Queen
Disclaimer: Emma Frost is property of Marvel Comics. I hold no claim and make no profit.
Note: I actually got the basic idea for this story from the Story Starter site at . The synopsis it provided was:
My main character/protagonist is a female. My main character is a district attorney. An archetype present in my story is Queen. A key object or symbol in my story is a glove. My story will be set in a pub in Ireland. My story is about isolation.
The story went from there.
The air is cold and steam rises from men's lips, but not from mine. They are hard and sharp as diamonds. Their words cut but they never bleed.
Men laugh drunkenly. They are warm and sweaty and stink of beer and piss and sex hormones. My lip arches in disgust. They are killer apes with opposable thumbs, nothing more. They are Not Me. Everyone is Not Me.
My hands are encased in soft leather gloves, white and pure. Pure as snow. They separate me from these humans; keep me clean of their filth. My mind whirls with laws and procedures and rules, things that keep the animals at bay but never really tame them.
I am not an animal. I am Me. I am the only Me.
My hands cross each other, white against white, long and shapely. My fingernails are pointed talons. A Queen must have her weapons. I inhale the crisp air, which slides between my pearly teeth like smoke. In a corner, a man tells his friend a dirty joke. His hair and cheeks are red, his voice smacks of Irish.
I can't remember why I'm here. This is a pub, a smelly brute place filled with smoke and dark things and nasty men who are not Me. All I know is white, and queens, and gloves, and white, and cold, and white.
In chess, the Queen is the most powerful player and the most vulnerable. Once she is captured, the game is finished. The ice castles melt. I think now of a man, better smelling than these, perhaps. He made me melt. I hated him for it. I loved him for it.
My gloves hiss as I slide them off my hands and touch the table. I want to bleed, I want to smell bad and laugh at the dark and not be Me. My eyes, blue as ice, flash. I am a Queen without a kingdom.
Perhaps I'm better off without it.
FINIS