Read Online Dressing Up for the Carnival by Carol Shields - Free Book Online
Authors: Carol Shields
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especially the moment when the Queen’s own harp was smashed by hammers and the pieces buried deep in the palace garden.
Simple nourishment has always been for her a form of torture. Fruits and vegetables, meat and milk bring on duodenal spasms, but, worse, she is unable to bear the shape of a spoon in her mouth. The finest clothing rubs and chafes. The perfume of flowers causes her to faint, and even oxygen catches in her windpipe so that she coughs and chokes and calls for the court physician.
Ah, the physician! What grave responsibility that man bears. It was he, after all, who first recognized the danger of ragweed and banished it from the realm. Then roses. Then common grass and creeping vines. It was he who declared the Queen to be allergic to her courtiers, to her own children, to the King himself.
But at least life went forward. Acts of proclamation. The Admiral’s Ball, already mentioned. And the Spring Rites on the royal parade grounds where the Queen could be glimpsed by one and all, waving her handkerchief, bravely blessing her subjects with the emblem of her disability. People are fed by that kind of example. Yes, they are. People find courage in stubborn endurance.
But recently the Queen has disappeared, and matters have suddenly worsened. There has been an official announcement that clocks and calendars are to be destroyed. It is forbidden now to utter the names of the days and months, to speak of yesterday or tomorrow or next week. Naturally there will be no Spring Rites this year, for the progression of seasons has been declared unlawful. Meteorologists have been dismissed from their positions and weather disallowed. The cause of Her Majesty’s affliction has been identified. It has been verified absolutely. It seems the measured substance that pushes the world this way and that, the invented sequentiality that hovers between the simple raising and lowering of a teacup, can no longer be tolerated by the Queen.
At last the people understand why the palace windows have been closed up. The temporal movement of the sun and stars must be blocked from her view. Rhythmic pulsations of light threaten her existence, suggesting as they do the unstoppable equation that attaches to mass and energy. She lives in the dark now, blindfolded, in fact. Her ears too have been covered over for fear she will hear the cries of birds, a cock at dawn, a swallow, or an owl hooting its signature on the night sky. She no longer speaks or thinks, since the positioning of noun and verb, of premise and conclusion, demands a progression that invites that toxic essence, that mystery.
But they have overlooked her heart, her poor beating queenly heart. Like a mindless machine it continues to add and subtract. A whimsical toy, it beeps and sighs, singing and songing along the jointed channels of her blood. Counting, counting. Now diminishing. Now swelling. Insisting on its literal dance. Tick-tock, tick-tock. Filling up with deadly arithmetic.
MIRRORS
When he thinks about the people he’s known in his life, a good many of them seem to have cultivated some curious strand of as ceticism, contrived some gesture of renunciation. They give up sugar. Or meat. Or newspapers. Or neckties. They sell their second car or disconnect the television. They might make a point of staying at home on Sunday evenings or abjuring chemical sprays. Something anyway, that signals dissent and cuts across the beating heart of their circumstances, reminding them of their other, leaner selves. Their better selves.
He and his wife have claimed their small territory of sacrifice too. For years they’ve become “known” among their friends for the particular deprivation they’ve assigned themselves: for the fact that there are no mirrors in their summer house. None at all. None are allowed.
The need to observe ourselves is sewn into us, everyone knows this, but he and his wife have turned their back on this need, said no to it, at least for the duration of
Simple nourishment has always been for her a form of torture. Fruits and vegetables, meat and milk bring on duodenal spasms, but, worse, she is unable to bear the shape of a spoon in her mouth. The finest clothing rubs and chafes. The perfume of flowers causes her to faint, and even oxygen catches in her windpipe so that she coughs and chokes and calls for the court physician.
Ah, the physician! What grave responsibility that man bears. It was he, after all, who first recognized the danger of ragweed and banished it from the realm. Then roses. Then common grass and creeping vines. It was he who declared the Queen to be allergic to her courtiers, to her own children, to the King himself.
But at least life went forward. Acts of proclamation. The Admiral’s Ball, already mentioned. And the Spring Rites on the royal parade grounds where the Queen could be glimpsed by one and all, waving her handkerchief, bravely blessing her subjects with the emblem of her disability. People are fed by that kind of example. Yes, they are. People find courage in stubborn endurance.
But recently the Queen has disappeared, and matters have suddenly worsened. There has been an official announcement that clocks and calendars are to be destroyed. It is forbidden now to utter the names of the days and months, to speak of yesterday or tomorrow or next week. Naturally there will be no Spring Rites this year, for the progression of seasons has been declared unlawful. Meteorologists have been dismissed from their positions and weather disallowed. The cause of Her Majesty’s affliction has been identified. It has been verified absolutely. It seems the measured substance that pushes the world this way and that, the invented sequentiality that hovers between the simple raising and lowering of a teacup, can no longer be tolerated by the Queen.
At last the people understand why the palace windows have been closed up. The temporal movement of the sun and stars must be blocked from her view. Rhythmic pulsations of light threaten her existence, suggesting as they do the unstoppable equation that attaches to mass and energy. She lives in the dark now, blindfolded, in fact. Her ears too have been covered over for fear she will hear the cries of birds, a cock at dawn, a swallow, or an owl hooting its signature on the night sky. She no longer speaks or thinks, since the positioning of noun and verb, of premise and conclusion, demands a progression that invites that toxic essence, that mystery.
But they have overlooked her heart, her poor beating queenly heart. Like a mindless machine it continues to add and subtract. A whimsical toy, it beeps and sighs, singing and songing along the jointed channels of her blood. Counting, counting. Now diminishing. Now swelling. Insisting on its literal dance. Tick-tock, tick-tock. Filling up with deadly arithmetic.
MIRRORS
When he thinks about the people he’s known in his life, a good many of them seem to have cultivated some curious strand of as ceticism, contrived some gesture of renunciation. They give up sugar. Or meat. Or newspapers. Or neckties. They sell their second car or disconnect the television. They might make a point of staying at home on Sunday evenings or abjuring chemical sprays. Something anyway, that signals dissent and cuts across the beating heart of their circumstances, reminding them of their other, leaner selves. Their better selves.
He and his wife have claimed their small territory of sacrifice too. For years they’ve become “known” among their friends for the particular deprivation they’ve assigned themselves: for the fact that there are no mirrors in their summer house. None at all. None are allowed.
The need to observe ourselves is sewn into us, everyone knows this, but he and his wife have turned their back on this need, said no to it, at least for the duration of
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