Now Departing

I had this dream last night. And the night before that. In it, I’m standing alone, in the city at sunset. The air is thick and warm. And when it starts to rain everything folds into tender flame. The water forms little lakes in the concrete vista, which blaze alight as she walks towards me. Something pushes down on my chest and there’s a whisper in my ear.

“You worry too much”.

I dream it again and again. But I never turn my head quick enough to see her face. She walks away and I can’t keep up. The rain starts to come harder. Harsher. Each drop starts to bruise and my feet sink deeper into each puddle on the floor. Until I see the air aflame again, reach out and leap forwards. Only then, after I have fallen and submerged myself entirely, do I wake up.

Julija wiped the water off her face and looked up to the mirror. In it she saw a cramped bathroom, almost medicinally clean, but, where she should have seen her own face, she saw only the cruel decay of time. Her real face was hidden somewhere beneath that haggard mask. She slapped it, pulled on it, perhaps hoping to finally tear it off, and noticed that even the bags under the bags under her eyes were tired. Her body, too, was near breaking point. The weight of two decades of overwritten texts, obnoxious students and the mind-numbing bureaucracy of Academia was pushing down on her shoulders. She cracked her back and finished washing her hands, where the skin between her fingers burned and peeled. She had ignored the inflammation for the past two months and did not intend to stop doing so now.

When she exited out of the bathroom, she inadvertently bumped into a tray of drinks and the attendant who was pushing them along. She apologised instinctively and moved past, without even thinking to look back. It would be easy to blame it on her post-nap drowsiness, but really she simply didn’t care to look. A moustached man pulled a bag out of the overhead, cursing as it fell and she did not turn to see. A raucous young boy ran straight at her, arms stretched out for his wingspan, but her eyeline never once took notice. She did prefer to imagine herself as a busy person, rather than a misanthropic one, yet it remained that the lives of the people around her held nothing to spike her interest. The chaos of everyday human life abounded, yet for all of it the flight itself was unnaturally smooth. It seemed to calmly slice through the clouds. You could barely even hear the engines. It may have been a nicer flight than Julija had ever been on, if it wasn’t for all the other people.

Once she had reclaimed her aisle seat, she took some time to readjust to it. Regardless of whatever material it was once made out of, it now mostly consisted of her own back sweat. Some slight fidgeting aside, she fit back into the grooves her in-flight nap had left behind. The old woman next to her had drifted off before she did, but was still sleeping, undeterred. She seemed serene. Peaceful. Her appearance belied quite a rancid body odour, but Julija was not displeased with this travelling companion. Idle chit chat and small talk could only frustrate esteemed academics like herself. She always had something more important to think about and the slightest distraction risked making her lose her train of thought. And, really, what was the point of talking anyway? If Julija wanted to get to know somebody, she’d read their book and, if they didn’t have a book about them, they couldn’t really be all that much worth knowing, could they? She remembered the last time someone tried to speak to her on a plane. An older man; leering and lecherous. She was well into her forties at the time, but he still seemed oddly concerned with her youth, vitality and virility. He had spouted all those vacuous sentiments about how, compared to him, she was still young. That she had to seize the world, or the day, or whatever it was that needed seizing. That she needed to smell the roses, or that she should smile more. After that, she felt that she had served her small-talk duty for a lifetime.

Still, she didn’t know how much time she had left on this flight. So, with no idle chit chat on offer and no world-changing idea coming to mind, she started to fiddle. First with the brochures affixed to the seat in front. Quickly passing through the company propaganda, (although the allure of in-flight alcohol drew her attention for marginally longer), she soon put the material back where she found it. Next she looked through her backpack. There was her research paper encased in a plastic folder, a book she regretted committing to review, a stick of roll-on deodorant and her boarding pass. She looked at the ticket:

From: Brussels                          FLIGHT SN502                             TERMINAL 1

To: New York                                Vanitas Air                                      SEAT 24D

But its content wasn’t likely to change anytime soon, so she put it away again. She considered looking over the paper she was presenting in two days time. A pity, then, that even she found that work boring. Doing her Political Science BA, she thought she was going to change the world. Doing her Social and Political Theory MA, she thought she was going to change Academia. It was somewhere between writing her PhD and her third book, On The Viability Of An Ethnographic Study Of Bureaucracy, that she gave up on change altogether. She’d written for hours a day, every day, for the past twenty-three years. Sometimes she liked to think about how many words that actually added up to and how not a single one of those had resulted in any material change. So now she visits conferences, manages dissertations, holds classes, all without the hope that any of her work is actually worthwhile. The nature of work, though, doesn’t particularly care if you like it or not. It always seems to multiply regardless.

