HANNAH THE CANNIBAL

Princess Hannah crosses her legs and watches her cat, Joseph, hunt a mouse. Joseph creeps up with his little white shoulders hunched behind him, his eyes green and round and wild. The mouse knows that it is going to die. When Joseph sees it flinch, he pounces and kicks its neck.

She uncrosses her legs.

Princess Hannah watches and watches and watches until one minute feels like a thousand minutes, a whole year in mouse-time, the end of the world. She watches as life sops from its eye sockets and it lays on the tile limply.

“That a boy, Joseph,” she throws her cat a soft carrot when it drops the sacred hunt at her feet. She examines it in her hands. How many times can say dead aloud before it loses all meaning? Dead, dead, dead, dead, dead, dead. Six.

Her father, King Delirious of Pancetta, awaits her at dinner. Her maids hoist up all eighty-five pounds of the expansive dress in their brave little arms and help her mount on to a small blue dolly. They roll her down the Wester Corridor like the wind beneath a parachute.

In an effort to make the royal family appear less gravely ostentatious, Hannah’s dress doubly suffices as a table cloth on which she and her court eat. The hen-maids slog the terrific gown across the table and serve an impressive meal filled with meats and breads and cheese and other beautiful delicious things that Hannah can’t bear to eat.

She feels ugly and frail and thin, but her hunger germinates elsewhere. She takes the food in crumbs and drops it on the floor. Joseph is always snarling beneath her feet, and unlike her, he eats everything.

“What did you do today?” her father shouts across the table; the dining hall is enormous but the acoustics are terrible. It echoes: day — day — day — day.

“Some sewing,” she yells back.

“You — what?” he screams.

She rolls her eyes.

“I stabbed a frog.”

She can hear the clinking of his silverware across the massive table.

“Décolletage?” he responds.

These misunderstandings are the extent of their relationship. She will inherit his empire someday after he dies. Until then, they try as best as they can to keep their distance. Halfway through dinner, Luther Duke of Laundry comes sauntering through and announces that Parliament is playing a game of backgammon in the courtyard. The King scrambles up from the table, grabs a pint of Meade and shouts, “good to see you, honey.”

Honey — honey — honey — honey.

Four maids hoist Princess Hannah by her shoulders and back on to the dolly, pulling her down the hall.

“I would like to sit,” Hannah insists. The maids lift her tremendous skirt far above their heads, giving her bottom half full range of motion. A little maid runs under and secures the dolly beneath her feet. It is her job to do so until the princess is fully sat, and then the poor maid crawls on her hands and knees beneath the skirt all the way to the bathhouse.

This maid’s name is Maria, and she comes from a poor family in North Laundry. She has seven brothers and seven sisters. Maria was born smack in the middle, which means that no one can really remember her name and is also very much the reason why she has a thirty-four-year old brother named Mario.

It is her status in the family that gives her the perfect balance between extroversion and introversion, mastering the art of entertaining herself and being perfectly pleasant when called upon. She has gaged this from countless psychology articles that she read in the spare time her family had forgotten about her, among books about France and China. She has seen sculptures by Rodin and Taoist tapestries. She has even taught herself a little Spanish. In the plight of being ignored, she is insatiable.

Joseph snaps at her ankles beneath the skirt. She bats him off but that seems to make him angrier. “Fuck off,” she murmurs to herself.

The maids whisk Princess Hannah into her bathhouse and pull the meat-stained garment over her head. Just as Hannah catches view of Maria, Maria catches view of Hannah and shuts her eyes. Hannah takes a moment to observe the girl, meek and unimportant. Flat brown hair that lays dully against her skull, a beaky nose that serves to separate her two eyes like a cavernous rift.

“I’m sorry,” Maria turns around and blindly scurries back to a cluster of her peers.

A burn crew of fifteen old maids drag the dress out to a small woodshed just beyond the purview of the bathhouse windows. They burn the dress over a few logs and shut the door. Hannah strides to her bath, an enormous chamber shrouded in blue and gold tile. She relaxes in the water.

“Thank you,” she dismisses the maids. They line up and march out the door like little donkeys. “Except for you.”

All the maids turn around and stir with whispers of who the Princess is referring to.

“You,” Hannah beckons again, nodding her head.

“Me?” Maria squawks.

“You.”

The girls shuffle out, bottlenecking jealously at a shaking Maria. Hannah doesn’t speak; the water shifts beneath her weight.

“What can I do for you, miss?”

“Come here,” Hannah growls.

Maria skitters across the floor, barely able to pick up her heels.

“What’s your name?”

“Maria of North Laundry.”

“Your surname?”

“Don’t have one, miss.”

“Maria of North Laundry…” Hannah runs her hand across the pool surface, “are you smart?”

“I… I think so. I just finished a book by-“ Maria couldn’t recall his name, so she just stood their humming the national anthem.

“Stop that,” Hannah raises her eyebrows.

“Okay. Yes. Okay. I should go now?” Maria stutters.

