QUEEN OF CALVARY

—after Emily Dickinson

After the apocalypse, her first feeling was a perfect indifference to everything around her. The wasteland was neither aesthetically pleasing nor displeasing in its emptiness. There was no exact word for this feeling. It was something close to the four words Nothing Can Touch Me. 

They used to say that the number four meant death or at least sounded like death, and they used to say that there would be four horsemen at the end. They were right about the appearance of the four, but the image was all wrong. It turned out that the horsemen were not men riding horses as in popular imagination, but rather, each was half-horse and half-man, those long-fabled creatures notorious for their wild-eyed sexual appetites. Close enough. 

The horsemen were gone now, and so were the winds and the waters. She thought about how the number four sounded like a preposition that had to do with purpose or giving, as in, all for the best. And surely every preposition was necessarily a proposition for some kind of movement or change, which in a way was the opposite of in-difference, the opposite of Nothing Can Touch Me. She considered all of these connections and felt indifferent to them. At the end, everything had converged too perfectly, and she had seen for the first time how everything was connected. It was connected in a way that was more like the crisscross of spiders’ webs or the hinges of oyster shells than like a row of tipping dominoes. Now that it was all over, she thought that maybe it was time to move forward with whatever was the opposite of convergence. 

Yes, that was it, a divergence, a breaking away. She craved some kind of divergence, but she wasn’t sure what that might look like. She remembered a previous life when she studied the movements of the tectonic plates, remembered how some of them pressed against each other, crushing upward into mountains or downward into rifts, while others moved away from each other, allowing the earth’s liquid entrails to rise up from her interior and harden into new skin. 

Considering the possibilities of divergence, she no longer felt indifferent, but still strangely formal, or rather, royal. Not royal in the sense of authority—she wasn’t yet sure if there were other survivors, if the other survivors would see it too—but royal in the sense of feeling perfectly adequate and erect when she stood up tall, full of grace. 

The Queen gazed across the wasteland and wondered if there once was or still was a mind, or a brain, somewhere behind it all. She called her queendom Calvary, the place of the skull, from the Latin calvariae, which is to say that the end of the world is like a skull looking out from the empty spaces where it once had eyes. When everything is over, the whole world is Calvary: a word cross-stitched with sinews that once belonged to the kinds of animals that produce milk, not to be confused with that war-word, cavalry, those four horsemen who never came in their expected form. She stretched her hamstrings and imagined them as threads of thinly sliced ham and thought that the end of the world wasn’t all that bad. All she needed was a crown. 

She had spent thousands of years upon the earth before it became so bonelike, and she knew some history, knew that there used to be a place named Calvary long ago, a hill, and it may have been called Calvary because the shape of the hill reminded people of the hard shape that contains soft brain matter.

It may have been called Calvary for another reason: they used to say that it was the final resting place for the skull of Adam. The idea of the skull of Adam troubled the Queen. His absent rib was the most essential part of him, the most incantatory bone. She discussed the issue with the Prime Minister who was also her heart. “Shouldn’t my queendom be associated with the rib rather than the skull?” 

“Your Highness, surely you don’t believe that nonsense about Eve coming from Adam’s rib.” 

“These things still have meaning even if you don’t believe in them, Florence.” The Prime Minister who was also her heart was named Florence, not after the city but after the idea of blossoming, or that which makes flowers into a verb.

“Yes, milady. I’ll remember that.”