Further down the plane sat another passenger, similarly concerned with the mundanity of his work. For the past decade, Scott had languished in pathetic, emasculating middle-management work and it was only now that he was reclaiming the passion of his youth: writing science-fiction stories. A writing holiday of course sounded like a good idea at the time, but sat here now he started to wonder why he was even bothering. He suspected that he would reach his destination, unshackle himself from the yoke of work, and find himself wholly unable to start. His imagination had grown rusted, stale and he doubted that even the heat of a Summer’s beach could restore him to what he once had been. But, when it happened, it happened so suddenly that Scott was wholly unprepared. Out of nothingness came an idea. A good idea. He had yet to reach his destination, but already he was scrambling in his hand luggage, desperate to grant the fleeting thought a safe refuge in his mostly empty notebook. He put pen to paper, and realised he had run out of ink.

Julija could feel herself drifting off again. When your work goes beyond the constraints of work hours and starts to seep into every moment of your day-to-day life, this almost seems like an occupational hazard. She longed for the sleep, to go peacefully into a world where her imagination was not to be curtailed by a list of references, but she knew well enough that she’d slept too much already. Still, when the heavy eyelids set in, it's very hard to resist. Her eyes started to shut, but they didn’t make it all the way; as any of the professionally sleep-deprived will tell you, that moment between the eyelid starting to come down and when it finally shuts is when your brain decides to play tricks on you.

When it came, it flitted across her line of sight so suddenly and so briefly that she was convinced it was such a trick. If not a trick of the mind, then a trick of the light. She thought it could be something to do with the plane being that much closer to the sun, perhaps. After all, she had studied a social science, not a hard one. But, whatever the cause, for the briefest second she saw a fire walk by. Not a real fire, of course, but flame made hair. Something straight out of a dream. Or a memory. But it couldn’t have been. Because it was twenty-three years later now. And she was long-gone. And yet...

The nearest flight attendant was now trying to convince the young boy to stop making his laps of the plane and to return to his seat. She wasn’t doing a very good job. As soon as she would corner him he would run around her legs, continuing unimpeded, and the attendant would have to start over. Julija waited for him to make another pass and, once the aisle was clear, she took this moment of furor as an opportunity to investigate. She traced where the apparitious woman had walked and found where she was sitting. They were mere rows apart. She wondered if she could have been here all along, right under her nose. And how wonderful that would be. Then she reminded herself how ridiculous and impossible a thought like that was. It was hardly as ridiculous or impossible as the apparent reality, since there she was. Sitting, on a plane seat. As if she was just some normal person. She was there. Not some tepid simulacrum of a figure from her dreams and memories, but a perfect replica of the woman she was once so madly in love with. She had her eyes covered with a black sleeping mask but Julija could tell that every half-forgotten memory was present, from the way her red hair fell to the tattoo on her shoulder and the birthmark on her left cheek.

Julija had loved that birthmark and said so frequently, talking often about how it made her stand-out from everybody else, how it perfectly summed up her determination to be meaningfully different. My Lina, you were the one who could have changed things, she’d often thought, only you died and left me in this world alone. Julija wasn’t ready to see it all again. Because, somehow, it was her, Julija knew it. Not a mind trick or illusion or some Hitchcockian lookalike. Her skin didn’t just look soft. It looked as soft, as soft as it ever was. Her lips likewise, though perhaps they looked even more enticing now. It wasn’t the skin of a dead girl. Just by reaching out, Julija could change everything. But she didn’t. Despite everything, or because of everything, she just stood, in the aisle, agape, to no response, left to wonder whether this was a miracle or some new form of cosmic torture. She wondered if she ever did wake up from her nap.

