Empress Diana [D1]

Empress Diana

district one . sixteen . twisted queen 

I’ve been sneaking out for a year now. A year to the day. And I still stop and stare at those two paintings every night before I make my exit.

The first shows a young, cheerful version of my mother, Edith, standing under a big, leafy tree and laughing as loud as the wind blows. Her hair bounces around her face in a way I’ve never actually seen. She wears white, of course, to showcase her radiant purity and glowing skin. And the biggest lie of all: she holds my dad’s hand. Sixteen years and I’ve barely seen her roll his wheelchair into the other room, much less show physical affection; but maybe, one day long before I was born, maybe then they were in love.

I doubt it. I don’t think she’s really capable of loving anything but herself. And I understand. It’s a full-time job to care about something so fervently uptight and needy, so I get that the resources run thin. But most people, as far as I can tell, at least make some sort of effort to spread those resources to their family. Not Edith. All she had was whatever sick fucking syrup she spoon-fed me for as long as I can remember. The worst part is I hardly can.

Dad’s a lie in the painting too, but I can’t blame that on him. He didn’t put himself in that wheelchair. He didn’t do himself any favors choosing Edith out of the pack of wealth-hungry monsters she calls her ladies, but he didn’t expect the medicine from a nurse to take him down. On that canvas, he smiles at her, not knowing the near future, not knowing his shimmering star was a burning rock when the lights wore off. He holds her hand, and in that hand is the last speck of his hope, what he thought was stardust but was mere dirt, disintegrating before I even made it into the scene.

The second painting is supposedly of me.

When she named me Empress, she knew she’d force me to ‘follow her footsteps’ into regality, and the thirteen year old captured between the golden frame is definitely that. Pulling from Edith’s features, the girl in the painting has strawberry blonde hair that swarms about her pale face, not necessarily bouncing with life but busy, thicker, prone to blowfish-like inflation in the heat of summer and on its way there. Now looking at it, I don’t know if it was coincidence she posed for her mantle place portrait in July or a ploy by Edith to look more beautiful and put-together inches away from my – her face. Not mine. Not me. Her. Her eyebrows are painted thin and straight, plucked to near invisibility by the artist, who reprised his role from fabricating the other portrait. Thanks to the pencil-line eyebrows on top of eyes already squinting into the afternoon sunlight, she looks focused, concerned with what’s straight in front of her, and if I’m not reading too much between the brushstrokes, she seems apprehensive at best.

As she should have been. There is a lot to be apprehensive about in this family.

No one else seemed to care that my dad suddenly became ill after he succeeded in giving Edith a child, and no one cared that within a few months he was fully incapacitated and resigned to bed rest, even though he was a highly trained former-Career who made a living training new ones to fill his shoes. No one cared that he was too ill to speak, too ill to move, that his voice and his will were stolen from him right from under his nose by a rosy cheeked, caring, cautious nurse that quit her job administering first aid to Careers to be fully by his side, a 24/7 around the clock caretaker that really just took the care away. He couldn’t have known. If he’d known, he would’ve stopped her from doing the same to me. It wasn’t the same treatment, since I could still walk, could retain mobility and activity. But I was limited. My spoonful was what kept me safe, kept me in line, kept me capable of practicing swordsmanship. Each night it put me straight to sleep, and the mornings always zoomed by in a blur of action, colors bleeding into hours of training, seconds ticking past days, the clocks never matching what I felt. But “why would Mother try and hurt you” was a reasonable enough answer to my concerns, and I’d always swallow in one big gulp and enter that dreamless trance I equate with sleep.

I don’t need sleep. Not when it’s forced upon me by sticky, sugary shit that disables grown men and makes teenage girls docile, easy-going, and even-keeled. Not shit she’s cooking up in our kitchen and serving as a top choice vitamin. What kind of Career can I be without remembering weeks of practice at a time? Not a very good one. The girl in the painting doesn’t look like one anyway, swallowed by her ruffled, handed-down white dress, uncomfortable with the humidity effectively teasing her hair, and smiling as if she was the happiest girl in the world. Not sleeping has shown me who I really was then, and I was a lie. That girl was a huge fucking fraud. That girl isn’t me. I’ve never been happy.

A year ago I stood where I do now. Those hollow, squinting eyes, alive and dead at once, mixing into me like the artist mixed his mediums, creating deeper shades to showcase who I was, swirling with the reds of my bloodstream. It congealed and left a lump, pitted in my heart. Edith’s airy laughter, vapid and vacant, rang into my ears, the silence of deception deafening.

Edith got drunk that night. Dad’s brother, Cecil, showed up with a leather bag full of bottles of liquor, and they clanked and clattered before that fireplace, the family above watching their every move and Edith’s every stumble before stumbling right into her bedroom with Cecil not far behind. I stood and stared at the painting for as long as I can remember. The girl above was just like me in every way, but we felt so distant, like she was dreaming of anywhere but under that tree, and when the chirrup of Edith wore away and crumbled into the darkness of the night I let her dreams free.

My feet hit the pavement, cold and unfamiliar in the moonlight. I’d never left the walls of my house after dusk, the medicine mingling with my bloodstream made sure of that, but she’d fucking passed out and I was alive and that was a feeling more alien than the night. When I returned home, I tiptoed to my room and crept under the blankets. Sweet satisfaction spread my lips flat across my face, a grin of quiet defiance, of flashes of liberty. I still feel the same sense of release, of comfort when I return home in the earliest hours of the morning. And since that night, Edith has trusted me to dose myself adequately as long as I dose Dad as well. Gives her more time with Cecil, who basically lives with us now even though his wife and children live down the street. This is part of the reason why I give Dad my dose, too. Hopefully it just kills him soon. He isn’t a person, and despite the heartbeat he is far from alive. It doesn’t seem fair to prolong that anymore.

So I act like I take that shit. I go about my days dryly, without backtalk, without teenage independence and angst. I eat dinner and thank Edith for a delicious home-cooked meal, even though I know she bought it already prepared an hour earlier, and kiss her on the cheek before leaving to play doctor. And once the drink’s set in to the lovebirds and they’ve worn themselves out, I give myself a wink in that painting and I slide out the backdoor.








My nights aren’t so innocent anymore. For a while I just ran, I’d run through fields and down dirty alleyways and around the district square. But one night, I ran into something I couldn’t quite understand. Something I had to understand. And it changed everything for me.

There were four of them, each naked with their hands smeared in blood. Their breaths were gusts of wind, heavy and strong. They’d been going at it for quite some time, and the wall they splattered the blood onto was evidence enough. Great swooping circles they must have climbed each other to achieve, towers of red with an eyeball on top, like a lighthouse beacon, but only it sees through the fog, a sea of red flowing beneath. It was beautiful, their painting, and it was real. When I looked away they were staring at me, hands down at their sides with their red palms facing up, and I felt ….home, at ease, and they could tell because they walked towards me with wide and welcoming eyes, the bald one holding a knife out in my direction, and I knew what to do.

I tore the blade through my forearm, and they clamored for what poured out of me, wetting their hands in my life and thrusting me right into their emotions, their truth, their passion. I became pieces of the sea, tower walls, the iris of the all-seeing. 

I didn’t stay long that night. And I never do. But I seek them often, and when I find them, they’re overjoyed. I’ve never talked to them, but I know they feel connected to me, too. Not everyone is a part of their art, I have to assume. Only those of us who are living now, living despite death sitting on our chest and begging for our return.