She decided to keep the name Calvary for the time being. She wanted to present herself just right for the occasion of her coronation, which was surely imminent. She painted her lips black with the tar from the center of the earth, applied her thickest eyeliner, finished off her waterlines with gold (for royalty), pulled on her favorite fishnet tights and a black dress patterned with tiny white skulls. In another life, her mother once told her that it wasn’t proper to wear clothes patterned with bones, because bones meant death and seeing them would make people think about death, and people wanted more than anything to never have to think about death. She remembered thinking that this was a silly desire. In another life, another mother had a tattoo of a skull across the fleshy part of her upper arm, and when she got sunburned, so did the skull. And in yet another life, she once crushed the skull of her mother into dust and then mixed that dust into foundation, that is, foundation for covering skin and not for positioning buildings. All of her mothers from all of her past lives were dead, but she remembered each one, wore them on her skin. She also wore silver stars in her eyebrows so that they illuminated the path in front of her. She carried a flaming sword in case the older breeds of lightness reared their volcanic heads.

After the Prime Minister reassured her that her aesthetic was proper for the occasion, she said, “Florence, I have heard that narcotics cannot still the tooth that nibbles at the soul. What do you think that means?” She used her sword to draw small horizontal lines in the sand and thought about all the ways that a sword is like a tooth. They were tools of separation, of divergence. 

Florence said, “I don’t know. I’ve never heard anybody say such a thing.” 

“But you just did. Wait. Listen, do you hear that?” The Queen thought maybe she had heard the sound of birdsong. But when they stopped speaking, the wasteland was quiet. She wished it had been birdsong. She remembered a life when she killed a robin in a fit of despair because she wasn’t ready for the onset of spring. She felt sad about this for a moment, but she did not feel guilt or regret. Those asphyxiating maladies had no place in her new world.

That was when it occurred to her: they had to save the birds, at least. The Queen sent Florence away to look for any surviving birds, especially robins but any birds would do, maybe some ravens, maybe some cranes, maybe some of the kinds that lay tenderer speckled eggs. Instead, Florence found some humans hiding in the earth’s jagged creases, hanging onto life in the way that the loose baby teeth of children cling to their gums with thin, bloody threads.

The Queen thought to herself that there must be a reason why salvagory stories always lasted the longest. After getting to know her subjects a little, she realized that the only people who survived the rapture were those who knew what it was like to truly want to die, and this made her feel better about the imperfliction of it all. They all acknowledged her as their Queen, and she hoped that she could do justice to the title. She thought about the nature of her authority and remembered a life where she told her daughter that it wasn’t proper to wear clothes patterned with bones because the bones would make people think about death. She put away her flaming sword so that her subjects would not be afraid.

Another reason why she chose the name Calvary for her queendom was because there was so much sand everywhere in the wasteland, and she knew that the sand was more than just weathered rock, that some of it was organic material like that which once belonged to the tiny creatures that built all those coral reefs with their bodies, and she knew that those bodies were like rock but also like bone. She remembered a life when she studied the beings of the sea, and a life when she studied the way rocks break away from each other, and a life when she designed churches and homes to look like strange bones and sea glass, and a life when she helped develop methods for growing artificial pearls.

She wondered if any oysters had survived the apocalypse, and if they did, would they have noticed that it happened? 

The Queen discussed all of this with the Prime Minister who was also her heart. 

The Prime Minister said, “Your Highness, I see what you’re saying, but salvagory and imperfliction are not real words.”

“But you understand them, don’t you?”

“Yes, I suppose so.”

Before the end, before she became the Prime Minister of Calvary, Florence had only been in charge of the passage of time. She kept minutes in a jar like candies and passed them out to children so that they would have more time. More time to do what? To learn all of the multiplication tables up to six figures? To pretend that the floor is lava and that to touch it would mean death? To cut out each other’s hearts and trade them like marbles? No, no. Children were not allowed to play with knives. Children were taught to carry scissors in a particular way. 

Florence remembered how beautiful all those minutes looked in the jar, like candies, no, not like candies. She steadied the quiver of her hand to help the Queen affix false eyelashes to her lids, meticulously applying the special glue. She was careful not to smudge the liquid gold upon the waterlines, careful not to reveal the fleshy pink underneath. 

