▸ Column · A medieval fallen kingdom; the asker a household servant writing to the Queen of the Dark Kingdom's column, with the modern therapist recast as a mind-tending healer and the tamales as shared honey-cakes.
QUEEN BERYL replies.
Replied to by Queen Beryl, with a rebuttal from Sailor Moon.
The letter
Most gracious and dreadful Queen — the healer who tends my troubled mind insists I am "mending," yet last sennight a kitchen-lad named Davin set down a basket of honey-cakes for all of us to share, and I spent the better part of an hour crouched behind the buttery, arguing myself out of the certainty that the cakes were bait before I dared take one. I was raised by a mother who turned every kindness into a snare — a name-day sweet meant she wanted something; a fond word meant a blow was coming on the morrow. She has been gone from my life six winters now, and I am one-and-thirty, yet my body still bolts to the watchtowers at the sight of a gift before my reason can so much as speak. The cakes were glorious, by the way, and Davin truly is only a lad who likes to bake — which I learned by interrogating myself afterward like a guardsman reviewing a siege. Two years I have sat with this healer. I know, in my head, that not every open hand holds a hidden debt. Will this ever quicken? Or am I doomed to spend my whole life conducting inquests over every kind thing done to me?
Queen Beryl replies
Come closer, child. You think you bring me a malady. You bring me a confession I happen to share: that a gift, in the wrong house, is the cruelest blade ever forged, because it makes you grateful for your own wounding. Your mother understood that. So, once, did the brightness that overlooked me — every gentleness a ledger, every smile an invoice I could never pay. So spare me the healer's word "mending," as though your watchtowers were a defect. They kept you alive in a house built to bleed you. That vigilance is not madness. It is memory doing its duty.
And here — hear the queen falter, for it costs me — that is also the trap. I made a throne of exactly your suspicion. I decided no open hand could be trusted, ever, and I have sat alone upon that certainty for an age, and it kept its promise: nothing ever hurt me again, because nothing ever reached me again. Your mother has been gone six winters and you are still standing her watch. That is not safety. That is letting an exiled queen reign in you rent-free.
You took the cake, child. Trembling, late — but you took it. Quickness is not the victory. Refusing to crown the suspicion is. Do not make of your wound a kingdom. I did. The cakes were glorious and I would not know.
— Queen Beryl
Sailor Moon weighs in
Beryl, you almost said the kind thing and then called it a war. It's not a war! Listen — you spent forty-five minutes scared out of your mind and then you ate the honey-cake anyway. Do you know what that is? That's standing up while you're shaking. That's the whole secret! I cried at every single fight and stood up anyway, and that counted, and so does this. Your body isn't an enemy queen to dethrone. It's a little kid who guarded you in a terrible house, still on watch because nobody told her it's over. Don't fight her. Thank her. Then take her hand and go enjoy the next batch. Two years of trying? That's not failure. That's a heart that refused to give up on itself.
— Sailor Moon
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