Bits of String Too Small to Save by Ruby Peru

Author:Ruby Peru
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: escape adventure strong female, tough girl humor adventure, dystopian girl adventure, grownup fairy tale, dystopian fantasy metafiction
Publisher: Pangloss Press
Published: 2017-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

37

Wherein the Queen Pretends to be a Regular Girl

DAHLIA RETURNED TO her bedroom, where a chambermaid armed with a powder puff whisked every speck of residual throne room dust from her royal person. Meanwhile, Dahlia felt mighty pleased with herself for dispensing of this last Affairs of State file so handily. The chambermaid subsequently outfitted Dahlia in a charming, navy-striped milkmaid outfit, with a baby blue apron all down the front. And no, that’s not your typical queenly attire.

The queen’s milkmaid outfit had been carefully designed (by herself) as a clever little get-up for cheese making. It wasn’t majestic, regal, or imposing in the least, and gave Dahlia a break from all those billowing skirts, bejeweled ornaments, and elaborate headdresses. In fact, people seldom recognized Queen Dahlia when she wore the disguise, which she didn’t mind, at all.

When Dahlia made cheese, she wanted to be a worker, a commoner, an ordinary girl. She didn’t look one bit the royal in her calico farm dress, apron, and thin cotton slip, even to the point where she pulled her shock of dirty blonde curls back into a bonnet—an ugly bonnet, too.

Dahlia imagined other commoners surrounding her, one day, ignorant of her true identity, acting perfectly normal. She imagined going out amongst them and making friends. Perhaps, she dared to dream, she could even catch a beau in an ordinary dress like this. In this dress, Dahlia imagined, she could talk with other milkmaids of typical girlish pursuits ... one day, perhaps. A queen could dream, anyway.

“Off to make the cheese, then,” she sang to her attendants.

With that, Queen Dahlia dashed down some stairs, emerged in the sitting room, passed through the armory, and ran up a winding staircase to the rooftop coop of royal pigeons, where she stopped for a visit with her avian pets (another of Dahlia’s secret pastimes). Specifically, she enjoyed naming and renaming the pigeons as they molted and changed nesting places and she lost track of who was whom.

Upon the parapet—surrounded on two sides by sheer drops and on two other sides by the high, stone walls of turrets with their tops in the clouds—Dahlia cooed to Samuel and Djem-djem and little Katerina, her favorite pigeons of the moment.

That’s when wide, flat Jimothy Schrank, wearing a tight, sweat-stained T-shirt, suit pants, and what he thought was a very real-looking lumberjack beard, blundered through a door and approached unsuspecting Dahlia, who busily babbled at her birds in the addlepated manner some people do with pets.

“Where’s the queen?” Schrank demanded.

Startled, Dahlia spun to face him. “Who’s asking?” she replied, in her gutsy-milkmaid persona. She didn’t recognize Schrank, even though he had, the very day before, confronted her during visiting hours wearing a velvet curtain as a toga. The voluminous fake beard threw her off, as did the lack of a toga—also, Schrank never turned to the side, so she couldn’t notice his odd dimensions. Meanwhile, Schrank himself didn’t recognize the queen without her usual headdress, face paint, and layers of skirts and gauzy accents.

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