Untitled Work

 I say that this is untitled, but the truth is that it is quite the opposite--in fact, it boasts two titles, neither of which I feel particularly strongly about at present. 

What to say about the piece itself? It started out as something for my Narration and Description course, but I ended up abandoning it and submitting something else. I found it a few weeks after the fact as an untitled document sitting in my Scrap Heap file on my thumb drive, and decided to dust it off and re-dream it. 

In short, it was a study in turning the familiar into the strange. I may develop the idea and turn it into something else entirely later, but for now, here it stands: 

_____________________________________________________________________

            The neighbors were at it again. Three in the morning…every morning…he could hear them through the walls. He rolled over, pulled his pillow over his head to block out the sound, but it was no use. He could still hear them, just on the other side of the wall. 

            A hazard of apartment living: nothing that you do is actually private.

            “What are they doing?” Clara grumbled, clambering clumsily to the edge of the bed and pressing her ear against the wall. He could see her expression by the steady blink of his alarm clock; curiosity and annoyance were both muted by her grogginess.

            He yawned and reached for her. “Eating, I guess. They’re big eaters over there. Eat anything that crosses their path and doesn’t have a Resident’s Permit.”

            “Is that allowed?” She scooted away from the wall and pulled the sheet over her shoulders. “I mean, don’t they have rules against that sort of thing?”

            “They do,”  he tried again to cajole her into laying down, but she sat firm, and the longer he was awake the more he realized that he needed to pee.

            So he swung his legs over the side of the bed and dragged himself up. “They try to keep strict rules about a lot of things, but when you’re royalty—“

            “Royalty!” 

            He continued as though she had not spoken, “you’re allowed to do whatever you like—or eat it.”

            Clara’s eyes turned upward. Curiosity outweighed by contempt, “Animals.”

            By the time he had returned from the bathroom, Clara was out of bed, too, buttoning one of his shirts to cover her bare body.

            The noise from the other side of the wall did not even falter when the community lights buzzed on in the hall outside of his unit. The white lights refracted through the glass panes of the front of the unit, blinding him momentarily. He’d meant to cover the entire wall with a curtain when he first moved in, but shortly after, a law had been passed saying that you mustn’t cover the front of your unit. It impeded bed checks.

            “The guards are coming, Clare,” he said over his shoulder, pulling open a dresser drawer and  retrieving two pairs of soft pajama bottoms. He threw one at Clara. “You will want to cover up.”

            “Ah, she-it,” Clara stuffed her legs into the pants and muttered to herself. “I knew I shouldn’ta stayed the night with you. Now I’ll be dragged back to my own quarter like some…common whore.”

            “Will you cut it out?” He had no use for dramatics so early in the morning. “They’re probably just coming to check on the noise.”

            Clara sniffed. “As if they won’t be able to smell that I don’t belong.”

            She had a point, but he didn’t tell her that.

            The soldiers tromped down the hall, two-by-two, six in all, plus the General himself who headed the march.

            Feeling that, with the General involved, it would be best for him to make an appearance, he pulled his robe off of the back of a chair, and opened his door.

            The procession paused at the door before his, as he expected they might.

            “Routine inspection, General?” he asked, the cool quality of his tone conveying his displeasure more efficiently than annoyance, he felt.

            The General shook his head. “Afraid not, Prime Minister,” he jabbed a thumb at the door. “Unfortunately.”

            The General was a bull of a man with a barrel for a chest and a red face that hid behind a traditional moustache, but when he knocked on the thick oak door of the only unit that did not have a glass front, his enormous hands produced a sound that was awkwardly timid.

            The noise from inside continued.

            This time, when the general knocked, he knocked like he meant it.

            The Prime Minister looked down the hall from one end to the other. Curious eyes peeked through the cracks of their doors. He didn’t know why they peeked. The glass walls hid nothing.

            When he looked back, he realized that the sound had stopped. The oak door was opening. 

            “General.” If the Prime Minister thought that his cool tone conveyed displeasure, then the Queen must be seething.

            The royals were picture perfect. The Queen stood in front, one daughter perched on her hip, the other clung to the opposite leg, and the Consort standing behind them, solemn, and waiting.

It was her blood red hair that defined her as royalty. The man at her shoulder had gained his status by virtue of being her mate and the father of her children—children who had unfortunately inherited their father’s darker locks. Rumour had it that the Queen would eat him, soon, due to his failure to implant a fair haired offspring in her womb.

But that was neither here, nor there. At the moment, they stood in their doorway in the most picturesque of fashions, dressed in white, waiting for an explanation from the General.

“Majesty,” the General bowed. So too did everyone else, from the Prime Minister to the end of the hall. “We’ve been called here to handle a disturbance coming from this quarter.”

The Queen looked from one end of the hall to the other. The daughter on her hip looked as well, but got sidetracked by her mother’s curls, which she took in fistfuls and cooed into.

“I see no disturbance here,” she said at length. “You were misinformed.”

Many a General would falter now, stumble over his words in an apologetic bumble. But this General, with his mustache and barrel chest, stood firm. He had seen the Queen as a young girl, had brought her as a babe to the former Majesty, and had placed the crown on her head when she had come of age. He had sat at the table and watched her eat the heart of her predecessor to gain the compassion that she had lacked. He had given her the news that neither of her twin daughters had been born with the royal blessing, and he had not faltered in the wake of that storm. He did not falter now.

“Majesty, the disturbance is you.”

The Queen drew her lips back, but said nothing.

“Lady, we respect that this is your time to be with your family, but if you could manage to keep it down, we would appreciate it.”

There was an art in the General’s speech that the Prime Minister admired. One never demanded that a Monarch do anything that she did not want to do. One merely suggested she do it if it pleased her to do so. It pleased this particular Majesty to do nothing at all, and so naturally another line of communication had to be carefully forged. By suggesting that she would do something if she could manage, the General had issued a challenge carefully decorated with suggestion. One never questioned whether Her Majesty was capable of doing something unless one wanted it proven that Her Majesty could do anything.

For a moment, the Queen analyzed his words. Then she nodded and made a gesture to her Consort to take their daughters inside, and followed. She had said not a word to dismiss the General and his men, but the bolt sliding into place from the other side of the door was all the command that anyone needed to return to their daily lives.

Prying eyes retreated. The soldiers and their General continued down the hall (poor Clara was espied on the other side of the glass wall and given a ‘friendly armed escort’ back to her original quarter), and the lights flickered out with a tired pphht.

The Prime Minister returned to bed, paused long enough to pull a pair of underwear too skimpy to be his out of the sheets, and settled against the mattress with a sigh.

It was quiet. For the first time in months, it was quiet. And he had worried about making the call! Perhaps tonight, despite the disturbance, he could get a decent night’s rest.

There was a knock on his door.

Cursing his luck, he pulled himself from bed, again, and moved to the door.

It was dark, so even through the glass door, he couldn’t see who stood on the other side.

It wasn’t until she spoke that he realized who she was.

“So,” the Queen purred, reaching out and gripping his throat with a strong hand. She crushed his windpipe before he had a chance to bring his own hands up to defend himself. “I hear that you have a problem with your living conditions.”