Excerpt: The Importance of Asking Why

That night, Chris tackled an exciting new venture in the daddy career track: dinner.
As an accomplished college student for a good part of his pre-Thomasina adult life, he was skilled at conjuring up somewhat nourishing food out of the cheapest edible things available, most of them microwaveable and containing enough preservatives to act as a poor man’s formaldehyde. He’d gotten along just fine on a steady diet of V8, ramen, and pizza, but ever since he’d married Angela he had gotten out of touch with his salt-gruel roots and become spoiled.
Staring despondently at the well-stocked fridge, Chris wondered what he could possibly make with brie, grapes, salmon, and the dozen or so vegetables he couldn’t even name. He didn’t doubt he could come up with something he’d enjoy and was fairly certain he could even cook it enough to not have to worry about getting food poisoning. What really worried him was that he had no clue what Thomasina would eat.
In the end he decided to take it to a vote.
“Okay, ‘Sina, I’ve got a very important question for you.” She perked up and stared at him, waiting to hear what big dilemma she could help with. “What do you want for dinner?”
And that was how they ended up sitting on the couch at 8 o’clock at night with macaroni and cheese, potato chips, and hot dogs, watching some cartoon he’d never even heard of about a fairy princess whose flocks of sickeningly adorable furry minions helped in her well-meaning conquest of the world through song and friendship bracelets.
Drowsing around the time the princess had gathered her fuzzy friends to rid the world of bullies by putting flowers in their hair and giving them hugs, Chris wondered if the cartoons he watched when he was that age had been such utter nonsense He fell asleep with Thomasina snoring gently beside him on the couch.
He dreamt of a princess, who bore an uncanny resemblence to Thomasina, climbing the wall of a ridiculously tall, ornate castle with the help of the deer and squirrels of the forest. She looked at him and asked why he wasn’t one of her furry friends and suddenly he was a white, long-haired cat with the irresistible desire to throw himself at her feet and help her over the wall.
When the princess finally made it over the wall, he squeezed through a hole in the wall and frolicked beside her like a kitten on nitrous. She didn’t seem to mind, just dancing and skipping like any good little princess without a care in the world.
Suddenly, out of nowhere, a figure shrouded in shadow screeched at them from ahead. The sky clouded over and lightning split the sky, thunder deafening them. Princess Thomasina clutched Chris the cat and ran from the shadow creature, wailing for the forest animals to help her but they didn’t come; they were afraid of the monster too. Chris jumped out of her arms and hissed at the shadow monster. It grabbed him by the foreleg and held him up in the air, shaking him and clawing through the skin.
Chris woke with a start, realizing he wasn’t imagining the pain in his arm. He looked down and saw, instead of the shadow monster, his daughter, still asleep and obviously in the middle of her recurring nightmare, clinging to his arm with such a death grip that she’d actually broken the skin in a couple places.
“’Sina! ‘Sina!” Prying he fingers loose, he held her close to him and gently shook her awake. She came to with a gasp as though she hadn’t been able to breathe before then and, with a sob, put her head on his chest. “Hey, you’re awake now, ‘Sina, it’s okay.”
“You keep saying it’s okay but but it’s not!” she whimpered. “It’s not okay. The bad man put me in the dark and, and, and I couldn’t scream or get air or cry or anything! He wouldn’t let me go!”