Nancy

Birds
Birds

*Egrets squawking in the garden below. Black feathers nestled among the roses, tangled like dark knives in the lattice gates. Little footprints in the cobblestones leading to the pond, where black canopies stretched above the still water. They restocked the pond every week now, the egrets ate like soldiers, their long beaks like the tubes the men wore on the end of their masks when they did training. Long scrawny necks breaking the early morning mist, singing like the brass trumpets when they played the anthem in the morning*

This is not a cornhusk doll
Dipped in blood in the moonlight
Like what happen in America
This is us, our eyesides snagged
Dipped in mob, in the daylight
Like what happen in America

*They were around her, her and Franz, faces red, screaming. They looked so angry, so savage, so tired. She could see it in her eyes as they swarmed them. They were tired of fighting, the killing- dear Trinity, was this of what happened in the news this morning? Was it really that many dead? Franz’s crimson hair poured around his face, like blood from a scalped head. He struggled between demands for silence and desperate pleading to listen. Someone rushed the stage, it was all so quick the guards couldn’t stop him. The swiftness of an arm pulling out from a coat, like a saber from a sheath. A silver barrel twinkling like glazed-over eyes. An explosion above the yelling. The thud of heavy brass and twitching flesh hitting the floor. She had woken up before he had even hit the floor*

The breasts are still heavy
The legs long and straight
The upper lip remains short
The teeth still too small
The eyeside is green
The hair long and black
Still coming through!
Still coming through!

*The painters mumbled and argued amongst themselves. Had to be perfect, had to be just right. Too gothic the first one was. Too uptight, like she was sneering, was the second. The third one was too loose, made her look like a concubine from the Dragon Kingdom. She had sat that way for hours, hands on her lap, smile stretched only to frown in relaxation every so often. Franz had one, even their daughter had one. Easier to get them all separate, too much time to get everyone together. They’ll hang them in the entrance hall, under the family crest. They measured her again, told her to stand her back a bit straighter. But the paintings always felt so lonely, that was what the painters agreed on*

She knows this room
She can navigate it in the dark
She entered the Palazzo at night by a side door
To ascend in a lift to the upper floor
She lies on the bed, looking up not yet seeing
The signs of the zodiac painted in gold on the blue vaulted ceiling

*A different room in the castle. Less shields, less guards, more gilded, more marble to replace the cold brickwork. Where flashbulbs and microphones couldn’t reach, where voices rose and died in the welcoming silence.  Footsteps echoing in the hushed tunnels dying out in the swallowing night. A gilded door creaking, orange lights streak across the marble. A soft silk robe replacing a tight dress. The smell of vintage sour grapes stronger than any amount of gunpowder from the artillery outside. Fresh pressed sheets welcome her, gossamer blue eclipses her from the outside world. A private place, a place he had constructed for her, just for him and for her. Their haven, comforting, familiar*

His enormous eyes as he arrives
Coming nearer in the surrounding darkness
His strange beliefs about the moon
Its influence upon men of affairs
The danger of its cold light
On your face while you were sleeping
She'll eclipse it with her head, stroke him 'til he sleeps
Until he has nothing to do among men of affairs

*He had arrived late. A hulking figure illuminated in the half-dead embers. Heavy boots imprinting on the crushed wool. She shivers at his touch, a hand tracing circumference around her cheek. His fingers roll through her raven black hair, like his men breaking through borders. His voice whispers to her, vibrant, echoing as his commands to his men from the upper balcony. She melts into him, the smell of brass and damp leather sharp against her delicate chaffron and lavender. She runs fingers like spiderlegs across his back and cheek, hiding the intruding moonlight for a moment to fully take in his face. Piercing, bold, looking at her through her violet eyes as if they would shatter into purple shards, yet twinkling with a love she could tell was still there beneath the rivers and paths of scars and wrinkles. A moment of silence hangs between them. There was nothing to say, there was only the language their bodies made as silken sheets disappeared over them*

Sometime before dawn
Her bare feet cross the floor
She gazes from the window
At the fountain in the courtyard

*The stillness of dawn, the exact moment before the night died and the morning sun burned away the stars. She treasured the silence, the comfort of this time. Franz still asleep beside her in bed, embers smoking through the cool air, a time when all she knew was here beside her, in her grasp. Silk robe hanging from her shoulders as she walked across the floor towards the window. Below, the garden lingered with the twinkling lamps. A form trudged from the forget-me-nots and slipped across the cobblestones into the dim light of a post. In a moment, her eyes met that of an egret, craning a neck with almost human curiosity into the window above it*

"Sometimes I feel like a swallow
A swallow which by some mistake
Has gotten into an attic
And knocks its head against the walls in terror"

*In her dreams, she imagined an egret- an enormous beast at that- flying, swooping, squawking. Raven black feathers vanishing into her hair as it swirled and screeched above her, like an angel blowing its haunting horn. It was so beautiful, so majestic and yet so threatening, so menacing. She could feel how the wind brushed her cheek like a ghostly touch as the egret’s talons grazed her skin. The softness of its feathers as a wing closed over her mouth. Its screeches and calls became desperate barks, furious, war-like, its huge, heavy body too impossible to fly banging against the walls of their cage. She swung at it, pushed at it, anything to keep it from overtaking her. For a second, she grabbed at its wings and held it still, and for that second the beauty of the egret returned, hanging like a statue noble and untethered in the darkness. It was only then she felt its great weight shift against her, and the awful calling of hunger returned. Even when she woke up she swore she could feel the fresh sting of cuts against her arms and cheeks*

