The Crown of Jewels

by Annie Blake

Carlos N. Cuatzo Meza

When I was a child my mother was too scrupulous to take off her clothes. She had a habit of cutting her hair very short and she always wore a dicky bow.

And I’ve been left wondering. What the hell did she look like? I try to undress her now that I’m an adult, but she doesn’t seem to find any humor in that.

Lies do that.

If you pack lies in rows and layers like sticks they cover you like a dress. The thicker the lies, the more seductive the dress.

The end of childhood is cutting through the red tape at the end of a tunnel. The days of our life are like people forming a queue. We are like pencils we need to keep sharpening. We have to take off all our clothes until we become as pointy as possible.

Some children die before they cross over. It’s a shame. They’re not dressed like children in their coffins, though. Some wear business suits and some look like beautiful mermaids. Their legs look like a thick shifty tail. Some children have a mouth under them with shark teeth.

Their hair is red and even though they’re dead, they look very glittery.

Unfortunately, some men are very slippery and get sucked in quickly by red hair. They think mermaids have something to do with apotropaic magic. They always get crunched. It’s inevitable (and a bit comical).

Maybe it’s because mermaids don’t spend much time in oceans and they certainly don’t like sitting on islands that arise from the depths. Which can all get a bit confusing. They spend a lot of their time in fairy tales. They are sirens. If these men knew that mermaids were really alarm bells, we would all be better off.

Anyhow…

When children die it becomes a hassle for everyone, because when they find themselves back on earth, we have to rewind the clock. Right from the beginning.

Let’s forget we have clocks for a minute.

I mean, really. Who’s got time for that? I want to be unequivocal. It’s high time we admit that funerals are pointless. For both of us. So if I feel too sad or if I don’t have enough money to bury you in public, please don’t get wound up.

The last thing I want to do at a funeral is see your mother. Lilith.

Sharing my feelings with her makes me feel like an antique domed clock on a mantel piece.

She has a habit of forcibly moving my hands. She should know by now that I keep changing my direction like a weather vane. I just don’t want to move in circles anymore. It gets me hardened and dry. Her eyes blink a lot when I remove my hands from the cuffs of time.

Sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference between you and your mother.

I want to make up for lost time. I want to jump over a fence. Over the edge of the world.

I removed all the black and white photos which look more stale and scaly under a glass dome. When the dome is lifted they are not controlled by time anymore. The images become fluid because they become aware of their instincts.

It’s not nice to leave people under glass. It causes suffocation and potential brain damage and even cardiac arrest. That’s what happens when you live by the tick of a clock. They develop into physical tics. We start believing we belong to a world in the shape of a sphere.

This type of thinking gets dangerous.

Hearts and brains have only so much time in a mantle. There is a twisty walk between the crust and the core.

My door looks like a mantel. It is very high and has lots of cavities in it. I’ve stashed a lot of personal stuff in there. I must admit, I haven’t been brave enough to give it a thorough going-over.

I spent a lot of money building a Victorian door with an arched window on the top. It’s a prestigious piece. But I keep it locked most of the time. Last time I went out, I noticed a bird gathering sticks, mud and leaves in all its hollows. I suppose it figured it could make use of my shelves. It dug around a little and uncovered a child’s jewels. The bird gave them to me. At first, I didn’t understand why there were small jewels outside my house. I wore them around my neck. But I looked a bit like a frilly lizard.

Then my feet turned into talons. I became super quick on the draw. I found myself mantling over prey. I became a bit of an angry bitch and I didn’t share my food with anyone. It’s hard being juicy and nourishing when petticoats ossify into scutes.

My sister Eve told me it would help to get rid of the mantel which was located in the attic. But I told her it was fun playing with a labyrinth of shelves. I always fiddled with it like a ball — in-the-maze puzzle. She said the balls always ended up in dead-ends anyway. It was a game for kids and the hole you get to in the end had nothing to do with wholeness. She complained it reminded her of a man with a giant head in the dark. With a crown on top. I told her I was given some jewels. We arranged them together.

I put on my own crown jewels. Now I felt acknowledged and respected.

Eve suggested that maybe it would be sunnier if we knocked down the walls of the room. To see the maze-like structure of the man’s head better.

The morning light was like rice paper.

It looked so cool. People with such a structured head earnt a lot of money in the world of clocks. My claws got sharper. And my crown of jewels grew horns. Then I realized that the mantel looked all wrong. Because the fireplace was missing.

I felt like such a dick.

Which reminds me of my mom. The way she used to sing “Two Little Dickie Birds.” I hate that song. But for some reason I can’t help singing it to my children the way she used to.

Something about that song makes them squeeze their eyelids. It’s really weird because even though I hide myself pretty well, they can still see what I’m up to. They showed me how even though they have eyelids, their actual eyeballs never close.

My mom used to wriggle her fingers a lot which used to make me laugh. But when they vanished behind her back she got stuck that way. Her ticker just caved in. Rigor mortis sets in so fast. It was impossible to unglue her fingers to heat them up in front of her chest.

So I had to bury her that way.

I started to feel sorry for my kids. They were starting to look poker-faced and cold. Maybe the bird outside my door would melt them. I suppose if I opened the door she would fly in. What was the big deal anyway? My mom always complained of the mess that nature made. But it was better to be creative than to be such a stiff.

My kids are allowed near the mantel now. It still looks like a maze of shelves. Or ledges. Actually, it looks more like the aisles of a human heart. Like those old Russian ovens. Kachelofens are made up of lots of different passages and can cook food and heat up a whole house in one stroke.

My kids love watching the bird building a nest on the shelves. I’ve made room for it by throwing out all the photos. And there is no need for clocks. We sit here next to the fire and we feel soft enough to move around. We have fun now singing “Two Little Dickie Birds.”

And I’ve taken down the curtains so I don’t have to wear special glasses anymore. I’ve worked out how to keep my kids from growing talon feet and horned crowns. When my two fingers disappear behind myself I make sure I stay warm enough to jump back in front of my chest.

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Annie Blake has been published or has work forthcoming in Misfitmagazine.net, The Furious Gazelle, Gone Lawn, Futures Trading, Cat on a Leash Review, 45th Parallel, Communion Arts Journal, Borrowed Solace, Gambling the Aisle, The RavensPerch, West Texas Literary Review, Typehouse Literary Magazine, Riggwelter Press, Lady Blue Literary Arts Journal, The Hunger, The Slag Review, Sky Island Journal, Trampset, Anomaly Literary Journal, Haikuniverse, North of Oxford, Blue Heron Review, Mascara Literary Review, Red Savina Review, Antipodes, Uneven Floor, The Voices Project, Into the Void, Southerly, Hello Horror, Verity La, GFT Press, About Place Journal, Gravel, Australian Poetry Journal, Cordite Poetry Review and elsewhere. Her poem “These Grey Streets” was nominated for the 2017 Pushcart Prize by Vine Leaves Literary Journal. Her fiction “How I Swallowed a Snake” was nominated for the 2018 Pushcart Prize by The Slag Review. Blake, the daughter of Maltese migrants, lives in Australia where she is a writer, thinker and researcher. She is also a wife and mother of five children. Her main interests include psychoanalysis, metaphysics and metacognition. A member of the Existentialist Society and C G Jung Society of Melbourne, she is currently interested in arthouse writing that explores the surreal nature and symbolic meanings of unconscious material through nocturnal and diurnal dreams and fantasies. Her writing is a dialogue between unconscious material and conscious thoughts and synchronicity.