by Katherine James

Katherine James is a writer and maker based in rural Virginia. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Virginia, and her work has appeared in Architectural Digest, Fifty Grande, The Denver Quarterly, and Pleiades.

Text for Screen Readers:

When this prince marries, he inherits a flock of geese. His
wife is neat and tidy, in the way that all wives are neat and
tidy, her fortune made from cumulating feathers into
marketable bundles. To sell, she said, is to live with a useful
passion beyond piety. And on the other side of pity is only
envy, which the prince’s wife also knows in abundance: every
moment of her life is filled with want. The more she has, the
more she wants, and the more the wanting becomes curdled,
a feather thrust into a pan of hot wax.

I didn’t envy the prince’s wife. At least not in the way she
expected—not her glittering dresses, the plush sofas, the ease
with which she moved through airport terminals and
shopping malls. I envied the simplicity with which she feared.
How when she sat down to work, she tore out each goose’s
feathers wearing the same expression of Machiavellian
embarrassment with which she plucked her eyebrows,
squinting with pain, all the while denying that it hurt.