Florence knew that the Queen needed to take care of her subjects, to preserve some sort of syntax, to divide up all the categories of solitude and arrange them according to height or weight. Surely there was some sort of lineage to follow, some kind of pattern that would make sense. She wondered if it would help to visit some old graves. Everyone who ever died had to be around here somewhere, even the people who lived for such a short time that they never had names, even the people who lived for such a long time that they forgot they had names. She addressed the Queen: 

“Milady.” 

“Yes?”

“Do you think we should begin writing up a constitution?” 

“I have always had an excellent constitution, and I have never once smoked a cigarette. Florence, I am feeling grand. My rosy breath could revive all the bumblebees in the world, or maybe smooth out the wrinkles on the moon.” 

“That sounds lovely.” 

“And wouldn’t you say that this new world is somehow more bearable than the old one? Don’t you feel a new kind of grammar emerging out of the broken earth? And wouldn’t you say that each of us is occupying our allotted amount of space in the world, as we ought to?” 

“Yes, I think that might be true, but you must remember that you still do not have a crown. Right now, your people need you, look at their faces, how they are intersected with fear.” 

The Queen’s royal subjects were already lining up with all the various problems that had arisen from the end of the world, begging her to set things right. One woman was coughing up frost. Another was sprouting vines from her wrists. A man was singing nonsense words while his husband beside him insisted that he could translate the song, saying that this was the salvagory language of the angels telling them all how the world was supposed to be. A crowd gathered around the two men in a circle, perhaps beginning to invent a new way of worship, swaying like blades of grass that hold tightly to the ground in a strong wind. 

The Queen told her subjects to pull themselves together. “You have to understand,” she said, “there’s so much evidence against the idea that people who speak in tongues are experiencing divine inspiration. For starters, all of the consonant and vowel sounds that they produce will necessarily come from the repertoire of a language that the speaker already knows. Did you know that?”

“But how does that explain these vines?” said the woman with the vines. The woman coughing up frost couldn’t speak, but she held a questioning look of imperfliction in her eyes. There was so much sand everywhere. 

The next two people in line were women who held bloody pearls in their hands and said, “Your Highness, we think these pearls fell out of our bodies. We found them in our underwear. Could it be something in the sand?” The Queen was interested in these pearls and examined them closely. She explained that contrary to popular belief, natural pearls typically do not form due to the intrusion of an errant grain of sand that slips into the tender interior folds of a mollusk. It is more common that a tiny parasite or other microbe appears as an irritant, and that irritant sets off a chain reaction of secretions in which concentric layers of calcium carbonite form a tiny brown sphere, and that sphere then becomes encased in an iridescent substance called nacre, or mother-of-pearl. In this way, pearl formation is a kind of immune response, a reaction of protection against a non-self found within the self. Nacre is an inorganic-organic composite material, which is to say that it requires an element of deadness, the inorganic, and an element of livingness, the organic. Without that exact combination, nacreous pearls wouldn’t have their signature luster. She explained all this to her subjects, and they appeared to be captivated by her words, but in reality they were only entranced by the sound of her voice, which was like the sound of a violin, and the way her legs looked in her fishnet tights, and they were not listening.

Florence pitied the Queen, who was doing her best to lead her subjects and make things better in the new world. She noticed that the Queen’s thick eyeliner had become smudged at the corners. She wondered if she should tell her. More and more people came forward to demonstrate how they too were afflicted by this pearly menstruation. They discussed how it made them feel powerful, in a way, but also made them feel like oysters. 

Florence collected the pearls one by one and used the false eyelash glue to construct a bloody crown for her beloved Queen. She tried not to let any sand get into the gaps, but it was everywhere. As she worked, she wondered about what it meant when people used to say the world is your oyster. Did it mean that there was already a pearl somewhere inside? Did it mean that the thing that’s not supposed to be there would eventually turn into something beautiful? Or did it mean that you’re supposed to detach the world’s flesh from its shell with a tiny fork and slide it all into your mouth, chew, swallow, and then slowly rework its proteins into your own?