Rapunzel’s Prince Never Comes Back and She Regrets Her Decision

A Short Fiction

Circa 2007; poem is Emily Dickenson’s If You Were Coming in the Fall

If you were coming in the Fall
I’d brush the Summer by
With Half a Smile, and half a Spurn
As Housewives do, a Fly-

As she stared out the window as hard as she could, knowing that she would never be able to predict his return, she realized that it had been nearly a year since he first left. Did it take that long, she wondered, to “find yourself” as he had said, or had he found someone else instead? Rarely did she allow herself that terrible thought; he told her he would be back someday, so she believed that he would. She could do nothing else.

If I would see you in a year
I’d wind the months in Balls
And put them each in separate - Drawers -
For fear the numbers Fuse -

She didn’t know, when he left, that she would miss him so much a year later. She had thought that, like so many of the passing whimsies of her childhood, she might forget him, or fall out of love with him. Or perhaps, if nothing else, that the burn in her heart for him might ease with the torturously sluggish passing of time, but it was not so.

If only Centuries, delayed
I’d add them on my Hand
Counting, ‘till my fingers Dropped
Into Van Diemein’s Land -