The Execution Of Lady Jane Grey / Aimée Keeble
first appeared in Truffle Magazine
The boys sit like judges at the end of the world, swinging their legs. Alright? They call down to me from their perch over the entrance to the tower block. All drowsy mouthed, their lizard eyes and careful haircuts. The one on the end with the glossy trainers has a baby on his knee. My thighs are fatty with hormones and revealed and the muscles in their jaws are unkind. I pass beneath them and bow my head.
Fulham glowers against an acid sky, it pushes its nose to sniff where the sun and economic equilibrium has abandoned it. Its many noise, its beautiful glass and stone forehead that the light splays its legs over. In the council flat in the council block, I lean my arms over the balcony and swallow. Just over forty minutes from the clinic in Richmond it’s taken my body to begin to break. Two pills: one down the spiral of my mouth and the other enveloped by the kinder muzzle of my groin. I drop my bag in the hallway. How unusual, this time of afternoon that is normally spent at work with motion or talk. A Friday out of sorts. The sun slops into the bedroom and I follow the burning.
In my bed, fully dressed, I lean like a child, cheek down, my bottom in the air. I wail. The ending starts as a shake, my soft parts are now cloven and I think, is this where the fear of devils comes from? I pull off my trousers, my underwear in a shy twist around my ankle bone. In the bathroom, elevated from the relentless tile, resting falcon-wild on the toilet I begin to drain. It’s hard to measure a loss. There is only the start, one cannot anticipate nor tell the color, or the hurt of the end. What is a loss if not the tadpole face of something new, churning in a water that never stops giving? All the possible pools we carry unawares, glittering with beginnings and endings.
Back on the bottom of the bed, I hum to myself, to the wee could-have-been.
And gently, the end of the blanket between my teeth, on my side like some finished Serengeti animal all too hot and striped, a glowing mesocarp revealing itself in red on the sheets. I am a vampire in reverse. Never have I felt more sacred than this, my most barbaric, my most like a little universe giving up.
I am as a torn fruit. Somewhere, sometime a ghost blurts out of the window. I grind the blanket and feathers crack.
When my man comes home, a halo of weed about his forehead and he asks me: Alright?
I chew on sheet corners and mash my legs and scream. You should be happy it’s over innit. His half eyes on the tv beyond me, his elbow against my back. He leaves me things, warm drinks stinking of sugar, white crackers, and bottles of Lucozade. There are dark patches where I have panted too hard on the blanket.
The next morning I take the bus into town and keep my palms against my navel. I am stuffed and malodorous with the perfume of false flowers, I am doubly padded up and bleeding as a joust victim.
London: I’m crawling across her body, her great West End breasts all a-sparkle and juicy with light. Me: Scaffold stiff as if I could hang myself from her heights. I am willing my head to be happy I am no longer pregnant with a child of a man who does not love me. And my body is singing as its cherub becomes evanescence, a Maybe flying out of the window on wings a predator would ignore. There is a mother-witch whose voice we all remember that is croaking after my undoing.
I wander around the National Gallery and gently collapse against marble when a cramp lances my waist.
I stop at the painting of Lady Jane Grey, her body shining like the inner secret of a shell- all curdled electricity, her hands reaching, and a man in black, rimmed with fur, bending around her, lowering her to the block, while women beside and behind her are collapsing, a man standing coly near in heart-colored leggings gripping an ax.
From somewhere, I remember someone telling me once: She practiced all night before she was executed, laying her head upon the chopping block because she wanted to get it right.
I feel myself lose a little more and roll my hips and shift my weight. Her parted arms- unlevel as if to achieve a greater balance, as if the world was scrunching its muscles beneath her. The richness of her reduced to straw and iron. In the domed room, strangers criss-cross faceless and too defined as in dreams and I am the dream too, I am the dream true. I mirror Lady Jane. I splay my fingers and lift a shoulder higher and feel the weight of all the men in all the world on my forearm, the blade-bone between wrist and elbow. I bend and close my eyes and allow the blood to come. My knees are cold on the floor and life fizzes around me, despite me. I have been practicing. We have always been practicing.
Aimée Keeble has her Master of Letters in Creative Writing from the University of Glasgow and is represented by Ayla Zuraw-Friedland at the David Black Agency. Aimée lives in North Carolina with her dog Cowboy and is working on her first novel. She is the grand-niece of Beat writer and poet Alexander Trocchi. Her previously published work is here: https://neutralspaces.co/aimeekeeble Twitter: @AimeeKeeble Instagram: @aimeekeeble