The judge slams the gavel—order in the court! It’s odd: she is a crow, and the jury is a murder adjacent. They each cock an eye at the same time, clicking in unison from ruffled throats, hopping in anticipation. The bailiff rests on a roost, a star pinned to his breast.
We have the usual suspects, Professor Plum and Colonel Mustard—impossible to drag from the charcuterie board. The Colonel expounds on the different types of mustard, moustache bobbing frenetically. Dijon! He flicks his wrist. Grey Poupon! The Professor leans forward, especially when the word stone-ground comes up. My dear boy, he says, peering through his lorgnette, plums are a stone fruit. You and I are perhaps a pair of stony old boys—heh heh.
Miss Scarlet, dripping diamonds, puffs away on her opera holder. She leans into the slit in her dress, she sees the boys adjusting something. The Colonel harrumphs, touching the pommel of his sword, while the Professor takes notes on leg lengths. Scarlet explains murders and poison gardens, puffing curlicues of lusty smoke into Mrs. White’s staid face. She invokes Giulia Tofana, how a woman in the 17th century could eliminate an abusive husband. However, Mrs. White has her doubts. She sees the subtle way the Professor leans away, when she drapes herself on his arm. What an interesting dynamic. Mrs. White would bet every bit of money (monopoly, of course, this is just a game), the crow jury will find her guilty. It most definitely was Miss Scarlet with a revolver, in the conservatory. Not very subtle, for an admirer of poison.
Mrs. White’s mobcap bobs like a chicken in time to Scarlet’s story. She’s never been married and she’s glad for it. Still, she imagines the Colonel’s sword in her sheath, and blushes. She waves a feather duster to distract from her sidelong glances. She’s always thought a man in uniform quite striking. How they are hairy in places, would the Colonel’s muttonchops be soft or bristly? Is she revulsed or does she want a brawny pair of forearms to push her up against the wall? She outweighs the Colonel by 30 stone at least but thinks of him lifting her skirts and taking her right there.
Scarlet quips drolly: Clue is stupidity—everyone knows it’s always the husband, slinky in her dress. Mrs. White edges away a little, she worries about this silly sylph, this scarlet lover, that some of these comments might get back to Hasbro. Mrs. White loathes her name, but the game seems to be in perpetuity. How could she be considered a woman of mystery, desired, when she’s been illustrated so many times as one thing on the cover’s lid?
She seems a cool cucumber, our girl, organization personified—the proper silverware always used for the proper course. But underneath her mobcap she is nothing but worry, a violet biding, always waiting. She’s been watching Dirty Dancing on repeat, and she sobs every time Patrick says, No one puts Baby in a corner. She thinks of what it would be like to be lifted overhead, and she dreams of arms aloft heels pointed to the sky. How her mobcap would become askew, in her dreams she removes it and the hair under is as shiny as Miss Scarlet’s. Lately she has begun a reducing diet, half of what she used to plate from the buffet’s silver chafing dishes. At tea Mrs. White skips butter and clotted cream for her scones. She has begun a regimen of calisthenics before every game.
She no longer plots crimes or considers what it is to be a game piece. How does she get someone to touch her without a winning agenda? She found the top shelf in the library, the one with all the illicit volumes. When she stumbled on the complete works of the Kama Sutra, her eyes almost rolled right out of her head. She has recently learned a word she hasn’t been able to say out loud and wants desperately to ask Miss Scarlet if it’s against the law, for two people to do that. She mouthed it in the mirror yesterday and had to undo the top button of her collar.
Mrs. White can’t even open correspondence now without seeing the eroticism of the gesture: how the blade slips under and slices the opening, the sound itself. She thinks of the tongue that licked that glue and slowed it to half speed, envisioning it as a black-and-white film, looping it in her mind. What would a lover write to her, Anais Nin? She found that book and slammed the cover closed after the first five pages. In between dusting, she checks the corridors in the portrait gallery and when the coast is clear she slips it out of her apron pocket. She has budgeted two pages a day.
Tonight, tipsy on four glasses of wine (unpoisoned, she hopes), she will gather up every bit of courage. She will dig deep inside to ask about lust, to ask Miss Scarlet why seduction rolls off her so naturally—how she can elongate her neck so easily. Why is everything about her so sparkling. Then, she will tuck her lonely self into her lonely single bed, still tipsy. Her face glowing the ruby of the cabernet and with shame—the shame of asking, worrying about her seam, but too afraid to touch it. What if it has dried up? With a few more lessons on seduction, could it be a desert gulch in a flash flood?
