"What's your name? Where are your parents?"
"It's a party," she repeats.
"What's your name? Where are your parents?"
"It's a party," she repeats.
The Queen Of Sheboygan
I fall out into the half-light, confused. Although I'm not blind the crumbled walls and faded half-signs my eyes fall on tell me nothing. I search for context in my memories but find a dreadfully inchoate sensation, as if clawing at dreams.
I see, caught in a ray of honey-colored light, a small, singular figure, potentially human. Coming closer I make out a child, dancing alone on the broken flagstones. She is wrapped in layers of cloth, a swaddling of soft fleece blankets, embroidered quilts, and what might be real, heavy furs. These loop even around the top of her witch-like, uncombed hair, drape over her skinny outstretched arms that wiggle in the ecstatic dance, giving her the solemn dignity of a veiled Mahadevi.
I approach, unsure of my place. The child has no such reservations.
Her gait as she comes close is bird-like, hopping along on the balls of her feet. Her eyes are bright and keen beneath the makeshift headscarf, staring into mine before darting away. She chirps loudly, “I am the Queeeen of Sheboygan!” Drawing it out proudly, looking quickly to me for confirmation. I am struck by how bizarre it is that this is what she cares about, in the midst of this rubble. Am I dreaming after all?
“No, you aren’t,” I say, chiding her, but playfully. Her reaction is strong and immediate: she screams, sounding not like a person in distress but like a screeching tea kettle. I clap my hands over my ears, my eyes watering as I feel a migraine coming on. The scene wavers in front of me. But instead of what should follow, the flashing lights, the pain, there is nothing. Not even the blackness you see behind your eyelids, or the sensation of falling asleep.
God, am I unwell, comatose, piecing these images together? No, apparently not comatose, because there is again a world. When I next claim consciousness she is staring at me, dirty face inches from mine. She is older than she first looked, maybe ten or twelve, but small for her age.
I sit up, and she falls backwards onto her hands, crawling away in a hurried crabwalk. In the layers of fuzzy blankets she resembles a colorful caterpillar, only her face peeking out. She thumps down cross-legged on the ground, gazing off imperiously into the distance.
I am the first one to speak. "What happened here? Where is everybody?"
The Queen thinks about it, her brow wrinkling. She opens and closes her mouth, then abandons the effort. Finally she takes a scrap of paper from the ground and folds it into a hat, her small fingers carefully smoothing the folds, and places it on my head. "Don't be sad," she tells me solemnly. "It's a party."
"What's your name? Where are your parents?"
"It's a party," she repeats. "It's a party." Her expression is unconcerned as she stands and skips away. The breeze is picking up, and scraps of paper swirl around her like confetti.
I wander through a world that seems abandoned. Numb, but cataloguing. The Queen doesn’t seem to mind when I go off on my own — sometimes I think she forgets I exist.
It’s quicker to list what’s left.
1. Paper. All colors, in boxes, flying loose on the streets, folded into origami. I'm glad I can write down my thoughts, it helps me organize what I do remember. The Queen doesn't understand why I keep a journal, but she finds me incomprehensible in general.
2. Birds. Not only the birds in the sky, some of the paper lying around the streets has been folded into origami birds. It’s not that crane you think of right away; it's a different one, a crow. I’ve been unfolding the pattern to procure paper, and only needed to see it twice to remember how to make one. I have a feeling that might be useful.
3. Sugar. Someone has a sweet tooth. All kinds of buildings have fallen down — schools, banks, government buildings, even grocery stores — but bakeries and ice cream stores are just fine.
4. Cartoons. Working televisions stand among the rubble, broadcasting the same few cartoons repeatedly. I think there's something off about the scripts (they keep repeating the same lines back to each other) but maybe that's what cartoons are like these days.
5. Rubble and ruins. Lots of fragments of plastic and stone. The city I remember Sheboygan being is hard to credit: was it that bright, that loud, that full of life? It seems too strange to be real, but I miss it too much for it to be imagined.
6. Ecological balance. For everything that's missing it's not as off as it should be. How did only the birds survive what happened? (And what happened??) Even the birds are changed somehow, evolved maybe; I just realized they're quieter. Haven't woken me up once. I would do a better survey of the environment if I had a drone, but besides the TVs and fridges the highest tech around seems to be the lighter I use for campfires.
