White Widow

A Story by ZackOfBridge

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The princess presented herself before her peasants today. Her sky-riding carriage descended onto the flat of the town square. The carriage hovered with the whisper of a hum and the glow of a pearl. The peasants stood rigid and moved about the outside marketplace like stiff penguin people and with a tremble in their bones. They massed to her arrival and exit from the carriage, her guards stood behind her. She presented herself every odd month as a reminder of the hierarchy, but also to inspire. Any peasant who worked hard enough, so hard they sweated blood, could one day find themselves in the grace of her, as one of her servants.

The peasants called her the white widow, whispered it, joked of it to calm the nerves. The title originated from the apparatus of elegant death fitted around her neck. A necklace like a mane of metallic scorpion tails hung about her neck and encircled her body. They twitched and jutted with her calculated walk like the many serpent heads of Medusa, alive and malicious.

But her dress, and oh that smile, she wears it like a crescent jewel fallen from a crown. The whites and blues of the dress under the necklace seemed sewn from the fabric of a virgin sky. The colors shifted and swayed freely as though guided by a gentle breeze front. The spears about her neck complimented, and shined like ivory fangs polished with a beast’s saliva. She stepped and waved with one pale hand and occupied the other by swiping a finger to one of the spears as though petting it under the chin.

A small, dingy cheeked child--a girl with cropped blonde hair and dark roots and a dress of tea color from lack of suds--broke from her mother’s hold on her knobby shoulders. On her worn, holed flats she ran to the woman of royalty with both hands outstretched. The princess’ necklace retracted as a snake before the venomous strike, as a wave before the clamor. The child wanted only for a grasp of the dress, cool on her factory-blistered hands, and cleansing like the first pool of a stream. On lookers sucked the air from the square and stored it within themselves. The mother threw her arms, and her fingers spread trying to capture her daughter’s tattered dress. The mother tripped, slid along the street, and ignored the scrapes against the flesh of her exposed knees. She lay in the shadow casted by her child, limp and bloodied, hung from a white spear around the princess’ neck.