Napkin Tucksters

Napkin Tucksters
      by Yardstick Reimer

Nebuchadnezzar sat in a chair

They had decided to give him some air

He dillied and dallied then fell on the floor

Just as the embalmer sacheted through the door

It is general practice in early Egypt to embalm a nobleman before he dies. He is not quite dead when this happens. The ladies in waiting take their turn, the doorman whose job it was to wave a palm frond over him to keep off the flies is allowed to poke a few holes, the dogs he kept and sometimes mistreated are encouraged to bite him repeatedly, matrons who once were his concubines but have long already been neglected ritually disfigure his torso, often around the area of his family jewels, the visiting priest, there on a tour of the holy sites and a speaking engagement to the other priests and divine underlings, slaps him about the ears while he is still breathing, though barely, and young men are sent in periodically to punch him in the stomach and around the nose and eyes so that as he is dying he will not go to the next world without having suffered. What a rejoicing then ascends and the heavens laugh to see such sport.

       On this occasion, on the death of King Nebuchadnezzar, the funeral arrangements had hardly begun to be made when a certain young man, a poet renowned in his court for his fair treatment of the female anatomy in his verses, came to the palace at the behest of one of the wives of the king. She had been the king's second most recent acquisition and she felt an urgent need to take vengeance on him for dying just now, too early in her career in this household. She had yet not spent three nights with the king and so had failed to find adequate opportunity to have him marvel at her form with its slim lines and delicate skin, pink hues predominating where her arms met their round shoulders' joinery, where her lips took their graceful turnings-to, and where her knees lined straight and true with her sweep of hip and thigh. Mezzedonalduezzia had longed for the treasures harvest upon these wonders and their joyful seeing the king rewarded those with who possessed them and shared them with him in the nightly rights due the girl who them bore about.

       She fussed for hours about the mirror before she called on the poet to attend her. He appeared, through a back door, frightened, not yet knowing that King Nebuchadnezzar was almost dead. Discovering the truth, he breathed more easily and extracted his writing materials from his shirtwaist and sat there drawing her. He drew, too. And well as well. She, Mezzadona, smiled and sat upon a chair of lavender damask, her skirts about her legs and ankles, her arms bearing bracelets of silver. He drew, she sate. She moved to the side and raised her leg to put it on a ratan. He took that in and made it look very nice upon the papyrus. She rose to observe his progress and then breathed in his ear one word, which he understood exceedingly well indeed. It was a reference to a certain region of the anatomy that most of us never see enough of. And when she had said it he bent to his paper and began to write.