Page 36 - The Woven Tale Press Vol. III #10

but looking at her checking her lipstick in the mir- ror while tapping on the breaks at a stop sign.
“She’ll be fine.”
I was annoyed at him for always being such a baby about Mom. Every time we left her, he almost cried because he didn’t want her to be by herself even though I told him that she probably liked it more than when we were there. The idea that Mom was happy without us wasn’t something my brother was willing to accept, so he ignored it and concen- trated on the fact that she wasn’t safe alone.
We rode the last few minutes to school in silence and I spent all morning thinking about his face in that backseat and the way he sounded when he bemoaned her loneliness.
I found him at lunch in the cafeteria and snuck past the teachers on lunch duty to squeeze into the seat next to his. “Guess what I thought?” I told him while he scraped his fork through cold potatoes and gravy.
“Robert.” I said and he looked at me with confu- sion. I croaked and he nodded and smiled. “I think that’s why he’s there. To protect us because Dad can’t.”
Chase looked at me, then to his friends talking about Power Rangers on his right and waited for me to keep going. I lied and said that I’d read a story once about some frogs being princes.
“Yeah, I know,” he rolled his eyes. “If you kiss a frog, they turn into a prince.”
I hadn’t thought of that before but I used it in my story and told him that they didn’t always have
to be someone you kissed to come to life. I told him that they were also protectors of women and children, and if any harm came to our door they would rise up and their steel armor would glisten and they would kill whoever tried to do harm to the ones they guarded. I told him that Robert must
“Right then, I wished that made up stories could become real...”
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