Emily, a neophytic woman freshly emerged from schooling, was seated in between two other passengers: on her right, a man of similar age was staring out of the plane window, headphones affixed. But her neighbour to the left, having only returned to her seat moments ago, was now beset by what Emily could only presume was unwanted company. Even as her neighbour attempted to sleep, there was a strange woman just staring at her. It made Emily feel uncomfortable, like an unwilling voyeur or a witness to some event about to turn ugly, but she had previously been in such tremendously high spirits that she looked instead to her right and attempted to push all else out of her mind. She was recently married and now, as she felt she was finally properly entering adulthood, wanted to reconnect with the Jewish heritage and history that as a teenager she had attempted to leave behind. Her trip was equal parts pilgrimage and honeymoon. She thought happy thoughts. She thought of the vow her now-husband had made. She thought of their love story, the official one that they had told their parents and the unofficial one that only they knew. And it made her feel warm inside. Even as she explored and experimented with her identity, he was never anything short of supportive. With no prompt from her, seemingly from nowhere, it was he that suggested they honeymoon in Israel. It was the happiest Emily had ever been. But, however much she tried to ignore what was going on in the corner of her eye, however much she tried to think on all those reasons to be happy and excited, that strange woman remained. Staring. Not moving. The attendant who was previously shepherding some overly energetic child now came to the strange, staring woman and, whilst clearly exasperated, was imploring her to return to her seat. The woman never looked away, but after wiping a tear from her eye, obliged nonetheless. The attendant turned to Emily next.
“Excuse me, ma’am, but we’re expecting a little excitement up ahead, so could you please ensure that your tray is placed upright and ensure your seatbelt is fastened. Thank you.”
Emily hadn’t felt any change in the flight, it was as calm as it had been, but she did as she was told.
“Yeah, sure…”, she responded, but stopped midway. She had made eye contact with the attendant and felt a shiver of dread run down her spine. She suddenly had the funniest feeling that she wouldn’t be making it to Israel after all.
“Could you tell your partner also?”, the dread attendant said, signalling the man to Emily’s left.
The honeymooner turned, furrowed her brow and gave the only response she could muster, “That’s not my partner, I’ve never met this man in my life.”

By the time Julija had returned to her seat, her elderly flight companion had awoken from her rest.
“Is everything alright, dear?” she asked when Julija sat back down, but Julija was still too transfixed to avert her gaze. She never once moved her head from the direction where she had found her lost Lina. Is lost really the right word for a thing that you’ve just found again? She started to rub her fingers together, scratching the skin between them. It was all wrong. It was all so impossible. How could she be here? What’s she been doing for twenty-three years? Why does she look the same as then, when I’ve had to grow so old? And…
“Where the fuck is my backpack?”
At her expression, Julija’s elderly neighbour stirred. “I’m sorry?”, she exclaimed.
“My backpack. It’s gone”, Julija snapped, whilst furiously and frantically searching around her seat. She checked again and again. But the truth was that, somehow, her bag had totally, inexplicably disappeared. Julija wanted to die.
“Oh, well. These things happen”, the old woman said.
Julija’s eyes narrowed, “No, they don’t.” You old hag, she wanted to say.
“No? Well, I suppose not.” And Julija’s neighbour gently nodded back to sleep. She couldn’t understand. No one could. No one else would be as stupid, as myopic, to store so much of their life in a fucking carryon. Christ. What would she present in New York now? She didn’t have the time to rewrite it, and even if she did, Julija knew she could never write like that again. The recreation would never be perfect. She felt panic setting in. She needed it back. Desperately. Fuck everything else in there. Fuck the review book and her boarding pass or even the bag itself. Julija just wanted her life back. And maybe the stick of roll-on too.

Perhaps, she thought, perhaps I am just losing my mind. It was here, I left it here, I know I did. Did someone take it? No one looks suspicious. Maybe. Maybe I’ve finally pushed myself too far. She sought out the nearest flight attendant and wondered what exactly she would ask them, going over the conversation in her head, have you seen a bag? Did you see anyone take something from here? Oh yeah, and why is my dead girlfriend sitting a few rows over?

