THEORETICAL YIELD OF A CHEMICAL DISTRACTION

I stared into the glass at the last sip of whiskey and puffed on the half smoked cigar and thought about the grisly divorce that had just encapsulated the past nearly six months of my life. There isn’t much to say about divorce…a rotten deal, like spoiled food stinking up the fridge. After it was all over I was sitting out on the deck with my little five-year old I call Smush. “What now?” I said.

         She glanced up at me, shrugged and then quickly returned to her coloring book. I took a long puff off the cigar and watched the purple smoke swirl into a passing breeze. Two glasses in, and on an empty stomach no less and my mind was already getting fuzzy. A large cheese pizza was sitting on the stove getting cold. Neither of us was much in the mood for eating yet. I reached over and grabbed the shotgun leaning against wall and checked the clip and chamber, both empty. Smush looked over, “Is somebody breaking in the house?”

         “No. That would be a bad idea,” I said.

         “You’d shoot them if they tried to take any of my toys right?”

         “Filthy mutants! You bet I would!” I said. “This thing here would take an arm clean off.”

         She shrugged again and went back to her coloring book. We live in the mountains where spring nights still feel like winter mornings and Friday evenings will usually culminate with a raging fire and marsh mellows and wieners being burned beyond recognition.

         “Hey,” I said.

         “What now,” she said.

         “Let’s get out of here. Hit the road top speed, get out where the wind blows and take it all the way to the end.”

         “Where’s the end?” she muttered.

         “We’ll know when we get there,” I said.

         “Hot damn! Will there be buildings and unicorns?” she asked with wide blue eyes.

         “Mermaids too if I had to guess,” I said.

         “Mermaids aren’t real,” she said. I wanted to bring up the unicorn bit but left that suitcase zipped. This five-year old was too clever for me. A few days before Christmas she jumped out of the car and stood in the drive with a peculiar look on her face. I questioned her and she responded, “How can such a fat man like Santa Claus fit down our tiny little chimney?” She could chew up most adults and spit them out after she got bored. The kid has some kind of mind, including possibly an eidetic memory and seemingly forgets nothing she sees, reads or hears…ever. There is no putting anything past her. She is sweet as an angel but can be brash with the tongue of a rattlesnake and will call you out on a dime and make you dance upon hot coals until you cry uncle.

         “The first trick will be getting off this mountain here in one piece.” I said. “We will need to stock up on movies for the road and ammunition.”

         “We don’t live on a mountain, we live in the middle of mountains, in a valley. The mountains are around us silly,” she said shaking her head at me. Either way we are high up. It is sparsely inhabited, wild and lawless. People here live by their own code of justice and deliver swift and brutal punishment if wronged with no consequences. There was an incident a couple years back when an outsider came into the area and was caught one evening peeking into the bathroom window of a home while a man’s wife was showering. The peeping Tom was chased into the woods and scalped.

        

Six months earlier I was looking at a picture of a girl one day. What was peculiar is that the girl seemed to have a peculiar twinkle in her eye. Smush was coloring in one of her many coloring books, looked over, pointed and asked, “Is she a princess?”

         “Why not,” I said. I didn’t know who she was or where she lived, only that she had that twinkle. That twinkle was trouble for sure. Even my five-year old daughter recognized it. There was just something about her but I couldn’t put my finger on it.

         “Hey Daddy,”

         “Yeah,”

         “Hey Daddy, remember that picture of the princess? She’s not for you buddy,” she said.

         “You remember her I see.”

         “Show her to me again,” she said.

I pulled up the picture on my phone. I kept the picture because every now and then I pull it up and look at it. Every time I am stopped in my tracks. I handed my daughter the phone with the picture.

         “What is her name?”

         “Does it matter,” I said. ‘She’s not my type.”

         “But she’s a Princess, Daddy!” She said vociferously.

         “Of course,” I said.

         “Does she still have a twinkle.”

         “Yes, she does,” I said amused.

         “Maybe she’ll want to watch Frozen with me like Auntie A*** did?” she said. And that was it. That was the moment when it hit me. That is what we’d do. We’d go and find this Princess.