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Dear Steemians,
Without further delay, here is Story #3! For the previous two stories, you can click [here](https://steemit.com/writing/@theowlhours/fancy-a-game) and [here](https://steemit.com/writing/@theowlhours/fancy-a-game-story-2). Feel free to tell me your preferred story in the comments below, and may the best story get an ending.
Yours Truly,
The Owl Hours
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**Story #3**
Marie’s first reaction when she saw the nutcracker was absolute horror.

She didn’t let this show on her face, of course. Instead, she gave her aging Uncle Drosselmeier a kiss on the cheek and murmured something about how nostalgic it was. She listened politely as her mother told Dieter, her fiancé, about the time “dear, sweet Marie kept saying her nutcracker was alive!” And her smile never slipped as she saw the guests out at the end of the evening.

Then she went up to her room, yanked up the window sash, and held the brightly-painted nutcracker above the cobblestones of the alley below. She stood there for a long time, stray snowflakes drifting through the open window. Finally she sighed, closed the window, and set the nutcracker on top of her bookshelf.

“You deserve to be smashed to bits, you know,” she told it sternly. “You got me into a lot of trouble last time, and I don’t plan on repeating it.”

She turned away from the nutcracker to pull out a nightgown, but then turned back.

“I mean it. If you try to pull me into the Kingdom of Sweets or anything like that, I actually will throw you out the window.” She went about getting ready for bed, trying to ignore her rising panic. But memories of one particular Christmas kept washing over her, and they did not fit the story her mother had told about an imaginative child.
 
When Marie had first started telling people about her adventure with the nutcracker, her mother had not thought that it was a harmless childish fancy. She had been twelve at the time, and she was supposed to be growing up, not insisting on imaginary friends and magical worlds. So her mother, instead of doting on how sweet her daughter was, had sent for the doctor. 

She could still remember eavesdropping on her parents as Dr. Haussman told them she might be “mentally unstable,” and how he had suggested that they send her to the country for a while. She remembered sitting in her room later that evening, as her parents argued over what Dr. Haussman had said. Their voices had been loud enough that she hadn’t needed to eavesdrop. She also remembered the sick feeling in her stomach when her parents had called her into their room and explained to her that she was going on a trip. An “adventure,” they’d called it, as if she hadn’t already had the adventure of a lifetime with the nutcracker.
She’d been sent to live with he aunt and uncle, who owned a sprawling estate a few hours outside Nuremberg. Most children loved the countryside, but Marie was not one of them. Banned from playing outside with any of the other village children or reading any of the books in her uncle’s library, Marie had been insufferably bored. The doctor had told her family that she should avoid anything that might encourage her “overwrought imagination.” 

But, kept from anything that might provide entertainment, Marie’s imagination had been her only consolation during that dreadful year in the country. She had spent a lot of time thinking about the nutcracker, having one-sided conversations where she begged him to take her back to his kingdom. When she got tired of arguing with the nutcracker (she had been convinced he could hear her, although she’d had no evidence to support this), she would sit in the backyard and talk to the flowers, pretending they were grand ladies in the royal court. At night, she would stare up at the stars and wonder what secrets they held. She would often fall asleep in the garden, the light of the stars imprinted upon the backs her eyelids even as she slept.

Marie was a smart child, though, and she soon realized that the fastest way out of the countryside was by pretending that she was a perfectly normal 12-year-old girl. She pretended to grow tired of her toy crown and gave it away to a younger cousin. She said she’d “lost” the nutcracker, although in truth she hadn’t seen the nutcracker ever since she’d returned from the Kingdom. To fool her aunt, she pretended to discover a great passion for needlework and ballroom dancing. 

At the end of that interminable year, when the doctor had approved her return to the city, she’d nearly cried with relief. But even once she’d returned with the doctor’s stamp of approval, her parents had continued to hover. They treated her like a perpetual invalid to this very day.

But she would be a married woman soon. Perhaps she would be married to Dieter, perhaps to someone else. It hardly mattered. Soon she would be out from under the watchful eye of her parents, and she would become a wife and a mother -- just like every other sane woman in Nuremberg.

What had Uncle Drosselmeier even been thinking, giving her that... that... that thing as a present? She was finally about to escape the nightmare that his last gift had brought upon her. Why would he want to remind her of it?
Still feeling uneasy, she crawled into bed and pulled the covers up to her chin. 

“That’s done,” she told the nutcracker forcefully. “There’s no such thing as a nutcracker who turns into a prince and leads you to the Kingdom of Sweets. It’s impossible.” And, as if to prove what a sensible young woman she was, she buried her nose in the book of astronomy that her brother Fritz had given her as a Christmas present. No nutcracker would dare work its magic on such a factual, scientifically-minded person, Marie thought to herself.
 
After all, magic didn’t exist.