“Excuse me? Excuse me?” she asked on her response, though no response came. She tapped the attendant’s shoulder. When no reply came, she tugged on their shirt. Only then did the attendant turn around. Now Julija wished she hadn’t. It was the first time that she truly looked upon the flight attendant’s face. It was human enough, except for the eyes. The eyes were featureless. Each one seemed eternal; no iris, no pupil, just an abyss to stare into. You can imagine that the poetics of it were lost on Julija. Her relative composure belied a fear that ran deep, one that upset her in the spaces between her bones.
“Oh God. What the hell are you?”, Julija said.
“Please take your seat, ma’am,” the attendant said to her, in a voice sweet as honey and as cold as ice. What could she do but as she was told? Still, if she hadn’t figured out that something was deeply wrong from the apparition of Lina, long lost to her, or the disappearance of a year’s worth of research, then she knew now. She had to get off this plane. The immediate problem being, of course, that the plane still happened to be thirty-six-thousand feet in the air.

She tried to think about it all, but her head was fried, working overtime in an attempt to reconcile the information surrounding her. There were too many parts, and none of them seemed to fit together. She couldn’t organise what was going on in any kind of rational way. But she needed to get to her conference and she knew deep down that this plane wasn’t landing in New York. So she just started moving. To the rest of the plane, it would have just looked like she was returning to the bathroom. But she just kept moving, past the lavatory and right up to one of the plane’s doors.

Near it, Julija rummaged throughout the space around, but she couldn’t find much of anything, let alone the parachute she would need to make her daring escape. Would she even know how to operate it? It couldn’t be too hard, surely. But such an escape was mitigated by the fact that she simply didn’t know where planes kept parachutes. Would there even be one here? One on the plane at all? Julija knew a lot about a lot of things, but she didn’t know about planes and she really didn’t know anything about this particular plane. She thought there might be a parachute in the cockpit but, when she looked to walk in that direction, she saw a small group of those eyeless, soulless flight attendants striding to her location. She knew she couldn’t hesitate. This was her one chance to escape. She had to keep moving. And, sure, she’d probably plummet into oblivion. But why shouldn’t she? She lived, now, only from conference to conference, from project to project. Without that, what did she have? She thought she had known- thought she had been- lost before; without her Lina she lived for the work and the work alone. Now that she was returned, and her work lost, the certainties of Julija’s world crumbled around her. Beyond the plane door, there was at least some certainty. She had no idea what the plane’s crew had in mind for her. She had no intention of finding out. She looked at the door and its small window, from which you could see the sky outside. The clouds were thick and endlessly white; you couldn’t even see through to the blue. She felt sick. But she knew she had to keep moving. She pulled the handle to “Open” and pushed and pushed.

But the door wouldn’t budge. I mean, sure she wasn’t the strongest, but she should at the very least be able to open a door, right? She didn’t care what was on the other side at this point. She just kept pushing. Her hands tore as her skin rubbed against the metal, oozing pus and blood as she pushed. Still, she never let up. She’d have pushed until her arms broke, and then kept going, if the attendants hadn’t finally surrounded her. And even though they grabbed her from both sides, she resisted, perhaps not realising that she had already blown her one chance.

“Stop it! Get off of me!” she shouted to no avail.
She was still attempting to wrest the door open. It was a futile attempt. There were three of them, she was but one, and they soon managed to pull Julija away. Her screams adapted to that futility.
“I want to know where you’re taking me!” she shouted instead. Then, as the attendants pulled her down the plane aisle she swapped her demand for a plea, “Where’s this plane going?”
There was a sound of plastic whirring against itself, as Julija felt her hands restrained behind her back. She was really causing quite a fuss. Even the passengers who had first ignored the commotion in favour of their own business, felt compelled to look as the attendants forcefully escorted the hysteric back to her seat. Julija could hear the rest of the flights passengers as they made a series of sounds expressing their serious, collective disgruntlement. They huffed, heaved and tutted at the idea of someone trying to escape.

