Episode 29 - Wants

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I don’t quite know why I’m handling this whole pandemic situation the way that I am. Like, I’m being responsible, right: social distancing when I can and masking up when I can’t. But those are two things that already appeal to me. It’s hard for me to be in a crowd of unfamiliar or slightly unfamiliar people, and masks can be fun. Get the right material, pair it up with your outfit or a fun eyeshadow look, and you’re good to go. Or maybe my enthusiasm just disguising the insecurity the masks can hide. I don’t really like the lower half of my face. I have wonderful eyes, eyebrows, and eyelashes. I used to be complimented on them all the time, but my mouth and chin were different. No one insulted them outright. Well, no, my mother took the occasional potshot. I just don’t like them. And there’s something nice about being able to hide them away.

As for the general existential crisis, I know I’m not reacting the way everyone else is. I’m not deterred or repulsed by it like I should be. But I’ve never really shied away from the concept of death. It doesn’t scare me like it does anyone else. I know it’s not a good thing, but honestly, sometimes it feels like death was the twin I shared a crib with. We might not get along, but it was always there. 

That isn’t accurate, but it’s only a few months off, really. Unfortunately. 

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The last few weeks of the duchess’s pregnancy were spent in greater isolation than what was expected. Everyone had thought she would be enthusiastic with them. Joyous and planning celebrations and making those planning events mini-celebrations in their own right. The birth of her child was to be a great affair, a celebration unlike any other because this was a gift to the kingdom unlike any other. Yes, the duchess was offering them a future ruler and the security that can only come from such a thing. But this child, the kingdom hoped, represented a new sort of beginning entirely. The blood in the child’s veins brought visions of things that had never occurred before. Fanciful and impossible in many ways but dreams are not meant to be policed. 

The duchess would be the great hero to this small kingdom, and her child would be the great hope. She knew this to be true. It was what came after that concerned her. 

And so, she waited for the hour in her chambers with hardly anyone to tend to her. Many were too distracted to pay her much mind, and she’d rather it stay that way. After all, preparations needed to be made, both inside her chambers and beyond.

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Even though we all lived together, my mom hardly ever spoke to my aunt, which was why I found their bizarre truce so… Well, I just said it: bizarre. In some ways, I thought that maybe they just shared the understanding that can come with being a woman from their generation, a generation who had to fight to enter gates erected on the premise of their inferiority. Even if they did not know each other when they were coming up, they were still soldiers on the same battlefield. They still understood the aches and pains each other carried in a way no outsider ever could.

But no, that couldn’t have been it. It might have been part of it, but it couldn’t have been the sole tie that created the bond I was seeing. They’re just two different people. They have two different answers to that question. They have two different actions to that hardship. 

My mom clearly internalized the belief that the best thing she could have ever hoped for was having a successful child whose household she could manage. And it’s led to a bunch of fights between the two of us. But my aunt had some successes under her belt. For a while, she had a career, a good one at that until I was about eight. And then the family had a move that crossed a Rubicon we could never come back from. Too many moves to too many places. Rumors aside, it did not look good on her resume. And sometimes she would try to blame it on me and some made up issue with my health. And how could she abandon the only child of her only sibling. But that excuse was a bit flimsy and it never lasted for long.

My mom never bothered to make too much of a path for herself. Whereas, my aunt didn’t bother to maintain one. They made their choices, which was their right, but it just so happens that their choices run counter to one at the root of my theory. 

There was a time when I felt bold enough to ask, though. In the wake of my mom’s discovery of the GiftedDuckling’s role in my life. And I’m not sure why that was the breaking point or the point that yielded this particular break. I’m not sure why this moment in which my mom suddenly had my life in her hands--and let’s go with literally for… for reasons--that I decided to push my luck further. Especially because it was quite possible my mom would not have an answer. 

In fact, I’m pretty sure she didn’t know. I think the answer she gave me was a sort of placeholder. It was something she could point to that I wasn’t able to immediately refute in any meaningful way, meaning that it served the purposes of ending the line of inquiry she wanted to avoid. It didn’t answer my question. It just got me to stop asking.

And I told you what her answer was, in so many words. ‘We both knew hurt: her and I. It wasn’t our fault, but it made us who we are,’ my mom said. But by including the phrase ‘in so many words,’ I suggested that I was paraphrasing wildly and omitting when it was convenient. In reality, there were two parts of her answer: an unspecified hurt and the simple fact that they were both mothers.

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The duchess had an easy labor, delivering her child a mere few hours after her water broke. Hardly any time at all, in fact, for a first time delivery. There was hardly any struggle at all. The midwife tending to the duchess was surprised and seemingly in disbelief that it had all happened as it had, but sure enough, after a few cries and pushes from the duchess, a healthy baby was in the midwife’s arms. 

The child simply couldn’t wait, many joked. So eager was the babe to take a spot amongst the royal family that the child crawled out without waiting for a mother’s work and a midwife’s assistance. 

And it was as the duchess predicted: she had given birth to a daughter: a young girl who bore the features of both her parents so much so and yet hardly at all as to resemble each parent while still having a face that was entirely her own. Even her complexion was unique, standing at the exact midpoint between the tan color of her mother’s skin and the paleness of her father. But there was a twinkle in the girl’s eyes that was entirely her own. 

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The members of the court cooed  and doted on the young girl. The kingdom’s jewel, they called her. It was a title born out of equal parts of love and convenience for no one wanted to say what they were all thinking: that the actual official title would be a delicate matter to hash out. 

After all, she was the new princess, but it was a title her aunt was left holding onto. And while a kingdom could have two princesses, there were no two more incompatible than theirs. 

