Pheasants I
The dead pheasants hung from the ceiling, the ropes suspending them almost splitting from the weight of the oversized birds. Generally, pheasants weren’t around at this time, but they had so much privilege that they had them shipped from America, coated in edible gold. Jewels hated it. Wearing her pink frilly dress, next to the head of the table, she dared not eat the disgusting thing for Jewels did not fancy eating flesh of a once alive one.
Everyone here were such tallowcatches, cuddling up to her mother just so they could get a seat at the royal table. The wandoughty fools. They would never get the title, as her mother was off to marry a king from the east after the widowing which made her a lunatic. The whole castle had dressed in black for a year and fifty-six days. It was a send to the hereafter, and Jewels honestly didn’t quite care about that scoundrel; they had never been polite to her.
She just wanted to get out of this room and change out of this lord forsaken dress. Pink had always been the lesser hue to her, and she did not appreciate the shoving of the dress on her skin, and her mothers tightening of the corset. It was always too hard to breathe. Sometimes Jewels wished she could put on the clothes of the dirty boy servants and sneak out of the horrid palace, no petticoat in sight.
She did not know what year it was, only that the others described the castle as a place stuck in time. The others did not belong here. The girls wore pants and the men sometimes wore skirts. Jewels did not love to acknowledge men, for they had been everything wrong with her life, and were dirty scoundrels who did not understand what they were achieving.
Her mother looked at her, and all at once she snapped out of her daze. The pheasant was still uneaten. She was going to get in trouble if she did not hasten. She swallowed down the taste of bile in her mouth, and started on the now-golden bird. She finished up in just a few minutes, while the rest of the dining room ate their berries for pudding. Her mother smiled briefly, her eyes blank and not there. It was infuriating. She had no right to be sitting there pretending that she was so above everyone else in the room when she was the most despicable of them all. But they had no brains, for they were all men, so they sat there, happy to eat rich food for once in their lives, and flirted with the queen who had long forgone her sanity.