Paul fidgeted in his seat. He was one of the many older passengers who were jilted awake from their naps by the one-woman revolt. His trip, particularly, was very important. He should have made it a long time ago, but he had put it off time and time again. At first, he resented his son for leaving. He cared little for the wife he had found and thought that his move away from Philadelphia was some petulant sign of rebellion against the father. It was sometime after the birth of his first child that he softened, and longed to visit, but felt too anxious to take the plunge and do so. He could not bear the thought of a grandson who resented him for his absence, or worse one who loved him in spite of his distance. Finally, in his twilight years, he felt wholly embarrassed of his past feelings. Ashamed that he took the actions of his own son as a slight. Even more ashamed that he had let his own fears stand between him and his family. He didn’t know what in him had changed, what had allowed him to finally make the trip, but, as you can tell, he was wholly concerned with a lot more than the emotional meltdown of some strangely accented woman. See, he too had noticed that there was something deeply wrong going on. There was not only no sound from turbulence or the engines, but seemingly no wind at all. He had noticed also, some time ago now, that the passengers all seemed to be heading in different directions. All this was stewing in his head and, whilst he didn’t quite know what was going on, he knew one thing: it was not yet the time for crying and screaming. There would be a time to act, eventually, an opportunity would no doubt arise. So he would not help the woman. Certainly at this point to be on her side would simply alienate the other passengers. And, of course, the screaming woman was already dead. She just hadn’t realised it yet. Paul flagged a passing attendant, who was rushing to aid her crewmates in their attempts to defuse the chaos and restore normalcy. He caught her cold gaze, looked into those featureless eyes and said:
“You don’t have any more of these peanuts back there, do you?”

“Ma’am, please calm down.”
Julija’s kicks and screams remained ineffective as she was dragged down the aisle and pushed back into her seat. Her face smacked against the overhead as she was pushed forwards; she had acted impolitely and was treated so in return. The world had seemed muddled even before she was hit. Now there was a ringing in it too. Through it, she could barely hear the attendants instructing her, or the other passengers jeering at her. When the restraints were applied, Julija no longer fought- it was taking all her strength just to stay conscious. Julija, who was being tied down by an assortment of attendants, cared little what they thought. Though she would admit that the disdain in the eyes of a woman she had once loved stung. She could see her now. Lina’s looking right at me, she thought, she can see me. She wondered if she was disappointed. Leather belts kept her from moving her body, or kicking her legs, or lifting her arms, and whenever she moved, it became harder for her to breathe. She sat in those restraints (she had no other choice really) resigned but still distressed. Tears ran down her face.
“Tell me,” she cried, “Please tell me where this plane is going.”
“Don’t worry ma’am,” the attendant said. When the voice came, it poured into her ears like thick oil and was punctuated by a tightening of one of Julija’s belts, “We’ll make sure that you get there.”

At this point, Julija no longer had control of her breathing. Short, sharp breaths were all that she could muster and she felt her heart beating harder and faster to compensate. Adrenaline pushed throughout her body and rushed back again and her face was hot, so incredibly hot. Her insides were tearing themselves apart.

Oh God, Julija thought, and the colour of the world began to fade away, but I still have so much more to do. The plane started to shake and all that she saw turned to white.

The Amber Burning

I don’t know why I’m writing this, anyone who reads this is going to think I’m insane. Maybe I am. Damn it. So I’m just going to write it down. Because if I don’t I’m pretty sure it’s going to violently burst out my head. I need this out my brain.

So, first, I guess I should say writing isn’t my strong suit. I kind of hate it actually. How full of yourself do you have to be to just sit and write? It’s all vile and conceited really, when you get down to it. I like reading though. And I like reading about wizards. Everyone has an opinion on wizards. I don’t care. I like wizards.

I’ve been trying to die since I was 13. But I’ve always been too afraid. And I always found that kind of funny. I don’t want to live, I don’t want to die, I’m caught in some purgatory between them, never really trying too hard at doing either. Anyway, between living and dying, there are a few strange quirks you pick up along the way. When I was 15, long after I had broken a light trying to hang myself with my school tie but not so long after I’d tried cutting myself and got scared from all the blood, I started walking to the train station. One day I was going to throw myself on those tracks. Not in front of a passenger train, but one of those massive freight trains that speed right through the station and look like they couldn’t stop even if they wanted to. But, of course, that’s just a bit too terrifying. A few steps off the platform and I’m gone. I don’t know why being nothing scares me but whatever little, worthless, shit I count for always kept my feet on the station and my head from being turned into bloody pulp.

