They were so very pretty. But you know what they say about beautiful princes: don’t marry them. I advised the princess to avoid the foreign prince–don’t take random walks in the garden and lovingly cradle fallen petals, don’t risk any chance encounters. Stay here, play with your beheaded dolls, drink tea, eat macaroons, count the fingernails you painted and plucked off prisoners’ hands while interrogating them for embezzling tax funds. But no, the princess visited
the garden while the prince was taking a self-guided tour and they met underneath the garden arbor covered in lights twinkling like little stars tangled in thorns and vines. They were so very pretty. The encounter led to engagement led to marriage too quickly–all I could do was watch and hope for the security of her happily-ever-after-ending. As long as the princess was happy and could find me a cottage and a steady supply of food in a meadow far from the sewage stink or daily execution sites, where I didn’t need to hear soldiers marching or townsfolk haggling or robins chirping because I’d keep my windows bolted shut, and I’d spend all my time fixing that pearl necklace with the broken clasp and fallen beads. It broke a long time ago, before I started serving the princess, when those creamy white spheres were enough to seduce me, before I’d seen real gemstones, gold, diamonds. They were so very pretty. But pretty princes spell trouble. If only the princess had listened to me, she could’ve been spared the heartbreak. Instead, she returned to the kingdom a month later, divorced, and with a new set of fingernails in her jewelry box. They were so very pretty, she told me as I rubbed small circles on her back like the good supporting character I was.
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