The Princess of Uncertainty (eBook)

William Austen (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2025 | 1. Auflage
196 Seiten
Bookbaby (Verlag)
979-8-3178-0622-4 (ISBN)

Infos

It's December and the adults in the Larsen family are overcome with grief, money worries, and disapproving neighbors-so it's up to their young children to lead the way. With the help of their fun uncle, they invent an unusual Princess who can make one wish come true on the darkest night of the year. Find out if wishes truly can come true in this heartwarming holiday romance.

William A. Austen spent the majority of his career as a California lawyer before turning his focus to writing. William now spends his time helping the characters he's created tell their stories for others to enjoy.

Textauszug

I.

For the Oakley Street Neighborhood Association, the sprawling Larsen family’s house had always been a bit of a problem, but things got completely out of hand after the grandmother died. In its three years of existence, the Association had done well at bringing up the area, setting standards for lawns, shrubs, and the tidiness of porches, as in the more established nearby parts of Minneapolis. They’d been willing to overlook the family that had been there since before all the renovations to the surrounding properties, and their house with its never-finished repainting, its patchy, toy-littered yard, and its scraggly, somehow satirical plantings. But here it was, the week after Thanksgiving, the Larsens’ house had no holiday decorations, and they couldn’t even shovel the early snowfall off the front walk in a straight line. People were talking. Tch-tches were being tched. Sooner or later, something needed to be done.

Few of their new young, professional neighbors knew any of the Larsen family, and even if they had, none would have been able to understand the grief that filled their home, a grief so deep and unrelenting that no one could speak of it. Gail Larsen’s mother had died at the beginning of November. The graceful memorial remembrance, the attendance of Gail’s brother Ted and their uncle Lou, and the best efforts of her husband and children had failed to lift the heavy weight crushing Gail’s spirit. She had not been back to work since.

Inside the house with the crooked walk, the Larsen family struggled to find their own logic. Lou and Ted stayed on, old Lou in the house, Ted in an efficiency apartment four blocks over. Ted was the one responsible for the haphazard snow shoveling - he had been living in California for ten years and was out of practice. Lou, well, Lou read the paper when he could find his glasses.

For now, everything else was up to John Larsen. His decision was to give his wife space to work out her sadness, and so he worked, he cooked, he picked up the house – to the extent he could catch up – and he told the children to do their homework. He worried about money, he worried about the children, he even worried about Lou a little bit, all while waiting for his wife to come all the way back from the shadowy world through which she drifted so slowly. He didn’t even get to sleep late on Saturdays, because Saturdays were when The Constructoids was on TV.

In truth, though, it was his favorite time of the week, an island, a bit of the old mayhem from the time before, and Gail insisted that normal noise was fine by her. The Constructoids was seven-year-old Max’ favorite show, and every Friday night Max’ friend Raul slept over so they could get up at 6:47 a.m. That left them time to set up their toys so that the little robots could watch, too. John was even permitted an allotment of Constructoids and Destructoids, though Raul was always trying to give him the ones whose weapons were missing. On this last Saturday of November, inside the house with the crooked walk, John Larsen got Hi-Jacker, Driller, and Slimespoon.

“Hurry up, Dad,” Max said.

“You know, guys,” John said, “you have to admit that it was a lot more fun when this show was on at 9:00 last year.”

“No way!” said Raul. “Now I get to spend the night cause my Mom and Dad don’t want to bring me over. All they ever want to do is sleep!”

John turned on the tv, but he and the boys got a shock. Instead of the dramatic opening theme to their show, on came a sprightly jingle.

Oh, we’re the Wimpy Kitties, mew, mew, mew.

We’re the Wimpy Kitties, what can we do for you?

If you have some chores to do, just tell us of your needs,

We’re the Wimpy Kitties, we love to do good deeds!

From the kitchen, Max’ four year-old sister Zoe came running in, her bowl of cereal sloshing. “Yay! Wimpy Kitties!” she said.

“Dad!” Max wailed.

“Mr. Larsen!” Raul echoed.

“Dad!” Max wailed again.