Still, I started to go to the train station. Every day, eventually. And I’d just stand there, watching the trains rush by. After a few weeks, I started sitting instead. Making judgy comments to myself about the commuters. And then some weeks after that, I started bringing my books. It was Autumn, in the afternoon, and I was sat reading. I’d not looked up at the trains in some time, I was somewhere far, far away from them. But, when I wasn’t looking, a train had pulled in. Off its passengers came, though I saw none of them except for one old man. He sat next to me and I realised something very strange. I’m 19 now. This man must have been in his 70s. Possibly older. But there was a strange kinship between us. Hell, he looked like me. But, with the twisted distortions of time, I realised it was yet another one of the universe’s mockeries. Every facet of my face that I hated, each one that I had pored over with disgust in the mirror, was amplified here tenfold on the face of a haggard, decrepit old man. He was me, if my chin had disappeared far into my neck, if my hair was thin and straggly, grey instead of black, and if my nose had never stopped growing.

We were sat together for a while, I soon returned to the land of wizards (though it had now lost some of its escapist appeal); he just sat. We said nothing to each other. That was until the old man stood up suddenly and, glancing at my book, said, “Do you want to know how it ends?”

I met his eye, looked at him directly and said, “No.”

“Yeah, I never found out either.”

And then he just walked off. But I noticed the train he’d got off was still here. And the carriage door was still open. And I really can’t tell you what was going through my mind in that moment because, for some reason, I jumped on.

As soon as I was aboard, the doors closed. It was like I jumped in at the last second, but I got the feeling that if I hadn’t got on board it would have waited longer. The carriage was mostly empty, though I could spot some tops of heads. I found a nice window seat, on the left hand side, and the train started moving. I really had no idea where to. There were no trainline infographics and no driver announcing our next stop. Realising I’d left my book behind, I started to fiddle with the chair in front of me. Then, I fiddled with my hands. I soon realised that I had nothing to do but stare outside the window as the train left the station. It wasn’t until after about an hour, when we had long since abandoned the concrete signs of human living, that there was the first sign that this wasn’t just a ghost train. A message came up on the passenger information display. It simply read: “APPROACHING: THE AMBER BURNING”.  

It was the strangest thing. The train never stopped, it never pulled into any station, but the world outside my window seemed to transform. Over a dense forest, the sun came to the horizon; its orange rays melting the leaves on the trees, mixing their colours together like a paintbrush swiping through a freshly painted vista. I took a moment to take in the vision. And then I started crying. Emotion washed over me. It was the same sunset I’d seen a thousand times before, but, for some reason, right then, it was the single most beautiful sight of my life. It was everything I needed, the answer to every unanswerable question. So I cried and I didn’t try and stop it. I didn’t wipe the tears away and I didn’t hold them back. I can’t be certain, but I think everyone else in the carriage was crying too.

A tone came through the train intercom, jaunting the carriage back to reality. The world was normal again and we'd left that enchanted rift. But the air we were breathing was different. We'd taken some of the magic from that place away with us. We sat, silently basking in the experience we'd shared, for the rest of the journey.

The train started to slow down and, wherever we were, I knew it was my stop.

I stood between the carriages, awaiting whatever lay on the other side. I was caught again, not between life and death, but between trepidation and excitement. The fear I felt of what I could meet at my destination was matched only by my desire to see it. The train started to slow down and I prepared myself. The button on the door lit up. I pressed it. The doors opened and I saw… that it was the same platform where I’d gotten on? The book I’d left behind was in the same position, on the same page, on the bench where I was sat. The sun hadn't even set yet. I can’t explain it. But, when I stepped onto the platform, I felt an ache between my shoulders. It was like the weight had come back onto them and was pushing down twice as hard. I felt dejected and had half a mind to walk out in front of the tracks before the train left again. Until I heard an announcement come from inside the train:

“See you tomorrow, Ben.”

And my shoulders loosened a little bit.

Fantasy Story A

Imagine a castle. Tall, imposing and altogether fairytale, with colourful flags adorning each tower spire. It is unfortunate that we have visited this place on a thunderously miserable night. Rain strikes against an ornate window and behind it, you should imagine a King. Only a very sad King. With no beard, or round belly, or golden hair, but with dark, drab clothes and hair the colour of coal. He is resigned to his quarters, pointed against the window and brooding. He has this talent for brooding. A talent one can only acquire from years and years of practice. He takes  a glance to his side and lays his eyes on a small silver headpiece. It almost seems wrong to call it a crown. Crowns are golder, pointier, embellished with jewels and sometimes have a weird cushion bottom that I’m sure no one likes. Yet, crown it was and the burden of it was weighing heavy on our King’s mind. The thought of wearing it again was set to tear him apart, to cause him untold anguish and anxiety. He fell asleep in his chair soon after, but I’m sure it was a torturous, angst-ridden sleep.

