Shelter in Place #6: “The Kingdom and the Quarantine”
The Kingdom and the Quarantine
BY ANNA ALLPORT ’23
There’s trouble in the castle.
My relatives, immunocompromised, are locked in the tower,
their feet growing cold on the rough stone floor,
braiding and unbraiding their hair, longing to let it out the window, the tresses cascading
triumphantly
to the delicate multicolored flowers below.
The ten minutes of sun they steal each day
before the kingdom wakes up, as dawn glows on the horizon,
is a meager meal of sunlight,
barely sustaining their appetites.
The news plays constantly, their only real connection to the outside world.
I’m there, too,
in a separate tower, separate dishes, separate air, calling across the courtyard to my royal
relatives,
working alone all day, only joining them when absolutely necessary, across the table
at the nightly feast.
Yet there’s a difference with my tower:
I’m not locked inside.
The gate is open.
As I scurry to the mailbox, grocery store, pharmacy,
spending hours meticulously disinfecting everything that crosses the drawbridge into the castle
walls:
showering after exposure to the forbidden forest
and bagging my clothes for a week
are the only passcodes to re-enter the stone fortress.
The royal family says I’m their knight in shining armor, but I don’t always feel like it.
A knight doesn’t feel guilty about being able to save the princess in the first place.
When kings from far-off lands send tidings
of news, it’s strictly by carrier-pigeon (they’re cleaned first, too);
letters have become more frequent for our court
since isolation started.
The princesses are glad. They’re suffering from royal boredom.
The cooped-up queen, on the other hand,
just wants to be left alone.
Right now,
there are knights in all of the kingdoms
gathering herbs and
fighting the dragon
and vanquishing its spawn
in caves across the land.
I don’t know when the dragon will be slain.
For now, each kingdom is at war
and each castle is fighting to keep up strength
while it is besieged from all sides.
But the spell will be broken, eventually —
it always is.
Shelter in Place is a new series featuring student artists’ and writers’ responses to the COVID-19 pandemic.