by Oliver Smith
After the plague, she had wandered
a land peopled by shades,
forgetful in the asphodel
with no memory left.
They reminded her of her father
in his later years.
Unsettled spirits, the restless dead
labouring in the Elysian Fields.
They pointed grey fingers
from the mist and asked
“Who the hell are you?”
“…And where are my
trousers?”
“I’d like a nice glass of sherry”
“Quick girl, pour the tea.”
And when she came to the sea
their bones littered the beach
gnawed by rats disembarking
from leaky boats and sinking ships.
Down by the harbourside
the last living prince waited
for his fairy-story to conclude.
She pretended not to notice a crown
of rat-tails on his head,
the rat-bodies bound together
underneath his borrowed skin.
The Rat-King lifted his broad brimmed hat
and made a wide smile from a hundred
little teeth in his overflowing mouth:
“No one left to die!
What use our years of battle now?”
He sweetly grinned
at the Ratcatcher’s Daughter,
“Just us two,” he said,
and held her hand, enamoured,
as they stood together, alone in the world.
She led him further up the shore
where the ancient castle
raised its black granite mass
to resist the winter storms,
“Lie down oh handsome man,” she said,
“and rest a while with me.”
He opened up his coat, and,
like a gentleman,
spread it on the ground
undressed to show
that he too had a human skin,
even if it was not his own.
“Oh let me lay my head upon
your heart,” she said
and inside she heard not a single beat
but one rat, two rats, three…
She was curious, so with her little knife
she split him from stem to stern
and a whole sea poured out:
rats in maelstroms and whirlpools
flowed around her feet.
“Oh, princes may transform so easily,”
she said, “frog to king to man to beast.
but a widow
is constant in her loss.”
The rats swirled across the ruins
they ran over the figurehead of a dead ship,
they perched on shattered statues,
they rolled around the portrait of a queen
worn to anonymity in the flow of time.
She waited with the his skin in her hand
empty and flapping
in the offshore breeze;
She had unstitched all the love that was left
and stood like someone’s lost, discarded
or mislaid memory as she dissolved
in the tide of polymorphous flesh.
My poetry has appeared in Strange Horizons, Liminality, and Penumbric. I was awarded first place in the BSFS 2019 competition for his poem “Better Living through Witchcraft” and my poem”Lost Palace, Lighted Tracks” was nominated for the 2020 Pushcart Prize. My website is oliversimonsmithwriter.wordpress.com.
