This king is crazy. He has to have this and he has to have that. He had me, his servant, find the key so he could unlock the door to the secret room and he had to see the portrait of the girl dressed in gold and then he had to go get the girl to be his wife but before that he had to have all the gold objets d’art fabricated to his specifications (birds, animals, jewelry boxes, trees)
and then he had to go on a big cruise with them and me on board so as to get her to marry him once he got to where he was going, and then there was evil magic that only the ravens understood (so it was a good thing that I understood them) and the queen got sick from these 3 magic objects that were supposed to kill her and almost did (but didn’t) because I sucked the tainted blood from her breasts and then the king killed me and thought he’d killed his kids because a magic stone said he had to decapitate them, because he had killed me in the dungeon earlier. Whew! Happily I wasn’t really dead at all and I was able to sew the dead kids ‘ heads back on and we lived happily ever after. But still, the king is crazy. All kings are. The power, and the desire, and the gold and the portraits, and the voyages and the queens and the anxiety about your lineage and the blood and the headless kids and then the guilt. So don’t have a king. Just don’t.
Stephanie Barbé Hammer Writing (Un) Real 