“I have a task for you,” Hannah says in a sunken tone. She proceeds to prod Maria about her least favorite staff member. Sister Luciernaga — Maria discloses. Sister Luciernaga is terrible to all the young maids. She slaps all’o us on the back of heads and calls us trash and pinches our wrists when we falter to clean spots on the floor, ‘n the floor is enormous, Princess Hannah. But she isn’t going to get into trouble, is she?

Hannah dives into the pool before responding and Maria wonders if this was a trick question. She shouldn’t have said anything. Princess Hannah is a woman of divine grace and knowledge; she would never be so impolite or crude to indicate someone as a subject of dislike. Hannah rises again.

“And this Sister Luciernaga, is she fat?” Hannah mimes a belly around her. “Paunchy?”

“Yes,” Maria stammers, “she’s not thin.”

“Okay, I’m making you a deal. You bring Sister Luciernaga to my quarters at eight o’clock tonight. You leave me with her for one hour, no more and no less. In that time, I want you to run down to the garden and dig a hole. I will instruct you on what to do from there. In return, you can have whatever book from my library you want. Since you said you just finished yours.”

Maria quivers. Hannah stares at her ankles.

“Go,” Hannah orders. “Before the others come back.”

Maria scampers out of the room. She finds the nearest clock: 7:30. Little time. Little time. Sister Luciernaga will probably be in evening mass with the sisters. Maria runs down the Western Corridor, out the DeMule entryway, through the arboretum, and around l’Arc de Gauche. Into the Saint Nicholas’ Cathedral.

All the nuns are lined up in rows of black. It is impossible to sort out Sister Luciernaga from the great entity, so Maria stays crouched by the cathedral doors until she hears the thud of the Bible closing. She reads 7:52 on the master clock located across the Botanica on a limestone capsule.

One long minute later, in what felt like a thousand minutes, an entire life, the nuns file out. Maria sees Sister Luciernaga three rows away, rosy-cheeked with God’s love. The little maid elbows her way through the other sisters, grabbing Luciernaga by the wrist and thrusting her behind a bush.

“What are you doing, you ugly wretch?” the nun screams.

Maria cups her hand over her mouth. Shush. Shush. Luciernaga is a large elephant to keep still, but Maria chisels her forearm into her neck.

“I need you to stay quiet. Quiet,” Maria urges until the woman tranquilizes, digging her arm further into her neck. “The Princess has summoned you.”

“Me?!” the nun squeals. “Well, why didn’t you say so?”

“It’s very… sensitive. And you must come with me right away. I’ll tell you while we walk. Keep your head down.” Maria doesn’t know what it is that makes her treat matter with such secrecy, perhaps it was the mere cloudiness of the event that made it so direly surreptitious.

The nun follows Maria back through l’Arc de Gauche, into the arboretum, past the DeMule entryway, and into the Western Corridor. Ten feet from the Princess’ bedchambers, Maria pulls Sister Luciernaga behind a gigantic potted fern and briefs her on a hypothetically sensitive situation.

“The princess has been raped,” she blurts out. “By a Lord.”

“The Lords,” Sister Luciernaga seethes. If there’s anyone that she hates more than the maids, it is the Lords.

“She needs your counseling,” Maria advises.

“Of course, of course,” Luciernaga nods towards the door. “I’m glad the Princess called me, some of those other sisters are so conservative.”

Maria opens it slightly; Princess Hannah is leaning against her bed. Joseph is nodding off at her feet. Before Luciernaga can bustle in, Maria mouths the word RAPE. The Princess nods. Maria couldn’t help but wonder — are they best friends now? Maria had never had a friend before.

“Dear Princess,” Luciernaga bursts through, holding her hands in prayer, “you must know that the Lord forgives.”

“Don’t say the L-word!” Maria hisses loudly. Sister Luciernaga’s back prickles in spite. Maria guards the door a moment too long, grinning ear to ear, before Sister Luciernaga begs for privacy. Prih-va-cy was how she pronounces it, and Maria thought about stuffing a fat sock down her throat. The princess nods; the maid obliges.

One hour. Maria fetches a shovel from the gardener’s quarters. She makes up some sorry excuse about Greek daffodils only growing at night, and the sleeping gardener agrees. He offers to help but she is already gone.

The soil is loose and fertile. Maria realizes that she has forgotten to ask how large the hole should be, so she decides to dig as deep and wide as she can in an hour. The moonlight cascades behind trees overhead, and at the start of her work she can’t see anything but the silver glean of her shovel. Scared to disappoint, she digs until the wells of her back hurt, her spine aches, her feet shake.

In one foul moment, she collapses into the hole. It is shallow but large. Her entire body fits in squarely. The moon rises above her, in the dirt she has created a new dwelling in which no trees or brush exist beyond the whistling grass, above her, the sky expands in uninterrupted supremacy.

Nine o’clock. She pulls herself out of the ditch and hustles back to the palace. She glances up at the Princess’ room, the incandescent light seeping through the quilt squares of her window. She imagines music.

