The Empress’ Attire

FICTION

By Gina Fallas-Rodriguez

What type of Empress did she want to be?

The question plagued her. Enora had been in power for a little under a year but had yet to decide on how she wanted to present herself to the world. The previous Emperor was ruthless. He wore his gowns of black and gold, mostly so people would see the platform shoes he wore to guarantee he was always the tallest person in the room.

She killed him because he was ruthless. He had the hubris of all men in power, the idea that a woman would want to sleep with him for the mere honor of it. She killed him as he was lost in his pleasure by slitting his throat.

Once he was done writhing, she assumed his scepter, put her clothes on, and presented herself to the world. As she stood from his balcony, looking at the guards below, she said, “Now is the time of change. You can return home or work for me. You are no longer forced to labor for an unforgiving Lord. Decide by morning.”

She was called a witch; people assumed she had unnatural powers because, while many before her had tried to kill him

and failed, it took her twenty minutes, if you counted the five minutes it took them to get undressed.

Her first year as Empress was reclusive. There was no need to go out with a house of servants at her disposal. People visited her, the once-poor city girl who now sat in her iron throne plated in platinum. The people walked across the wooden floors, polished nightly, the windows lighting the path to her throne. They bent her ear, and she was often moved with compassion but realized she could only do so much. She found it difficult to institute changes to the farther-flung corners of her country.

She knew she needed to present herself to the people in a parade, as the previous Emperors had done. To show the world that she was more than some recluse that was losing touch with her people. While every Emperor and Empress took their throne by blood, she didn’t want to present herself that way. She wanted to stay away from blood reds, she wanted no obvious weapons clinging to her side. She wanted to appear as innocuous as the day she had taken the throne for herself.

She and her advisors argued. She wanted to walk in the streets, naked. It would be an act of strength and power. She wanted to show how she came from nothing, how she would dirty her own hands if she had to, how she preferred to converse and work together rather than rely on weapons and wars to get her way. They didn’t want her naked. It didn’t matter that the previous Emperor got drunk and slept on the balcony exposing himself to the world. A young woman, of a certain age, should present herself respectfully. At least that was what they told her.

A month before the celebration in her honor, she finally decided on an outfit. She would wear a cape and have a new headdress made. She would present herself as a nighttime Empress, controlling the ebbs and flows of the sea. She would

bare her body, covered in paint, to the people, to remind them of the power of women; a woman’s body was the start of life, the start of consciousness. While her advisors were not happy about it, she would at least not have her unadorned bare skin, exposed to the world.

Her cape was painted in colors of cerulean, sapphire, and navy, with white to mimic the ebbs and flows of waves as the wind blew her cape. Her legs were painted in the browns of rocks and dirt. As the paint moved up her leg it turned into hunter and forest greens. The shades of a dark blue across her abdomen turned to lilac as the paint worked its way up her body. The lilac gave way to amethyst, becoming a dark purple that, when it reached her dyed hair, transformed to true black. Spots of yellow and white decorated her purple-painted body to look like the night sky, reflecting the most well-known constellations of her nation’s sky. She had beads of gold and silver sewn into her hair. The new scepter she held had a pomegranate-shaped medal at the top, and she imagined walking through the town, eating that fruit, and letting the juice roll over her body. Instead, she kept her hands free in case she needed to defend herself.

The young women assigned as ladies-in-waiting washed her body. They pulled and prodded her hair as they sewed in the beads. They grabbed the first bowls of body paint and started on their work. Eight hours later the Empress stood before her mirror, not completely content, because she was not naked as she had wished. But she had become her version of Mother Earth of nighttime Empress. The cape was light enough that just a small breeze would make it flutter in the wind. She knew all eyes would be on her.

She stood at the carved mahogany doors. Her advisors were behind her.

The trumpets blasted. The doors opened. She stepped into the world and heard the gasps and claps. The sun was warm as it hit her body.

Then she felt one lonely drop of rain, now two. The words her grandmother said to her flowed to her through time. “We must never become complacent. We either fight or bend the world to our will, but never be complacent.” Enora’s lips curved up as the first drops of rain rolled over the curves and plains of the paint on her body.