You’ll be pleased to know the following morning was considerably more pleasant. The sun shone brightly through the King’s brooding window and woke him from solemn slumber. He dutifully put on that hated crown and moved himself towards the great hall. Today’s Kingly obligation was one of the most arduous. He had to attend his own party.

Walking past the portraits of his ancestors, each one of them a perfectly posed frame of the monarch and their partner, the King lamented the myth that had soured his childhood with false hopes and dreams. “An Unprecedented Era of Peace and Prosperity”. The family mantra would echo through his mind whenever he needed it least. According to the story, were his marriage to yield in a pure, unadulterated true love his kingdom would not only be peaceful and prosperous, but it would no longer be his kingdom. The promise is that on achieving true love, the monarchy would simply just fade away.

Load of bollocks obviously, but the King had tried absconding from a courtship party once and his mother tried to throw herself out the tallest tower. That’s the funny thing about family traditions. It doesn’t ever seem to matter how truthful or how useful they are. You just kind of get caught up with them, whether you want to or not. When the King at last entered the great hall, he did so with a sombre melodrama, and was met with the applause of local nobility. He was getting a reputation for eccentricity, but nobody really minds so long as you provide enough booze. Pleasantries and grand entrances complete, the only thing left was for the King to immerse himself in the party.

Now I’d like you to imagine again. If you find I’m asking for too much of your imagination, perhaps fantasy stories aren’t for you. I’m sure there’s some fascinating Wikipedia entries you could be reading or maybe you can watch one of those How It’s Made videos. I’d like you to imagine a woman. An elegant, noblewoman. A beautiful noblewoman, with long, shimmering blonde hair. Not just a beautiful noblewoman, but the most beautiful noblewoman you could possibly imagine. This woman, this awe-inspiring woman, was what stood before our King. He must have been so stunned by her beauty that he could not think straight, or form a sentence, because he walked directly past this woman. And then past the next inconceivably beautiful woman. And past the next. The hall was soon filled with a crowd of disappointed beautiful women.

Now I don’t want you thinking of our King as a shallow man. Or, at least, not shallow in the usual terms. It wasn’t the faces or the bodies of the women that repelled him, but their total ubiquity. Each one of them was otherworldly beautiful, each one of them was dressed in the finest gowns and each one of them curtsied in precisely the same manner. This was the one-hundred-and-fifty-seventh such party that he had attended since his coronation. The King had long abandoned any pretense of civility. He’d politely greet the women, of course, but no longer was he interested in hearing their carefully rehearsed marriage pitches. They were all the same anyway.

Our King was coming to the end of this round of prospective wives now. He’d almost stopped to talk to one redheaded woman, until he noticed that she was wearing a brooch shaped like a leaf and so, really, what was the point. He was ready to decrown himself and spend another evening lamenting his condition. It was then that something most peculiar happened. Just beyond his line-of-sight, there was a struggle within the crowd. Guards seemed to be in a fuss and the nearby noblewoman seemed mightily distressed. As the King marched over, the crowds split. The guards took to their knees and left in the centre of the commotion was a woman. Her skin was darker than her pale sisters. There was a tear down the skirt of her dress and her corset was on backwards. She quickly moved a stray strand of her hair off her face and met the King’s eyes. Time slowed. The King considered what to say. But decided against saying anything at all. He excused himself and walked back to his private wing of the castle.

In three weeks time, the two were married. For the kingdom it was Winter, but for them it was a great Summer. They talked unendingly about the most significant nothings, taking walks across the castle grounds and treading the first footprints in freshly fallen snow. The King loved her intelligence, they would often spend hours in the library mixing and matching characters from all sorts of books to create their own stories. She seemed to have no worry or responsibility and seemed to be making the most of every monarchical fancy or pleasure. She was kind to servants, even friendly with many of them, and had even convinced the King to take cooking classes with her under the castle’s head chef. Neither of them were very good, but their subjects naturally ate everything they were served and declared it the result of culinary genius. There could be no other response. The King wasn’t into decapitations, but he’d certainly give them a sinister stare. The two had a romance most of us only get to dream about (or read about in fantasy stories). They had an emotional connection, an intellectual intimacy. They had a unique bond. They had really great sex.

