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To begin with, I am a man. However, to say that my presence in the harem is odd simply because the king is devotedly heterosexual would hardly convey how completly inexplicable is may appointment. I hold no illusions about myself. There is nothing in my appereance that one would expect to elicit desire. Formerly one of the king’s clerks, I have spent most of my life huddled over a ledger, and so my back has developed a hunch. My hands are calloused from smoothing parchment with pumice, scarred from my habit of sharpening quills with a knifepoint too hastily. I have a pronounced paunch. My skin and the whites of my eyes have yellowed. My teeth are crooked and, as if just for good measure, the Almighty saw fit to make me bald, except for a faint spray of hair over the back of my neck and behind my ears, an area of my scalp prone, for whatever reason, to dry skin and painfull outbreaks and pimples. So why me?
Seth Fried. Life in the Harem.
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Last year, the people in charge of the picnic blew us up. Every year it gets worse. That is, more people die. The Frost Mountain Picnic has always been a matter of uncertainty in our town and the massacre is the worst part. Even the people whose picnic blankets were not laid out directly upon the bomblinewere knocked unconscious by the airborne limbs of the neighbors, or at least had the black earth at the foot of Frost Mountain driven upon their eyelids and fingernails and up in their sinuses. The apple dumpling carts and cotton candy stands and guess-your-weight booths that were not obliterated in the initial blast leaned slowly into the new-formed craters, each settling with a limp, hollow crumple. The few people along the bombline who survived the blast were at the very least blown into the trees.
“Frost Mountain Picnic Massacre”. Seth Fried.
Ilustración de Brandi Strickland.
