Not So Happily Ever After

He made the lawyers uncomfortable. The four of them sat on one side of the expansive oak conference table, dressed in their thousand-dollar suits with hundred-dollar haircuts, concerned expressions on their faces. Across from them, their client, The Beast, sat alone. He looked at them expectantly.

"What?"

The lawyers said nothing. It became uncomfortably quiet in the glass-walled conference room on the thirty-seventh floor of the downtown high rise.

"Look, if you're not going to say anything, I'm just going to leave, okay?"

He was a fearsome creature, a bipedal brute with horns and crooked fangs, covered with matted, graying hair. He wore the trappings of wealth, but the clothes were just as old and mangy as his hide. Still, when a real-life prince phones you up and offers to double your going rate to handle his legal affairs, it's just bad business to turn him down. Even if he does have slobbery fangs and dresses like a waiter at Medieval Times.

"Please," the lead attorney said, "Let's go over everything again. You want a..."

"Divorce," the Beast growled.

"Uh-huh," the attorney replied. "Irreconcilable differences?"

"Fraud."

The attorney visibly stiffened. "That's very difficult to prove. Do you have any evidence that the marriage was entered into by your wife with the intention of committing a fraudulent act?"

The Beast grabs his own mane and shakes it toward the attorney.

"Hello! You see this mane? The permanent fur coat and the bad dental work? This wasn't supposed to happen if I kissed and married my true love."

He takes a photo out of his jacket pocket and slides it across the table.

"I used to be handsome. When I first met Belle, the curse was broken and I was as dashing and debonair as I had ever been."

The attorneys can't help but admire the man in the photo. Young, with a chiseled jaw and rugged good looks, the man in the photo could have easily made any magazine's "Most Beautiful" list.

"So I turn back into my normal self and we figure, this is it, right? Our happily ever after. We naturally make plans to marry the following evening. It's a beautiful ceremony... on western lawn, right as the sun sets..."

The Beast starts to get wistful until one of the attorneys clears his throat. The Beast snaps out of it, annoyed at himself for letting his feelings bubble to the surface. The lead attorney looks at him patronizingly.

"Let me guess. No happily ever after?"

"So we get married," the Beast continues, ignoring the tone. "We're in love and everything's going perfectly. No need for a prenup, 'cause this is true love and it's gonna last forever, right? Please. Ten years and forty pounds later, we're about as far from 'Beauty' as you can get. The woman is a nightmare... I didn't get all this gray hair just because I'm getting older! I mean, I leave the chamber pot seat up just once, and I never hear the end of it. And the sex? Forget about it. Most nights, I end up visiting Mr. Kleenex and Miss Lubriderm."

The lawyers shift uncomfortably in their leather chairs.

"Look, I'll get to the point, all right? It wasn't true love. We didn't live happily ever after. And had I read the terms of the curse closer, I would have known that falling out of true love reverts me back to looking like this. So Belle just uses it as one more excuse, saying how I've changed and how I've really let myself go... you know, all that bullshit. And then, on top of all that, I find out that she's been seeing Lumiere on the side. You know how awkward it is to walk in on your wife shtupping your best friend... who also just happens to be a candlestick?"

The Beast takes a moment to compose himself.

"Anyway, long story short, Belle says she's leaving me. Says I'm not the man she married and she can't take it anymore. Wants me to move out of the castle while we divide everything up. And I'll be damned if I let that bitch take my castle. It's been in my family for generations."

The lead lawyer shakes his head. "I'm afraid this is a no-fault state. Without any prenup to dictate the allocation of assets, you have to split everything equally. If you want to keep the castle, she has to get something of equal value."

"Equal value? Do you have any idea what that castle is worth... in that neighborhood with the market the way it is? Besides, she didn't have anything when we got married. She's an inventor's daughter who spent her time reading instead of working. I mean, she wouldn't be where she is today if it weren't for me!"

"I'm sorry, but it's the law. The argument she's going to make is that she's become accustomed to a certain lifestyle, and if she's not able to provide that on her own, you're going to have to support her."

"For how long???"

"Either until she remarries or is able to support herself to the same degree you currently support her. But more than anything, it depends on how good her attorneys are. Do you know who's representing her?"

"Ludlow & Associates."

The lawyers all cringe.

"Is that bad?" The Beast asked

"You ever hear about Alice's O.D. in Jersey? Told stories that were all kinds of crazy?"

"I thought she was dreaming under a shade tree."

The lead attorney sighs. "Exactly my point. Girl was higher than a kite, found wandering half-naked on the turnpike with four different hallucinogens in her system. Ludlow got the charges dismissed and the court record sealed... and now all anybody ever talks about is the nice nap she took under the tree on a lazy afternoon."

The Beast's shoulders sag a little.

"So what do we do?"

The lead lawyer looks at him sympathetically. "We start looking for a new place for you to live."


(1,002 words)