Page 33 - The Woven Tale Press Vol. V #3

moving at a breakneck pace but equally matched the peacock made its last life noise.
and without a clear frontrunner, so our children lashed harder, until white feathers began to fly about them in the animals’ wake, drifting like dust motes through the air. Until the red of pea- cock blood began to mix with the blanched white of feathers; until the white leather whips dripped as they sailed through the air, stained on the ends like a dip-dye job. Their whips lashed until they lashed not the all-white of bird hide but the bleached-white of bone.
The little man then wrapped chubby hands around his gold crown and returned it to his head. He raised himself on little-man legs and wiped small flecks of blood from his pants; stood straight as he could, popped his thumb back into his mouth, and, ignoring the white garbage bags of the birds’ bodies, moved towards his chambers.
Nearing the ballroom’s other end, first her bird,
then his, collapsed. Our Princess did not allow
herself to fall. She was slightly older, after all, and
thought to jump off the bird when she felt it dying
beneath her. Our King bumped to the ground on
his backside, faltered slightly and tipped back-
wards into a bit of blood. He righted himself as the Tahoma Literary Review, Canyon Voices, and Gravel Magazine.
That night, the children slept as they always did: royally.
Miller’s chapbook, See & Be Seen & Be Scene, won Five Quarterly’s e-chapbook competition in 2014, the Talbot International Award and Janef Newman Preston Prize for Fiction. Her work has appeared in
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