Extremities
By Robert McDonald


She is about to be entombed alive, but even as the workmen stack the red bricks and scrape mortar off their trowels—they’d just finished a previous entombment gig— the pardon arrives, a messenger windmilling his arms, shouting “Stop, in the King’s name, this has all been some weird and crazy misunderstanding.” Flecks of foam on his pony’s skinny flank. “Bother,” she says to herself. Her gold has gone to the barristers, her properties to the priests, the finery and baubles were stolen by the maids, her favorite groomsman she’d sent over to her sister, Mabel, who goodness knows in these times could use a rough and tumble. Oh, she should’ve worn something beyond winding sheets, but the look she’d been trying for was virginal drama, and who these days expects a last-minute minute rescue? “Be a dear,” she says to the workmen, (Grand jingle of her chains) “Find me a locksmith, a hairdresser, and perhaps a small mirror.” She glances down, the yellowed toenails on her bare and bony feet. The ugliest extremities, her late mother told her, of any crowned head in Europe. A peasant shyly takes her hand, as she sighs and smiles and weeps, still mistress of those mutinous and toad-knobby toes.


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Robert McDonald's writings have appeared most recently in Six Little Things, Apparatus Magazine, Literary Bohemian, and Right Hand Pointing, among others. He lives in Chicago in a tatty coach house, and works at an independent bookstore.