The hallways are empty. She hears the distant shouts of a lively backgammon game and believes that it would continue on throughout the night. Opening the door to Princess Hannah’s room:

Sister Luciernaga. Her belly ripped out; intestines poached and unfurled along the floor, blood spurting from emptied roots where her toes used to be. Her mouth-hole is open and her face is ripped off. So are her hands. So are her feet. Dead, dead, dead, dead, dead, dead.

Maria screams. Princess Hannah lay on top of her bed, ripping leaves off a sage plant. Her belly is plump and full. Even in murder she looks royal, blood spread across her mouth like lipstick. On the floor are pools of red.

“Salty,” Hannah remarks, pointing haphazardly at the corpse. Maria teeters in the doorway. Hannah cracks her neck walks over to the window.

“It’s a flush moon tonight!” Hannah smiles and jumps back on her bed. She lays across the covers like a schoolgirl. “Moon, moon, moon,” she sings. She props herself upright:

“You dug the hole, didn’t you?”

“Yes.” Maria peeps.

“Great. Give me your clothes,” Hannah taps her fingers expectantly on the bed pole.

“What?”

“Give me your clothes,” she orders again. “Strip.”

Maria pulls off her uniform and stands naked in murder room. Hannah dons her black-and-white uniform and her maid’s hat, a perfect fit. She makes Maria push Sister Luciernaga’s remains out the window, landing with a thud.

“While I’m gone, clean the room. And pick out a book. Whatever you want.”

Maria doesn’t remember very much from this moment of her life, only that she cleaned up blood in the same way she would clean up dirt or sickness. She touches it with her hands, her knees, Joseph biting at her feet but she’s impervious to him in a swath of soaked towels; Sister Luciernaga had never been mean but only petty; Princess Hannah had once seemed perfect in all her reams of gold; she needed to go home to her rickety cot. She wanted to crawl into the bloody wood like a bug and nest. Sleep and be small.

Hannah returns, her maid’s uniform remarkably clean. She pats it down and calls Maria into bed with her. Maria’s body is covered in red smears and handprints.

Hannah grabs her by the stomach and holds her close. They lay quietly.

“You can’t tell anyone,” Hannah sighs. “You have done me an incredible favor.”

“What compelled you?” Maria shifts her arm beneath her head. What compelled you. The only words she could find.

Hannah rubs her eyes with one hand, pulls the maid in even closer with the other.

“Do you know when you wake up in the morning, and you are already so tired. Solely from anticipating the monotony of the next day and the next. This thought makes me so tired that, sometimes, I sit and watch Joseph play with other animals — kill them. It’s immense freedom, being feral like a cat. To live and to kill.”

Maria glances at Joseph on the floor, sleeping.

“And you — you know that you are special now,” Hannah declares, “if you weren’t already before. You are the most powerful mouse the world has ever seen.”

Maria closes her eyes. Purses her lips. Her heart beats. Her ears sweat.

“Can I go now?”

…

Maria walks home the long path at night. She wears her uniform but her skin is still slathered in red; at home, the dining room and living room are filled with her family eating soup carnivorously. All of them are too hungry to notice her fascinated state. She walks over them and into the outhouse shower, running the water over her body until it cleans her and the air dries her and the flush moon watches over her.

She doesn’t eat. She doesn’t sleep.

She stays awake and looks out the window at the darkness that had never bothered her before. She feels herself brimming with light and with wine. Maria of North Laundry is inscrutable; the most powerful mouse the world had ever seen.

The next morning, she walks the long road back to the palace, even meeting with a few other maids along the way. All are carrying their braided baskets and everyone is congenial and girlish. Few are over seventeen years old.

Maria keeps her eyes on the ground. What hides beneath.

…

Together, they wash Hannah’s clothes by the grotto in the river. They coordinate with the cooks what Hannah would eat for lunch. They prepare the bath for Hannah to clean herself. They wash the floors, beneath fern pots and statues. Maria’s mind wanders to the softness of Hannah’s sheets compared to the starchy fabric of her tenting maid’s dress. Will she ever feel cloth that soft again?

At noon, Maria takes a walk through the garden. She watches the fountain spur outwards. Clamoring along the rivets in the stone towards the pear trees, then back around to the tulips. Eventually, she makes her way to the hole she dug for Sister Luciernaga. The hole that she had dug for herself.

Princess Hannah is less than a hundred feet away, planting bulbs with several of the upper crust members of her court. They look like swans, their dresses teased sideways beside them. Hannah laughs. She peers up and sees Maria dawdling over the shallow tomb.

This is the morning after the last words they would ever share. Soon after, Princess Hannah will become Queen and take on a new cabinet of servants. She will marry a man named Harvey of Burress who will die some five years later of unknown causes. Maria will live until old age with eight children of her own, working an administration job at a nearby university. Both will be outwardly happy, wither, and die of an insufferable hunger. To have lived and have killed.

Hannah watches on as a gardener approaches the maid. He asks about the daffodils.

“What daffodils?”

“The ones you ran out to plant last night,” he pockets his gloves and runs his hands through his mangy, dirty hair. “I know I was asleep, but I swear I heard you say something about flowers that grow at night.”

[hannah the cannibal]