This is not a rabbit skinned
With a body of silver
Like what happen' in America
This is not a terrapin
With its shell torn away
Like what happen' in America

*It had taken him a few days to speak about it, to speak about anything at all. The doctors had said this was natural, at least they hoped this was natural for nothing like this had ever happened in this case. He had denied it once or twice, he would admit, how he would swear if the burning bourbon he drank would awaken him from a nightmare. This could not have been real, it couldn’t in all things he could understand it couldn’t. This wasn’t her wish, it couldn’t have been. She was no warlord, no conqueror, no murder. It wasn’t her, it was what wore her face, called in that twisted staccato of the woman he loved. This wasn’t some harlot making a cheap and debauched wish, this wasn’t a greedy empress choking on a silver spoon, this was his wife, this was his Nancy, this was*

The breasts are still heavy
The legs long and straight
The upper lip remains short
The teeth still too small
The eyeside is green
The hair long and black
Still coming through!
Still coming through!

*They smashed another mistake, a hammer through clay like a bullet through bone. Just because she had changed couldn’t mean she couldn’t be remembered any different, the sculptors argued. Don’t want to remember the horror, but remember the goodness. From his perch, overlooking the sculpting, he grimaced his teeth. She was too beautiful to sculpt, you couldn’t capture the details it would be like trying to paint the image of love, the image of hate, the face of sorrow, the face of regret. A part of him looked at the picture, the portrait of her, they used as a model. How they marked it with notes and measurements like she was an object, a tool, something to be used and tossed away. A part of him imagined putting his fist into the eye of the sculptor who said he probably want to screw her before she got old. A shot of whiskey he kept in his coat calmed him, but his eyes never left hers, gilded in the oil cage just a few feet below him*

The mood soon changed in the clear morning air
A man came up towards the body and poked it with a stick
It rocked stiffly and twisted around at the end of the rope
Finer than a hair from every side
Finer than a hair

*He watched as a few people shuffled awkwardly around the statue. Set it up in the courtyard, where the sun would shine on it during the day better. Some people looked at it with sorrow, leaving picked flowers at the base and kneeling in the tilled dirt below it in some sort of prayer before walking off. Some didn’t even look at it, as if out of shame or anger. Couldn’t blame them, could he? It was still their Queen, dammit, just as he was still king and Parasoul still princess. Nothing could change that fact, but could the perception of what a queen was to be able to change, a thought murmured through the pounding in his head. Only last week, when an Egret, private, battle-scarred, with eyes so wide the nerves seemed to snap like overstretched ropes, lost in a binge of medication for his burns and the booze they smuggled in to compensate for antiseptic, was caught beating the statue with a stick, wailing on it in a bellow of insults. He would have called her majesty a year before, now he called her a friend-stealing whore as they dragged him from the statue’s arms. Franz’s anger boiled in his tired heart, but for some horrific flicker of truth, he knew it wasn’t at the private*

This is just a cornhusk doll
Dipped in blood in the moonlight
This is just a cornhusk doll

*Deserts stretching miles under godless heat. Tank treads crushing bone. What do we do why don’t you tell us Franz? You’re our king, you’re our leader, what do we do? We can’t order them to fire, sir, they didn’t even make out the trench. We can’t fire sir not against her I said do it soldier or I’ll shoot you myself. You saw them from your tent you knew it was impossible. Heard the screams first, saw the bones bleaching in fresh blood as she crawled towards us. Gilgamesh can’t even carry his axe anymore he’s basically a walking corpse isn’t that what you wanted? You said we’d be home by Christmas you red-headed son of a bitch I gave my life for you and this is what you want me to do? You carry this damn army on your back and the smell of their rot sticks on your clothes but you could have scrubbed it all out huh? Just needed more time, more time, always more time. She wished you’d stop but did you listen no of course not you’re king, you put the gigan nation to the sword why should you listen. She’s still there, burnt into the sand you could touch her shadow under the sun. Erobrung whining like a death rattle. Four horses thundering across the plains, neighing and breying, their riders howling and hollering like the skulls she adorned. I am Canopy Canopy is me for home and for country, never shall I rome, strong as egret wings Canopy’s guns will sing for sister and for brother for father and for mother, I join the call to arms so we may never fall to harm I am Canopy Canopy is me Canopy is her bones under our feet breathing life back into us please please I’m sorry please understand I didn’t mean for this please*

This morning in my room
A little swallow was trapped
It flew around desperately
Until it fell exhausted on my bed
I picked it up
So as not to frighten it
I opened the window
Then I opened my hand

*Suitcase packed, only essentials. Didn’t want any of this stuff anyway, didn’t deserve it. He knew a place out in the country, far out of Canopy. Maybe make a new life, he heard there were monks or priests who offered him a place. Quiet, calm, peaceful. Trinity watch Parasoul, he thought as he shuffled out the door into the early morning. May she forgive him, or at least not hate him. She was strong though, like her mother. He had carried a picture of her, in the garden surrounded by the birds, him by her side, smiling. Two kinds of egrets surrounding them, but she nuzzled into his side. His fingers grazed over her face one more time, lips pressed to the plastic cover softly, then he slipped it into the suitcase. As he left for his car to slip away into the shadows, he tossed his meager meal of bread and water he drank for the medication out the window.*

*The egrets gathered around the breadcrumbs, as a car rolled silently away into the dark country. They would be refilling the pond with fish soon, but this was as good a meal as any*