Far, far within the usual boundaries of the forest, in a place that has been forgotten certainly twice and perhaps thrice over, lived a caustic and demented rogue named Drano. He dwelt in squalor here, happily ignored by his time, in a house built from stomach bile, shame, and swamp mud, simply because he could no longer live anywhere else. Evil and mischief roiled beneath his clammy grey skin like nimble parasites. Flies, initially enticed by his foul miasma, dropped dead on contact.
Into this scene rode a figure atop a horse so vividly white that foolish and casual onlookers suffered a form of snowblindness long afterward.
Drano heard the animal’s hooves, and grinned as he made a grab for the brutal-looking mace he had long kept hanging near his front door in anticipation of such an encounter. (The world in its joyous derangement can never be held entirely at bay, after all.) Emerging with bestial assurance from his home, tree-bole legs splayed wide, big oily muscles squirming with malevolence, he confronted the bright stranger.
“Your life must truly be meaningless,” he said, grinding his teeth, rocking on his heels, and grinning wildly at the blissful delivery of fate.
“On the contrary,” returned the stranger, in a voice so mellifluous a gathering flock of crows was struck instantly dumb with shame. Here and there, on sinewy, dormant branches, blossoms spontaneously erupted. The woman who now dismounted from her brilliant steed was beautiful beyond all sanity. “I am the only thing with meaning you have ever encountered in your sad, beshitted life. I am the turning point and the crossroads, the watershed and the fulcrum. I am the Queen of the World. And your choice is stark: take me for a wife and find redemption, or do what your maggoty heart truly urges and destroy me.”
For a second, Drano hesitated – enough for the Universe to exhale the fragrance of infinite ranks of exotic flora, to round up the scattered quark herds of Outer Arcturus until they danced in a froth of reunited quanta, to sound out the tentative opening notes for a Cosmic symphony so quivering with intimations of beauty that some comets relinquished their once-resplendent tails in homage – but it was only a second, really.
Within the Queen’s jade eyes lay the distillation of all sorrow.
Drano brought down the twisted and monstrous weapon with both sturdy arms, and the Queen of the World was bludgeoned beyond all recognition, her royal brains and courtly pieces of skull dripping from the still, shocked, arboreal witnesses.
Outraged, one of the dumbstruck crows began a lament, its voice a swiftly rising tin-on-iron screed.
The World shifted, rocking on some unseen axis, a vast spell not so much broken as altered.
Something feral coughed in the thicket. Drano laughed with great fervour and pounded his matted chest. Except it wasn’t matted, nor indeed was it broad. Suddenly confused, he looked down at his breasts; finger-tipped and caressed them briefly, like an interrupted lover, like a shrewd and picky shopper in a fruit market. He saw his slender hands, their manicured nails like something precious strip-mined from the sea. He looked up at the horse, no longer blinded when he took in its beauty. Without thought, he mounted the animal, and sat astride its muscled girth. He felt a tingling between his legs that was both familiar and infinitely alien. Helplessly orgasming, he burst into great fits of ecstatic sobs.
Eventually, after days of blissful shrieking torment in the deepest, darkest part of the forest, the Queen of the World rose up on her blinding mount, tears flowing like contrails behind her, and set out on a new search, on a fresh and wrenching Quest. To heal the incurable, rescue the lost, wrestle the woebegone. And, when everything is dotted and crossed, all for naught.
* * * * *
A version of this story appeared on BlergPop on May 7, 2012. David Antrobus also writes for Indies Unlimited and BlergPop. Be sure to check out his work there if you like what you read here.