The four of them sat around a table for ten, nodding and comfortable, dinosaurs who had lived through many ages yet and figured they might be around for one or two more, though they were coming to the end and had long outlived their reign. Now, they were free to sit and watch from the wings, speaking wryly of the young and the old and of their aches and pains and of their progeny. They had their own language, their own private jokes and conversational cadence; there were no rules but there were customs to be honored.
The oldest two had been married to each other so long they could not remember their lives before, and for the woman, that was for the best. Her eyes and her humor were dark, and her hair was kept dark with dye, and she liked to slip offensive declarations in amongst pleasantries, observing like a cat the uncertain laughter that followed, watching comprehension dawn on the recipient a beat too late to parry.
These two no longer felt a need to sit close or listen to each other speak. Here is how they showed their care: He allowed her to say appalling things to people, and he let her interrupt him to begin new conversations over his own, and long ago he had saved her from her bad beginnings. She helped him make his cumbersome way across crowded and empty rooms alike, and she fixed him his plates, and shuffled around to fetch the people he wished to speak with and brought them to him for audience with the king.
The younger two were lighter, kinder; loyal friends and companions of the eldest. They were the king’s younger brother and his affable gray-haired bride. These younger ancients delighted in receiving guests at their spacious table. There was always room now, and they missed the days when the table was always full. They gave courtiers warm welcome, they ignored the sooty-eyed queen’s wicked tongue with a placid disregard.
The king’s wife was full of malice but also full of a strange humor and gnarled love and she was his best and truest companion. His “betrothed,” he would call her with mirth, amused by the passive, flowery nature of the word, a perfectly opposite characterization of the woman he cherished. There was no title that would suit her. She loved gossip and rumors and Keeping Up With The Kardashians. She loved gospel and babies and her husband’s warbled tenor. She loved watching people squirm when, softly and with a smile, she murmured horrible things to them at functions.
Long ago, these four had done all there was to do in their small town. Bars on Fridays and church every Sunday. They raised children and made a thousand roadtrips and beach trips and ball games together. Once, they had known everyone there was to know, spent hours in that small town parlor game of naming a person and then listing every known associate, where they lived, and their most well-known sin (divorce, alcohol problem, petty crime).
Now, most people they knew were dead, or ailing, or in a home. They caught up at funerals and Christmas services. They lived for phone calls in a way their children, and especially their grand- and great-grandchildren, would never understand.
They loved their grandchildren and found them delightful and incomprehensible and irritating. They loved their great-grandchildren — the babies — the best. Fat and smooth and babbling with their whole bright long lives ahead of them. The mottled queen did not really like her children half the time (except for her son, whom she adored always, with a bottomless, greedy devotion) but she wove protective spells around all of them each night. Her heart, like her garden, was overripe and overgrown with weeds and brambles, and like her garden, it remained fecund long after it should have gone fallow.
Her husband had shrunk with age, though he would always be round and he would always take up space. But now, for the first time in his long life, it was easy to overlook him in a crowd. He blended in with the background, with the houseplants and the upright piano and the other old people. She missed his booming, luminous girth. She was the stronger of them now, though she suspected that had always been the case. She had kept his secrets and he had kept hers, and what was a marriage if not that?
The four had a few friends still around from the old days, and though she did not love many people, the queen loved these last friends. Especially the cousins — the mischievous prankster and his sweet Catholic wife. The queen loved the wife most of all, the only sweet person she could tolerate, and she liked to swim around in that sweetness, wonder what it would be like to wear it herself. She did not want to, but she wondered.
She liked being at the center of a kingdom, even if the kingdom was tiny and now fetid with a creeping decay. It was hers. She had a suspicion that she would be the last one standing, that all of her friends and loved ones would die and she would remain, decrepit, indestructible, alone. She thought that she would not mind this so much, though she would miss them. It was possible she might unhinge once that happened, might loosen her casual hold on respectability, but she was not locked in to it now. She was comfortable with herself, with the world. Life was hard-pressed to elicit more than a shrug from this old queen. That was more than most people could say.
As the gathering wound down, the old ones laughed at an accidentally clever remark by a young person visiting their table. They toasted with their styrofoam cups of lukewarm after-dinner coffee. They were in no hurry. They had nothing but time now.
Thanks for reading my piece!
I thoroughly enjoyed your writing here Stephanie, so glad I found you. Looking forward to more fiction. Keep writing!
Wow, that is a mighty ‘first piece’, Stephanie. Your descriptions are epic, so much packed in to taut sentences … brilliant. I feel like I know their characters after just a few lines, yet still more unfurls. Wonderful words.