Fiction

Spring 2010

For Want of a Fish
by Sarah White

There is no fête without regret, as the saying goes. Suppose the King is expected for dinner. Count M. has promised to serve him a filet of shad, but the delicacy doesn't arrive, and M.'s disgraced cook will lock himself in a pantry to

        "Perplexity"
        by Sarah White

take poison. The Count's adolescent daughter will be so agitated by news of the scullery suicide that she trips on her gauzy train and falls down a flight of marble steps. The butler, rushing to help the senseless girl, grazes the Christmas tree, which tips and ignites the tapestries. Under a pall of wooly smoke, an orchestra strikes up the polka. Envoys burst in to interrupt the music with urgent bulletins—the Bastille has fallen; Napoleon has escaped from Elba; a Great Fire has destroyed Chicago; the Austrian Archduke has been assassinated; the New York Stock Market has crashed and everyone is bankrupt, including the King. In an anteroom of the château the Crown Prince continues to dance with a stranger who becomes the love of his life only to vanish before giving her name and address. Seeking consolation at the buffet table, he helps himself from a silver bowl, unaware that a tiny but toxic bacillus is making its home in the caviar.

By the time the shad arrives, the kitchen staff has drunk too much grog at the cook's wake; the King has taken his ashen-faced son to the hospital, and fish is the last thing on anyone's mind.

Sarah White writes and paints in Manhattan. Her books are Cleopatra Haunts the Hudson (Spuyten Duyvil, 2007), Mrs. Bliss and the Paper Spouses (Pudding House, 2007), and The Poem Has Reasons: A Story of Far Love (proempress.com).