to your future.” Ally’s heart began pounding furiously, and she halted her assault on her nails to wipe her palms on her jeans. “James? No… John!” She looked up and drew her heavily mascara-ed eyes level with Ally’s. “The name I see is John Cage.”

Between the pounding of her heart and the roaring of her blood in her ears, Ally barely heard the involuntary gasp that shot through her lips. She jumped to her feet, scrambling blindly towards the door.

Destina’s hand shot out and caught her roughly by the wrist. “Hey!” Ally stopped struggling and looked up, bewildered and frightened. “Your destiny will cost two dollars,” the woman reminded. Ally scrambled for her purse, quickly wadding the bills into the woman’s out-stretched hand. As she turned to leave, her thoughts in turmoil, the woman’s gentle hand on her shoulder gently turned her. There was something in her eyes that Ally didn’t quite understand. Was it… pity? “The truth is…” the woman hesitated, looking down at her. “The truth is that you make your own destiny. Understand? Don’t wait for it to come to you.”

Nodding, the woman’s words barely registering in her consciousness, she backed out of the tent.

It was late, she noted as she disconsolately watched the snow, and she still hadn’t eaten. Judging from the shouts echoing from downstairs, it would be awhile before she could eat. She would have to wait for her mother to storm upstairs to her room and her father to storm outside to his car before she could eat, and she knew from experience that the process could take hours.

It didn’t matter. She wasn’t hungry anyway. The resounding shatter of glass from downstairs registered briefly into her consciousness, but she wouldn’t let the sound settle. Her stomach twisted and she tasted bile in her throat, but her hands shot up to her ears as she sunk onto her window seat. “Jingle bells, jingle bells,” she sang tunelessly, desperately trying to block out the argument downstairs. But before she could even finish the chorus, the pounding of her mother’s footsteps on the stairs and the slam of the front door echoed through the house. She watched her father get into his car and drive away, the lump in her throat building to near strangulation before she shut her eyes against the sight.

She didn’t know how it had started this time. An argument about who should lead the prayer, a dispute over the quality of butter, a comparison over the quality of her mother’s turkey and the one her dad had a few days previously… the beginnings always melted into each other. And the moments when she sat there, her stomach twisting, unable to touch a bite of her food over the building nausea and the bickering… those melted into each other, too. Easter, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and her birthday: it was always the same. It was the endings she remembered, the tears and the recriminations, despite the fact that they were always the same, too. The sight of her mother’s face, twisted with tears, and the headlights of her father’s car were burned into her consciousness. A grimace tugged at the corner of her mouth. She wondered, distantly, if she could recognise her dad’s car from the front.

‘It won’t always be this way,’ she promised herself. ‘Things will change.’ Even in her mind, the thoughts sounded impossibly naïve. The pressure of her unshed tears burned in her throat and she swallowed against it.

It had started out as such a good day. Madame Destina had verified what she always hoped to be true: she had another half, and she had his name! Elation sparked through her. She had the key to her future in that name, the key to the perfect life and happiness that eluded her parents.

She closed her eyes and willed the hurt and the pain into a distant corner of her mind. ‘It won’t always be this way,’ she repeated. She *had* to believe things would be different.

‘They will be!’ she insisted stubbornly. She wouldn’t get divorced and subject her child to the type of arguments she had born witness to. She rested her head against the windowsill. She would be happy. And John, tall, dark, handsome John would love her with every part of his soul, just as she would love him. Their courtship would be brief but intense, their marriage imminent from the start. There would be tough times, she knew, but their love would get them through. Christmas would be what it should be, full of magic and fun and love.

A bittersweet smile crossed her face and she tucked her legs up on to the sill, wrapping her arms around them. ‘Until then…’ She closed her eyes, her tears illuminated by the steely gleam of the moon, and began to sing. The rawness of her throat, choked with tears as it was, lent a sad irony to the song that was a promise to herself more than anything else.

“Have yourself a merry little Christmas
Let your heart be light.
From now on our troubles will be out of sight…”

She lulled herself to sleep on the cold sill, a smile on her face.

To be continued...