I met the Queen at a Whole Foods and we were both there being ethnic, sampling yogurt made from a goat’s vagina, hanging lunar new year’s lanterns on the employees, we planned immediately to carpool later to hear a poem about a salmon at Barnes & Noble.
Afterwards, we cried and we shared generous excerpts of our dream diaries, which involved recurring dreams about printing out pictures of TOTO toilets and having them confiscated by our mothers, aka we were immediately intimate aka we watched reruns of CAJUN JUSTICE wearing ironic Obama masks and talked about jobs, mine was to manually cut the eyeholes in Obama masks, hers to know all about the body’s authenticity.
She lived in a natural museum and squirrels were her specialty. She liked cracking the skulls on her teeth when the security guard was busy plucking his nose hairs in the ticket booth, seeing herself in the break pattern, her long tongue and narrow hips. Next best was the octopus. The octopus was the best because you could make out with it as you killed it in your mouth, as described in the Queen’s one and only internationally bestselling memoir GOD GAVE OCTOPI THOUSANDS OF MINIATURE LIPS FOR A REASON, which featured on the cover an octopus looking like a douchebag. Who gave it sunglasses? The Queen would never have chosen sunglasses.
When asked whether she would rather destroy India or China tomorrow she said “China” and everyone who heard her applauded and sipped at some white wine. When asked if the people should be free she knotted her tongue into a cherry. She never told a lie, never, not even to the first boy who asked her if it was true she had stolen her brother and hid him in a grandfather clock that was punched hourly by the famous Chinese performance artist who died.
When she heard the sad salmon poem at Barnes & Noble she touched her chest sadly and got plastic surgery the next day. The first Queen to get her vocal chords tuned to the tune of submergence. She talked forever after as if she were underwater in a swimming pool or a very small sea. It made for better communion with the octopi, she said, and made hospital employees where her brother died laugh. How often did the Queen call just to hear him cough 19 times? The Queen was charitable and donated the same number of Obama masks to children at the hospital at Christmas, even a cat-sized one.
The Queen wrote one more book before her ultimate drowning. It was titled THE HIPS TO MAKE UP FOR IT and was full of encouragements. All across America people did not demand refunds. They did not ask for 38 cents from Amazon. They hailed the Queen and used her name as foreplay and in Christmas cards.
The Queen was named after the church she was born in, which inspired her in her later life to stage the musical No Sum of Us is Holy, in which charitable pastors dressed as sea animals taught math to the excommunicated in a local Chili’s. One number featured children singing and wearing Obama masks, with the role of the Queen’s brother played by the red telephone stage left. I had the honor of cueing the 19 coughs scattered throughout the acclaimed second act, titled, 1+1 = (He)11.
I will miss her at Whole Foods. They will miss her at hot yoga. Everywhere, hips are giving out, even the metal replacement ones. In response to the tragedy we have come together to schedule a fast for 32 days, only yogurt permitted, one minor starvation for each of the suction cups kissing her underwater mouth.
Kristin Chang lives in Cupertino, CA. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in BOAAT Journal, Dead Ink, Wu-Wei Fashion Mag, Word Riot, and elsewhere.
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