7. The Queen of Sheboygan. (Are we the only people left?)
Once, I hiked as far as Lincoln Park Zoo to see what animals had survived. Days of traveling over cracked roads devoid of the rusting hulks of cars. There was nothing there but empty cages pulled apart by vines, not even bones for the birds to pick at. I wonder what it is they eat: they don't like ice cream. Maybe it's each other.
It's a good thing the Queen likes sweets.
It’s all a bit unreal, what’s left, like a painting of itself. I noticed it first with the ice cream: it’s a perfect spiral on top of the waffle cone. And it's this uncanny color — almost too pretty to eat. It's the same color as the sky, which is never bright or dark.
There’s something else about the ice cream, something about how it doesn’t change even though it’s usually warm here. The Queen doesn’t like getting sticky… and she doesn't like change. But how do I know that?
It’s not always warm here. It can be cold when the wind is blowing, and you’re wet. The Queen doesn’t like getting wet. I know that much because I saw it.
I saw her swimming once, in the great violet body of water beside the shore where the seabirds peck. It is not the ocean; the taste is sour but not salty, though the waves are high. I glimpsed her little face between one wave and the next, thinking at first the water had taken her. But of course she was exactly where she wanted to be.
She had gone swimming in all her clothes, the layers of cloth trailing like the fins of tropical fish when she paddled. Her expression was much unchanged from usual, serene but serious. I waited for her to be ready to hold court.
Once she had returned to the shallows where she could walk the Queen trudged grandly towards me, nodding twice as she sometimes does to acknowledge my existence. But she stopped suddenly, shivering and scrunching her face in distress. She plucked at the wet cloth wrapped around her shoulders, her breathing rapid and agitated.
I don’t remember how I got over to her so quickly, maybe I ran. I don’t think I would have rushed her. But I was there next to her, kneeling so I wasn't looming over her, offering her the warm blanket I was wearing around my own shoulders. Patting her face with it to get her attention.
“Here,” I said, “Let’s get dry.”
The Queen bared her teeth in a grimace, looking not at me but through me. She thrashed wildly, limbs windmilling, but I wasn't trying to grab her: I had ducked backwards to give her more space, she was fighting air. Finding herself still wet, she shrieked piteously, throwing herself to the ground, and flailed everything. Her face was bright red from the effort of her despair.
She reached for me and I heard what she was asking, giving her my outstretched hand to hold. That calmed her enough that I heard her muttering under her breath. I leaned in a bit, enough to hear her saying, "Dry. Dry. Get dry." There was a smell in the air like lightning, like petrichor, like a young storm finding its feet. A sonic thunderclap followed that made both of us reach for our ears, failing because we were still holding hands, and -
-And everything was dry. Her hair and robes steamed lightly in wisps. The bed that had once held Sheboygan Lake (how did I forget, of course it was Sheboygan Lake) was as empty as a tooth socket.
The Queen caught her breath, then exhaled slowly and relaxed her shoulders. She was unsmiling when she looked back in my direction, so maybe I was only imagining the satisfaction I read on her face. “I don’t like swimming,” she informed me.
“Oh?” I asked. “It looked like you were having fun in the water.”
She considered this gravely, and announced, “I like water. I don’t like wet.” She shrugged elaborately. “I am never ever trying that again!”
“Well,” I cajoled, “maybe you can try again another day.” Quickly, the double nod.
“Again another day.” I got the sense that she was happy with me. But I did not see her or the lake again for days.
I started thinking today: why me? Why am I left? It can’t be random. This isn’t luck. What is different about me?
I cannot remember. There is almost certainly a reason why. But I can work out a theory.
I am a logical person. In her way, so is the Queen. So this is a trait about me she may appreciate. The things remaining in this world have a common feature: they are things she may appreciate.
The Queen likes me. But does not like me to remember why.
I think….
I might have taught her how to fold a paper crow. Is that how I met her? Was I a teacher?
The birds are very quiet over the beach today, and the ice cream is sweet and wonderful. All is right in the Kingdom of Sheboygan. Hail to the Queen.