“Shh. Shhh,” John said, with a glance over to the stairway. “Just a minute, just a minute.” He tore through the piles of old homework, comic books, and junk mail on the tv table until he found the Nickleshopper. The Larsen had dropped cable when John’s biggest office cleaning client had gone under. John had gone to the struggling electronics store nearby, bought one of the new high-tech antenna cubes, and they got seventeen channels - but only the Nickleshopper carried the listings. “Oh no, guys! It’s not on anywhere! They must have canceled The Constructoids.”

“But Wimpy Kitties is on all the time!” Raul complained.

Max and Zoe’s sister Sarah wandered in. She was thirteen, which made it something of a big deal that she got up for the Saturday morning routine - but she always did. She was even dressed, in jeans and a button shirt, and she’d worked her hair to one side in the style all her friends thought was so sophisticated. Sarah groaned in agreement with Raul. “Oh help,” she said. “Those little fur balls are on at least three times a day.”

“Sarah,” John warned, as Ted let himself in the front door.

“Hey Unca Ted,” the three children said, not in unison.

“Hey Mr. Unca Ted,” said Raul.

“What’s this? Wimpy Kitties?” Ted said, and then again, in a quieter voice after a gesture from John, “Wimpy Kitties?” In the month that Ted had been in Minneapolis, most of the blond West Coast highlights had disappeared from his hair, and the children had gotten used to seeing him in long sleeves instead of his surfing tees. He said he was working on something in his apartment. He hadn’t said what, but mostly he was just there at the house, there to help, to play with his nieces and nephew, to provide comic relief, to shovel badly, there to be there until Gail felt better, until things were all right. There also because of the surprising girlfriend he’d found the day after he arrived.

“It looks like Constructoids has been cancelled,” John said. He nodded to Ted and they began gathering up the boys and their toys before they got contaminated by any of the cereal Zoe was spilling onto the table.

“It’s not fair!” Max said, quietly, but with forceful indignation.

On the TV, Sweetie Cat said, “I love sorting my socks.”

“Me too,” said Purrty Penny.

John and Ted led the boys and their robots to the dining room through the wide oak archway that separated it from the living area. The house had been elegant in its day, almost a century ago, and like most houses in the area, had at least not been ruined, which was what was making them so attractive to all the newcomers and their Neighborhood Association.

“Max, you remember how The Constructoids started at 9:00 o’clock, and then they moved them earlier and earlier, to 7:00?” John said. “And how their toys used to be at the front of the store, and then they started moving them to the back, and now there aren’t any new ones? People just lost interest in them.”

“But how could they?” Max said.

“Remember how you used to be interested in dinosaurs, and then those wizard toys-”

“But you don’t understand, Dad, I love the Constructoids.”

Ted knelt down to console Max and saw that he was nearly crying. Raul was very still. In the background, the Kitties were singing “Let’s Eat Our Vegetables.”

Almost in a whisper, Max went on, “They were going to build a tower. Sludger made a new weapon. They were going to beat the Destructoids. Now they’re gone.”

“They’re not gone,” John said.

“Yeah, they’re just... somewhere else.” Ted rubbed Max’ back.

“Yeah, lost or something,” Sarah said. Alone among her friends who had little brothers, she liked hers, and she could see that this was serious.

Now the boys were deep in thought, as John began to clear space for them to play on the dining room table. “Whose turn was it to clean up last night anyway?” he said.

“Sorry, mine,” said Ted.

“Unca Ted, where do things go when they’re lost?” Max stared at his uncle with all of the hoping his seven years could muster, which was a lot. John and Sarah put away the remnants of Lou’s solitaire card game from the night before, a cookie platter, seven school books, four cups, and a squirtgun, watching Ted think - and smiling. They knew something was coming.

“It’s all about the unseen universe,” Ted began. “Dark matter and dark energy. You see, Max, most of our universe is made of this dark stuff, this dark matter. We can’t see it, but scientists know that it’s there because of the way it affects the matter we can see.” Sarah sat down next to Max and listened as raptly as...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 22.9.2025
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Romane / Erzählungen
• ISBN-13: 979-8-3178-0622-4 / 9798317806224