VIVE LE ROI! VIVE LA REINE!

I am too young for this. It is no secret how I cried when they took me from the laps of my mother and father, those soft nests where I was too old to cradle myself but where my eyes still rested, seeking love and finding something like it, a cousin perhaps but some relation nonetheless. The leaves crunching under the wheels were caught and dragged along and muddied with pitch, their color lost. I couldn’t see them but I felt this, felt their kinship with me as we moaned together dying bit by bit of what was gone. Women would greet me later on the grass, all velvet and silks billowing, but I would see their whalebone skeletons. See us caged, see the game. Die a little more.

I am too young for this. Strange hands sharing bodies with mouths that speak tongues I barely recognize are weaving little birds into my wig: stiff, clawed creations that seem real and dead although they were never living, and this is normal to me now because everything here is stuffed, padded, insulated. All is artifice. I take the birds as they come, learn to bear the weight of nothingness all around as I do the headdress, another woman’s hair piled high atop my own which no one sees now except a skinny boy who cannot be bothered to uncoil it, to slip his fingers through the strands to the skin beneath. And the woman. She was dead, no doubt, when they cut it from her, although I imagine sometimes how she might have let them take the shears to her scalp to feed a feverish child and the idea of this makes me feel somehow ill myself and yet grateful to be living at all, a doll’s life though this is.

I am too young for this. When I dream at night now it is of the sharpening of knives, the roar of what sounds like an ocean crashing but is actually a swelling of people against me whose lives we have made like those of dogs, and they are foaming with rage. Their lips are purple, quavering, and they want to see mine still and blue with cold—want nothing more than to watch the air pass through them while I breathe not. They have fashioned themselves into the only real thing that I know, and I cannot run and I cannot stop them crashing and I cannot make them understand. So I bide my time, spout empty banality from my innards, play the comic ingénue to minds whose greatest pleasure is to smell the starvation of these other men. I whisper brittle cruelties because I crave the warmth that whips my cheeks as they slap their knees, the shame of knowing better and speaking worse that heats me as oil inside a lamp. “Madame la Reine, elle est tellement drôle.” Madame la Reine, elle mourra bientôt.

I am too young for this.

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