Despite the raucous party din you turn from twenty feet away to look straight at me. I feel regal, ensconced on the pink silk throne trimmed with real gold leaf that's rubbed to a faint dull woodgrained shine in all the places people rest their hands, foreheads, and lips. My black velvet falls from my collarbone all the way to the floor, covering my tight stiletto ankle boots. The skirt is outlined everywhere with white ermine, the bodice a reverse in black on white. My swimmer's shoulders rise above the costume, hard and meaty like the bells on a bar, high, like goal posts spread across the endzone of the chair's wide back, reaching up toward my heavy antique rhinestone dangles glittering in the night's false light, and farther on up toward the matching tiara set firmly on my own black pompadour. Even my makeup is arch: dramatic upswept brows I can wriggle individually, and a mouth as red as the virgin sheet in that first instant when her eagerly-awaited cry has not yet died out. Even Max Factor cannot hide my dark blue shadow that does not know the time, but I do not intend to pass for what I am not: I only intend to be Queen.

I am Queen, and standing just inside the door you know it instantly. You spread your black leather domino showing not just its scarlet lining but also your acrobat's body painted into black satin spandex so exacting I can see your nipples grow from here. Your mystery mask covers nothing but thin ovals of skin around your eyes, like a new trend in kohl. You doff your black velvet hat with its soft wide brim so the double white ostrich feathers flutter all their barbs like a fusillade of Cupid's arrows or the legs of a corps de ballet in a Walpurgisnacht finale; they spread apart like so many sets of thighs before your head bowing nobly all the way to the floor.

I think I want to keep you, at least for the night, and as you begin to arise I lift my left brow and raise my right arm in the beginnings of one imperious gesture. I will make you bow again right here, I think; or there, before my boot, where I can make you kiss it. But as you sweep your hat back up across your face some noisy interloping minx with too much lipstick and a tatty corset of torn black lace snatches at a feather and I lose you to an accidental tussle of class.

But I am Queen and I have other flesh to flay, so I do not really see you again till the party's over and the morning well past dawn. Your chapeau might be called forlorn by now, the crisp soft brim gone simply limp and the ostrich feathers bedraggled, stained with old wines and the inevitable dust of two too many floors, your mask askew like the twisted bra-strap put on in too much haste. Still, your domino's intact, wrapped around you like a bat's wings, and your reawakened eyes still try to nod when you see me watching you.

You may well wonder why you sashayed off with that ugly hussy and it is not you on the floor at my feet right now but this brace of others instead. What have they got, you might wonder, that you could not give me equally well or better? I scorn you with an eye down my nose but I do not spurn you or look away, and you understand I have permitted you to ask to make amends. You take one hesitant step and then another, bring your hat to your heart, and look properly abashed. A few more steps is as far as you should come and so with some perplexity you bump my nimbus, look up at me amazed, then really bow: not some artificial spectacle with outsized prop, this, no. Not some silly book-learned motion any high school drama coach can teach, but a bow that comes from deeper than the heart, where Fate holds promises She may or may not keep. I see how you are drawn down to the floor as if by roustabouts' ropes that overcome you, pulling slowly at first while gravity still has you by the feet, and then more swiftly as your head falls lower and your legs commence to buckle. Your knees are on the floor, your hat has fallen quite away, your cloak has fallen back and out like black leather wings in the shape of a diadem, your face has found a place among the little naked bevy on my leashes, and you know not what to do but wait, and wait, and wait.

With a long, deep breath I call on all my fortitude. "Is there," I intone from up above, "something I should know?"

But I already know what you cannot, that there's no answer you can give. I already know what I should know, and now you, too, shall learn it.

 

©2003 James Williams - Contributor's Bio