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My aunt did have a child, once upon a time. Or not once upon a time. That just seems cold. But I don’t know how to talk about a parent losing a kid. And seems like a plot cliche right now, but that might just be mean. And yet, I’ve seen many writers jam that into the story because it was easier. It was so obviously a bad thing that you didn’t have to really built up to it or explain it, and if you couldn’t explain it well or fully paint the scene, well, chalk it up to the privilege of your own life that you never had to go through such a thing, which is a hard argument to counter even if it was not offered up in good faith.

And yet I’m doing that here. I’ve never lost a child, and I was hardly an infant myself when it happened, so I have absolutely no frame of reference for any of it. But really, it’s hard to imagine my aunt loving or caring about anybody given how I knew her to be. Yes, she had that… that guy, let’s say. And he hung around through way too much. But there was a practical side to loving him. And there’s nothing practical about loving a child. So it seems impossible, to me, to imagine her as a mother who cared. 

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The eyes in the shadows had rested themselves upon the sight of his own daughter. She was beautiful, he whispered to himself over and over again. She was the spitting image of her mother, which practically speaking made some things easier. Easier to hide her parentage and easier to dodge questions, but in all likelihood, it would be held against her. Her mother was utterly despised, unjustly so but nevertheless it was so. 

In addition to being beautiful, the baby was so delicate, the man thought. He could not even bring himself to reach out and touch her. He feared the damage he could do. She was angelic, far beyond the mortal realm and the royal family she was a descendent of. They didn’t deserve her in the least bit, and yet there they were: neglecting her in favor of a foreigner’s daughter whom they dared called jewel. 

“She should be queen one day,” the princess said. “After me, of course, but it is our birthright.”

He believed her. He fully believed that there was no more deserving than she and no problem he could not easily solve. In some ways, he wasn’t wrong, and in many ways, he was. But he was in her orbit now, and in that space, his mind was clouded, and things easily slipped through.

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Maybe if my cousin were alive things would not be as they are. Maybe one life could have prevented all the death that came after. But it seems like something a defense attorney should be worried about, and I certainly should not try to fill that position or enter it in anyway. Not advisable for me in this context. But we all want our lives to have something that we feel comfortable calling rhyme and reason, even if that’s not what it is. 

Which is why--for a while--I was really into astrology, but it wasn’t actually astrology. I just didn’t know how to approach the concept of fate or destiny in my real life. This isn’t a fantasy novel, so I had a finite number of approaches. And because I didn’t know anyone who was into astrology, it could be whatever I needed it to be right then, and right then, I needed it to be the route upon which I could walk on my way to find some sense of destiny. Some clear and external reason why I lived and my cousin didn’t. 

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A courier waited outside a dark pub for far more hours than could have been expected of him. His burden was heavy, but his soul was strong. He carried in his arms a bundle of material, records from a kingdom far away whose name the boy could hardly pronounce but seemed vaguely familiar. He thought he had heard it before, and that when he did, it was an important thing to remember. And yet, it had slipped through his mind. Some other need of some other day had entered and pushed it out. But the boy could not seek it out in times like this. He had a delivery to make, as this material had been sent for by a mysterious man who paid with heavy gold coins, coins that were the things of legend this far from the palace. It was quite a bit--a small fortune that left the boy in awe of the man and eager to serve. The boy was honest, after all. He wanted to truly earn what it was that he had been paid. 

However, it would not be. He had been forgotten about. The man was not coming and would not know the details of the spell until it was much too late, despite the answers being so close by.

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I was never as close with my mother as she wanted me to be. It seems like she didn’t want there to be a clear divide between her and I at all. It goes back to her not being taught to want anything more than a life taking care of me in some new ways. Her life was always supposed to be bound to mine. But of course the resentment was going to get to me, right? Like, there was something inevitable about it. And if I could not indulge my emotions. They were eventually going to eat me away. 

The GiftedDuckling encouraged me to make that break, to pull myself from the tie that bound me and had the potential to destroy me. She was right, but that isn’t to say I didn’t fight at first. Of course I did. Self-preservation doesn’t come easy to me. It has to do with that death connection. It pulls me down. And you know, there was a chance this would work, right? It didn’t have to automatically be destruction. Literal or otherwise. But as the GiftedDuckling explained, there are some gambles you should never take. 

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The wound on the man’s hand had long since healed, becoming two scars: the physical scar that lived on his flesh and the one that lived in the mind of the duchess who did not need to see it to know that it was there. After all, the child did not just appear in the princess’s womb, no matter the story the king told, and that same sense of logic told her that the meeting of the prince’s hand to the church fixture must have produced something. 

It was hard to think about. The child in her arms began to stir. The duchess revealed her breast to the young baby for her to feed. To her relief, the infant latched on without complaint or hesitation, just as she needed her to do. What a sweet child she was, the duchess thought. So sweet and yet so cursed.

There were many things the duchess did not need to see to know. She did not need to see the man’s hand to know that a simple protection charm--with the queen’s meddling--had become anything but that. The duchess swallowed nervously. No, it wasn’t just the queen’s fault. It was her as well. It was the mishap of a heart far too generous and too sympathetic to a soul that had already committed to anger. Whether or not the commitment was justified. The duchess did not need to see the princess to know what that mind had set itself to unleash, and the duchess did not need to see the shadow lurking about to know the tragedy that was about to unfold. 

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Aishi Online is a production of Miscellany Media Studios. It is written, edited, produced, and performed by MJ Bailey. With music from the Sounds like an Earful music supply. If you like the show please consider leaving a review or posting about it on a website that might not be around in five years. Make the post vague and somewhat mysterious but still compelling if you want. Up to you.

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