She was dotty for sure, everyone agreed, but no one was quite sure what to do, what to say. One thing was perfectly clear, though - one mustn’t be rude to the Queen Mother. She rules us today in the same inimitable style as she did in her glory years. We are a small country, tucked away in the mountainous seaside corner of an ever-changing patchwork quilt of others which merge and split with the orgiastic abandon of amoebas. For well over two hundred years now we’ve kept to ourselves, more or less, quietly occupied with culturing our unique strain of little grey grapes and exporting the sweet, dry wine with a misty, musky aftertaste grapes to our neighboring countries, and if now we keep track of sales on laptops instead of slates, why must this mean the Queen Mother should change her tried and true ways?

The real problems began with that ghastly hurricane which swept the royal stables into the sea. When she heard what happened, the Queen Mother, that fount of kindness to all dumb beasts, immediately ordered the homeless horses be sequestered in the lower floors of her palace, which weren‘t used for much of anything. As is her prerogative, she did not consult the Prime Minister, who doubled as the seneschal (we are, as I mentioned, quite a small country and sometimes it is necessary to double up on duties). He first had an inkling something was amiss not from the distinct scent of stable, hay and corn and oiled leather and musky equine sweat, that wafted through the grand ballroom but by the hordes of foreign paparazzi lounging on the marble front steps and grinding out their cigarettes on the noses of the great stone lion-eagles, bribing maids and slinking through the hallways, hiding in the linen closet, leaving messes in corners and generally making life far more complicated than it needs to be.

Unhappily sipping a glass of iced wine, the Prime Minister watched as stocky roan mare with a roman nose nibbled the second-best tapestries. A draft horse, seventeen hands high with hooves as big as kettles, clumsily played tag in the mud room with a coy pair of Norwegian Fjord ponies. Clattering aimlessly through the butler’s pantry, a pinto gelding glared first with his brown eye, then with his blue, at a downstairs maid as she battered the Crown Prince’s favorite polo mount over the head with a broom to punish it for drinking the cream left out for the fairies. A broken-down hack lifted its tatty tail and with precision and great pomp deposited a streaming pile of manure on the albino lion-skin which had been the prize trophy of the old King.

The Prime Minister finished his wine, sighed, and hobbled off the find the Queen Mother. She was not holding court, however, and it took him some time before he discovered her in the rose garden, tarnished crown askew, in her gum boots and a polka dress, pruning away with vigor. Two adorable Falabella fillies lay curled up beneath the bush, snoring gently in the afternoon sun.

She had only this to say for herself, "It may be unhygienic, but one’s people come to expect little gestures like this."


* author's note: I came up with this story in 1996 for a creative writing class. We were given five random nouns and had to write a story around them, mine were queen, grape, horse, storm and computer.
* stock art from Adaae-Stock and Littlenake on dA.