In Spring, the Kingly duties arose again. Grateful as he was to have completed his task of finding a wife, she had done little to absolve him of the boring matters of tax, diplomacy and whingy landlords. It was on a day where the King had taken Court that his wife took the time to meet his family. They were all dead, but one shouldn’t underestimate the power of oversized portraits and loneliness. She had a great deal of riveting conversations with her great-great-great-in-laws and promised to each of the painted couples that she would be the best wife she could be.

A servant, bringing along a replenishing fruit basket so the King’s wife could enjoy conversing with the long-dead as long as she pleased, noted that she seemed enamored with the paintings. The King’s wife said that it was because she was, she felt an odd kind of kinship with them. It was almost like they really were family, though she had never met them before tonight. She mentioned that she hadn’t known that her wedding ring had been passed on through so many generations.

The servant was shocked to hear this. They’d assumed, quite reasonably, that the King’s wife, of all people, would know the dynastic myth. But she didn’t. She hadn’t heard of it at all. It was much later that night, when she saw her husband again after his duties were completed, that she made her new discovery known. Unable to even look into her husband’s eyes, she soon burst into tears. His tiredness slipped away immediately. He asked what was wrong and pleaded to know what he could do to help.

So, she told him. About how on the day they met the guards were trying to throw her out the castle. That she had snuck in amongst the crowds. That she had stolen the dress she had worn. That, really, that wasn’t the first day they met. That really they first met years ago, when her company was passing through the kingdom. She had noticed his kindness, and his sadness, and all those gaudish rings. She had decided to stay in the hope of seeing the sad King once more. It all came out in a sputtering pace and the deeper she went into the story, the more lies that she uncovered, the more tears streamed down her face. She was okay with dooming a man. She thought that the worst that could happen is that she’d make a disappointing wife, and she was content enough with that, so long as she had the comforts of high society and one or two weeks of married bliss. She struggled a little more with dooming an entire people. She feared that her unwashed, innoble status removed any hope of the kingdom knowing that era of unprecedented peace and prosperity.

Her husband inhaled deeply as he weighed the news. Then, he responded:

“Back in the intercontinental wars, the King and Queen would spend all their days locked away in their chambers. Some historians figure they were trying to sex the war away.”

His wife gave a sad smile in response. The kind you feel obliged to give when someone makes a joke, but you’re not in the mood to laugh.

“Later, when the coffers ran dry and the crown found itself in insurmountable debt, the marriage at its head apparently couldn’t have been stronger. They were childhood rivals turned passionate lovers and their storybook romance just wasn’t good enough for the family myth.”

“Hell, that’s just the good ones. Even at the turn of this century, the throne has seen its perfect marriages grow sterile and stale. One Queen soon found that she was interested in far younger men than my grandfather. And the King and Queen before me? Well, if there’s was a love so gallant and true then perhaps my mother wouldn’t be living so vicariously through me.”

“The point is they all, at some point, thought they were in love. And if our thoughts are all we are then, I think, when you think you are in love, you must be. And even though you’re in love, sooner or later, it will all fall to shit and there’ll be no peace and there will be no prosperity and the Kingdom will wilt and the march of monarchy will go on and on and on.”

He stopped himself before continuing.

“This isn’t coming out right.”

“What I mean to say is, I don’t care. Wait, that’s not right either. I do care. I don’t care about some story or some idealised, magical, fairytale love that has never existed and will never exist. But I care about you. I love you.” He reached out and embraced his wife, pulling her onto his lap. “And you haven’t doomed us all.”

She rested her head on his chest, noticing that her eyes were drying and her mouth was smiling.

“Perhaps we were doomed from the start but, I mean, that’s hardly your fault. Am I getting this across?”

She looked up and met her husband’s eyes. The air in the room had shifted. They weren’t the words of a poet, but a poet’s words are often cold, heartless verses that promise beauty and bely artifice. No, these were his words and his awkward delivery assured his wife of their authenticity. Her fingers ran across his face, then through his hair and then she answered her husband with a kiss. And as their lips met, the rubies on their rings gave off the slightest bit of light…

Or, at least, that’s the way I heard it.